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Originally Posted by Winnipegger
(and let's be clear: buses do more damage to the roads than the equivalent amount of cars needed to transport the same amount of people).
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I'd be really interested in seeing the study that verifies this. I mean, I could imagine that being the case for a bunch of compact cars brimmed to the max in capacity. SUVs transporting one person? Not so much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winnipegger
Mayes isn't necessarily wrong, and urbanists who immediately decry his stance simply because it's more intricate than an "infill good, suburbs bad" opinion are failing to take in the big picture. Does sprawl cost money? Absolutely. But so does infill, and doing the math on it isn't easy and is subject to interpretation. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to encourage infill, we absolutely should. But we have to bear in mind the challenges associated with both types of development and try to find solutions to overcoming the financial challenges Winnipeg faces. In a city that is struggling to provide an adequate level of public goods and services to all citizens, politicians are going to think about what gets them the best bang for their buck in the short term. Long term thinking isn't useful when you're just struggling to survive until the next budget cycle.
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The problem is Brian Mayes seriously misrepresents the urbanist position. Doing so, he obscures the conversation on infill's potential benefits. At Property & Development meetings and on his "Infill Myths and Reality" Facebook/Blog post, he reiterates that old infrastructure costs money to maintain.
Almost nobody denies this! The actual argument is about the
incremental cost of infill compared to greenfield. Namely, does maintaining and then upgrading old infrastructure to handle more capacity cost more or less than maintaining old infrastructure and then maintaining sprawl infrastructure down the line? And does having increased taxpayer density per some unit measure of infrastructure help sustain infrastructure?
It should be noted that what's precipitating this is a draft Residential Infill Strategy that seems geared to make infill harder in mature communities. For some reason, Brian Mayes feels compelled to use
arguments against banning greenfield in a conversation about whether we should be less restrictive on infill. The whole infill restrictions debate was ignited because there seems to be so much demand for infill in areas like Old St Vital that it's already leading to a transformation of neighbourhood streets.