Quote:
Originally Posted by bomberjet
What those projects DO do, if you will, is take the burden off of surrounding infrastructure. Sure, there's no new revenue coming from the Panet Widening. But it takes the pounding off of surrounding residential streets. See Munroe Ave, Concordia Ave, Louelda St, London St. All terrible roads.
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I don't understand this thinking... What you are saying is that you want to create something more expensive to decrease the cost of the less expensive double-wide residential streets? You're increasing the usable life of a few residential streets by building an even bigger burden.
As an analogy, this sounds like building a more expensive machine to fix a bunch of cheap machines without a care for the cost of repairing the expensive machine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bomberjet
It's not always about creating tax revenue, it's about providing the proper level of service. You create tax revenue indirectly when there is better traffic flow. People are more likely to frequent these areas when they know they won't be sitting in traffic for an hour. People sitting in cars costs money.
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Tax revenue for the province and feds through business and income taxes... The City, who maintain these projects, will still be at a net loss -- they can only capture value from user fees and property tax. Unless they beg for operating grants from the higher levels they won't be able to afford to maintain this project.
If you look at all of the "project benefits" for the 3 projects I state in my original post, they all state that the benefits are "quicker commutes, faster EMS response, safer streets, seperate out active living". It looks like a copy and paste job by the planners.
These are all noble goals, I agree that increasing the safety of our streets is important. But it can't be the only thing we think about. How does this capture value? How are these projects going to pay for themselves, because we're already in a deficit we can't afford to build more projects that will put us further in the red. We can't just say "it's for safety" and not worry about money. We can't just say "people have to wait in traffic too long" and not worry about money.
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