Originally Posted by fusili
The comparison is a non sequitur. Water that comes from the mountains travels by gravity along a river channel. There is no infrastructure required and thus no cost that has to be borne by taxpayers. There is no differentiation of cost burden if there is no cost.
When that water is pumped through a pump station along a force main to your home, there is a cost. That cost is the capital for the pump station, the operational costs of the pump station, the capital for the force main and smaller feeders and the maintenance for the entire system.
Imagine a simple linear system that consists of a pump station, 1km of 300mm force main (I don't know my water servicing standards, so these dimensions are is just made up), then another pump station and another 1km of 150mm feeder pipe. Imagine every component of the system is at capacity. Now imagine we add 5000 people to this system. If we add them to the end of the line, we have to upgrade the first pump station, the 300mm force main, the second pump station and the 150mm feeder pipe. But if we add those people in the area before the second pump station, we only have to upgrade the first pump station and the 300mm force main. Adding those people closer to the pump station is cheaper than the alternative. This is the crux of the argument.
Upgrading inner city infrastructure is akin (although more complicated) to the example above. So yes, while we have to upgrade infrastructure to accommodate additional growth in the inner city, it is a hell of a lot less than doing so in the outskirts of the city, because we only have to upgrade a part of the system. With greenfield growth, we have to upgrade the entire system (in reference to the simplified example above). This is mostly true for water and sewer systems (especially those using Bonnybrook as a destination for sanitary sewer) and especially for transportation, our largest capital and operational budget item in our city (after police) (Wooster- can you confirm?).
This is why arguments that greenfield infrastructure is cheaper are perverse. Yes, digging sewer lines in virgin fields is cheaper than ripping up asphalt, but in most cases, that greenfield development requires us to do both. Infrastructure has to tie into an existing system. The problem is we think of infrastructure only as the stuff in the immediate vicinity of a development, but we forget that the water that comes to our homes travels through kilometers of existing pipe before it gets to the border of our new development or that when we flush the toilet, it doesn't just travel down a pipe to the edge of our subdivision and then get teleported to the treatment plant.
Compact development is cheaper than spread out development because it requires less infrastructure. Less kilometres of pipe, less pump stations, less lift stations, less storm ponds, less roads, less transit, less distance for garbage trucks to travel. Saying the opposite is not a matter of values, it is a matter of being unable to understand math.
And yes, most of the infrastructure dealing with utilities is in fact in the inner city, because that is where the city was when those key pieces of infrastructure were built. Pump stations are all along the river, not in Evanston. The sewage treatment plants are in Bonnybrook and Pine Creek. The sanitary mains travel through the inner city to get to them.
I took you off ignore because someone quoted some ridiculous thing you posted and I needed to take you off ignore to quote your post to respond. There is a reason you are ignored by myself and several others on this forum. Perhaps it is because you argue things like water flowing from the mountains past Tuscany to the inner city is somehow akin to actual infrastructure that we have to build, operate and maintain.
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