Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town. However, you require more infrastructure living in the suburbs. Only two other families ever use the piece of street in front of my house. At best a hundred families ever use the small park across the street.
>Everyone pays the same for infrastructure regardless if you live in a low or high density part of town.
No actually. A heavily subsidized project like the Big Dig cost vastly more per mile than a suburban side street.
Furthermore, you can't just assume that cities could exist in isolation. The inhabitants wouldn't last long without numerous inputs (food, water, power, etc.) that they can't provide for themselves and that require areas with less density to produce for them.
It's very hard to come up with numbers because everything is effectively a large interconnected system. Some patterns are probably more efficient than others but you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
The Big Dig is part of a transportation system designed to help people who live in the suburbs commute by car into the city to work. If everyone who worked in the city could also live there, there would be much less need for massive highways. As local transportation, the subway and buses are much more scalable and efficient. (Not to mention just walking.)
Residential sprawl in the suburbs is not producing food, etc. Nobody is advocating turning all cropland into city, that wouldn’t make any sense.
The advocacy is for changing tax/zoning/planning policy to encourage residential density and mixed residential-commercial use neighborhoods. Even in towns of, say, 30k people, having a denser town center full of low-rise apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods is a big advantage for economic efficiency, for human health, and for the environment.
Having people commute one-person-per-car for 1–2 hours per day, drive cars to school, to shops, to restaurants, to the post office and the library, ... is ridiculously destructive at a societal scale. All the public infrastructure and public services cost several times as much per capita as life at higher density, not even to mention the economic/environmental cost of the cars themselves, or the massive time opportunity cost of the commuting.
> you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
Nope. But people who want to live somewhere very economically wasteful should be prepared to pay for it.
Of course the Big Dig is more expensive, but you can't compare a single road to another road. If you take all roads in one area and divide it by the number of users you get a much more meaningful number.
Of course you are completely right that we need rural areas where we for example grow good or do other things that need lots of space. However, that doesn't happen in most suburbs. In fact suburbs typically keep their density artificially low for non other than vague aesthetic reasons. I myself live in the suburbs and find it very convenient. Would I do so if I had to pay for the street and sewer that lead to my house like my parents who live in Germany had to? Probably not. My parents had to pay about 20k, and that was because most of their property was on a main, federal road. Otherwise it would have been closer to 40. At the time I thought that was insane, but given that in a multi story apartment building the cost would have been much lower, it seems fair in hindsight.
In the US town where I live, which is admittedly more exurban/rural than suburban, I pay for my own septic system, trash, water, etc. Houses that were hooked up to sewer in another part of town a number of years back had to pay for that. No, in the US, you don't typically pay for public roads although people certainly pay for upkeep when they are on private roads as some are. (I'm off a state highway and have to handle the upkeep of my long private driveway.)
Personally, I'm no particular fan of traditional suburbs. But I'm also unconvinced that it's even desirable to especially encourage urban living--especially if, in practice, that means encouraging living in a few specific walkable cities. Presumably urban living in this context doesn't mean Las Vegas.
The park is not part of infrastructure. It is a perk that the government decided to be responsible for that is a vestige of urbanized planners taking cues from New York and Philadelphia. Your street is part of a system that was put in place through the urban planners and is probably maintained by the municipality, if you would like to volunteer to not have them maintain it, you can always ask them to.
* Streets are paid for in the United States through the gas taxes collected from the distribution of fuels. It is a user tax.
* Water and electricity are maintained and run by utilities through their use rates. I will pre-empt the discourse and note that water is heavily subsidized by the government and creates weird incentives (I am looking at you Arizona with your green lawns).
* Transit, bicycle, and pedestrian movements are subsidized by the gas tax. In this case, your statement would be true.
The way this is set up means that the content creator has no idea how funding works.
1. Toll revenue goes to toll facilities. Private public partnerships (PPP's) need to be repaid and the tolls collected go directly to the repayment of the bonds, maintenance, and general operations.
2. Transit siphons monies away from the use tax. Transit exists only because of the user tax. While people see autos as bad, they fund the transit that provides movement for poor individuals. I am okay with this.
3. State and local roads is oddly worded in this phrase and brings a warning to my periphery review. Most states have amendments and/charters that require fuel funds to be allocated to the roadways, Wisconsin (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Finance/fueltaxes.htm), Florida, and a number of others that do not take money from other sources. In fact in Florida, the highway funds are raided yearly to fill in budget gaps.
The best I can come up with on how this chart was made to get the 50% concept is that FHWA provides matching funds for projects, the reason is that they want to provide a carrot to meet federally required mandates, such as interstates and state roads on the National Highway System. If you kick in these monies, which is free money, then you can get there. However, this is an advocacy program.
One last note. The writing is on the wall for the gas tax long term. The federal level is already having a shortfall in revenue because of the CAFE standards increase. This is why states like Oregon are trying out the Vehicle Miles Traveled tax, because they need to switch out how the roadways are paid for.
For starters, by spending trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East to keep fuel prices low. We also set the gas tax far too low to account for all the negative externalities of driving.
