Quote:
Originally Posted by joshlemer
I feel that expanding and widening ring roads and highways are destructive to the city above and beyond the direct devastation they cause to their immediate area in terms of pedestrian/transit/cycling-friendliness, aesthetics, etc. At any one time, there is an equilibrium, where typically people don't want to live any farther than, say, a 50 minute commute between where they live, shop, work, meet friends, play, etc. When a new wider, faster, better right-of-way roadways are built, that increases this range, it changes the equilibrium, and then people and businesses move further out accordingly.
I know you mentioned this idea of induced demand, but I think there's more than just an induced demand for the roadways, I think streamlining highways in/out/through the city induces demand for new development in the suburbs, while actually contributing to a positive feedback cycle discouraging development in mature neighbourhoods.
I think the feedback cycle goes something like this:
* Faster roadways are built, enabling more people to live further from the city
* This alone tips the scale a bit in favour of driving rather than other means of transport, because there are friends/family in these new developments which are inaccessible by other means.
* Business and other amenities flock from the city to those new neighbourhoods, and to the arteries connecting them (see Kennaston (retail is more and more popping up further down McPhilips these days), Regent and Lagimodiere, St Vital mall, North McPhillips). The inner city is left without amenities (no grocery store or retail downtown)
* This tips the scale further towards driving vs other means, since you must drive in order to access most amenities.
* Consumers are more dependant on their cars than they were before, because nothing else is practical. Since their lives are set up around the car, they actively avoid going anywhere, like downtown, that caters less to motorists. This furthers the undesirability of the inner city and accelerates the migration of businesses outwards.
* Now much more demand for faster car infrastructure, so levels of gvmt make major roadway investments
* rinse, repeat
I think if we just kept roadways more or less at capacity, the natural tendancy would be for more infill development, and more viable transit (because of the density) and etc etc.
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While your logic is sound, you are forgetting two major issues which should not be glossed over when considering the costs and benefits of road infrastructure:
1. Infill is not without it's own costs
Yes, I know this forum is filled with urbanists who portray density and infill as the be-all end-all to the city's financial and infrastructure woes. And while density and infill are important components to making Winnipeg more vibrant and financially sustainable, urbanists incorrectly assume that plopping a 20 story apartment block in Osborne village is a cost-less endeavor to the municipality, while plopping the equivalent amount of living space in greenfield is going to make us bankrupt. It is not this simple. In reality, infill costs the city money immediately since it occurs in older neighborhoods with aging and now under capacity infrastructure that must be upgraded at the city's expense - mostly water and sewer. Moreover, adding 400 people to a mature neighborhood will also have an impact on traffic and bus routing needs.
Conversely, developers are more than happy to pay all the upfront infrastructure costs to build subdivisions, virtually expanding the city's assessment base at no cost in the short run. And typically, 400 units of infill are going to net less property tax than the equivalent living space in the suburbs. While it is true that one housing unit in infill isn't necessarily a perfect substitute for one housing unit in a subdivision, there are trade offs associated with both types of developments.
This trade off means the short term financial math on infill versus subdivision (especially in a revenue-starved city like Winnipeg) is difficult. Does the City, which desperately needs money to fix crumbling infrastructure, accommodate 400 units of infill by spending $10 million to upgrade water and sewer lines in Wolesley, or does it allow a developer to add 400 units of housing in Waverley West and increase the tax base by $1 million? Winnipeg will probably allow both since people need a place to live, have different preferences, and the municipality desperately needs money.
2. It's not just commuters who use road infrastructure to get to work and home, but also businesses and people commuting for recreation purposes.
We tend to forget that expanding roadways doesn't just benefit (or induce demand for) residential commuters in cars and buses to work from home and back. Roads are also heavily used to move goods across the City and country, and it's important to allow businesses to get their goods to market both within the City and outside. Efficient transportation networks are needed not just by residents, but businesses to. If we invested every dollar of our roads budget in public transit for the next 10 years, the roads would crumble to nothing and while residents can take buses and cycle to work, truckers don't have that luxury.
And investing in public transit to try and induce business to centralize doesn't make sense for all types of businesses. Sure, one could argue that commercial offices benefit from being downtown, but Winnipeg already has among the highest percent of it's office space located downtown compared to all other major Canadian cities - we are already doing well in that regard. But it doesn't make sense to say, encourage New Flyer, Boeing, Maple Leaf, Winpak, or Kitchencraft to locate their manufacturing plants downtown because having large manufacturing facilities take up valuable land in central areas is an inefficient and unwise use of land. As such, it's important for these facilities to be located where it makes sense, while also being well served by transportation infrastructure on the city's outer edge.
Finally, recreation is also an aspect. Like manufacturing, it doesn't make sense to locate all of our baseball diamonds, soccer fields, pools, forests, and parks inside the city where it can be readily served by central transit. These "inefficient" uses of land should be located where land is less valuable - outside the core, and even outside the city itself. But it's also important from a health and recreation standpoint for people to be able to access these amenities, which is something Winnipeg also does well on.
TL;DR: While infill and public transit investment are important, neglecting roads and discouraging all development on the city's periphery isn't a credible or well thought-out argument.
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