More than half of adults under 30 are living with their parents. Kids thrive best when they can't afford a home. The suburbs is an Obesogenic environment, just living in it leaves people prone to weight gain, and now 73% of Americans are overwreight or obese. Kids thrive best when they're overweight or obese. The suburbs are an environmental disaster. Kids thrive best on a destroyed planet. It's important that kids thrive best. Maybe there's a better way to do it. I wouldn't know, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.
This generally isn't true. Road maintenance is the cheapest form of public transit in the US, and the entire road system (in cost per users) is really low (in Michigan for example, this is between $10-$20/month per person. Lower for suburbs, higher for cities and rural)
If you have a county or municipality in mind, their road budget is probably public, you can probably get their actual numbers for last year and see this for yourself.
Road maintenance isn’t cheap, especially in low density areas. Using current figures isn’t useful because most roads in the US are very underfunded, and we get low scores on infrastructure quality as a result.
Plus it’s not accounting the full cost of roads given that you need a vehicle to access them. On average, something like 15% of a households income is tied to transportation (car maintenance, loans, gas, registration, etc), which is insanely expensive just to be economically productive.
And after the people who built the buildings have taken whatever money they did make and "left the building" too, then rezoning and repurposing can change the range of available lifestyles in unplanned ways.
>Overall there is no reason for them to exist unless people pay a massive premium.
One of the primary reasons for exclusive neighborhoods to exist is so they can exclude those who have average or lower ability to pay a premium.
Including the necessary car(s) as originally intended which are still insanely expensive & time consuming to operate even after they have long been paid for.
But after that sometimes no longer allowed to be parked in some neighborhoods depending on the ugliness consensus of the rulemaking body at the time.
Not even to be economically productive, rather to subtract from productivity during otherwise more fruitful survival efforts.
Road maintainence, energy usage of personal vehicles.
The US economy is so unsustainable on so many levels it's really hard to argue about anything like the status quo. It's an extremely convoluted and leveraged systems which cannot be fixed in a way that ends up with something similar.
> So, for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of a major urban freeway was $7.7 million per mile; doing the same on a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile.
So at $20/person, you need a density of 4000 people per mile (assuming 18 year life for the road).
$1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life, would need 7500 people at $20/yr each, or 3000 households at 2.5 ppl/household. Assuming each household is a quarter acre, that's 750 acres, or about 1.2 sq mi. That's a depth of .6 mile on either side of the mile of road. (Which is a depths of 15 lots. I think.)
Edit: $10-$20 per month. Well, there's a lot of other roads needed, too.
You don't perform a reconstruction after 10 years.
You need a reconstruction when you have done zero maintenance for 30 years. Or else if there are 1000 loaded lorries roaming on your street everyday :-)
Otherwise you can do with some (partial or full) resurfacing after 5/10 years. That's much much cheaper.
I agree with Strong Towns that we've gone overboard on cars, parking, highways, and sprawl. But their focus on road costs is not based on facts. I checked my town budget and roads are <10% of the budget. The vast majority (2/3) is hiring cops and firefighters and parks staff.
But most suburban streets are very low traffic, and low-weight traffic roads. They are not arterials / collectors. And you rarely need a full reconstruct. So even trusting the given quotes, you generally are good with the "resurfacing" column, and you can aim well below the smaller price for arterial/collector.
If I take my local prices, resurfacing 1 mile of a 6 yards wide road, is less than $250.000. And that's with full refurbishing for a pretty damaged road + a new asphalt concrete surface! If you just do preventive maintenance with single-layer or bi-layer that can be 5 or even 10 times less...
(Sorry about the probably imperfect technical terms translations).
