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Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

> To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen.

Yep.[1]

The governor is _trying_ to build comprehensive transit in Colorado[2], but between an incompetent transportation district and the difficulties of building public transit infrastructure to serve our metastatic urban sprawl makes public transit difficult to fund over cars.[3]

Our state metro areas just refuse to accept that if they want growth they'll need density. They'd rather pave their farms because they value the taxes they get from McMansions more than actual food.

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/17/rtd-leadership-elections-cont...

[2] https://www.cpr.org/2024/01/12/jared-polis-2024-state-of-the...

[3] https://pressbooks.uwf.edu/envrioscience/chapter/14-3-the-im...

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All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride.

What is even more tempting is that all this infrastructure and right of ways are still there. A lot of these towns have the old station land empty still, some have the old station preserved even. A lot of the rail grades are either sustained by freight rail or have been railbanked as trails. Its practically turn key as the hard part of gathering all this land was done over a century ago.

Too bad rail ambition is so paltry in comparison today.

Can you lead me to some background on this? I'd love to look at some of the routes and law behind it.

It was called the denver and rio grande railroad

That system was slow and doesn’t solve the same problems. It’s competing with long range travel and all of those track routes were far slower than just driving.

The problems that Colorado faces are transportation within urban areas. Driving to salt lake and ski resorts isn’t an issue.

All those routes could be made faster and it also had routes running down the front range too. Either way traffic on 70 into summit county is stupid and this is the salve. Already exists. Already graded. Already set up to serve vail and many other destinations that people rent a car from DEN to reach today.

The tax haul from a house is almost certainly higher than food grown on a semi-arid steppe like Colorado

Totally, which is why Colorado is producing less and less food. I mean towns sprouted up where people settled and people settled to grow food, so this has been happening in Colorado since farming began here. As a result the land left for farming is getting worse and worse. The good spots have all been paved.

But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment complex? Cities out here will choose the former as much as they can, increasing sprawl, because "quality of life."

Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex. The people also want houses opposed to apartments (hence the higher price).

This seems to be an ideological conflict where some people are trying to force everyone else into options they dont want- why?

The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments do so, and let people who want to live in suburban houses do so too.

Careful how you swing that axe of relaxed zoning. Got me nearly kicked off my local town council. "Why can't that town two towns over build more apartments for our day laborers?" they all ask in unison.

I dont understand what you are implying. Are you saying that NIMBYs will come after you?

It seems weird but you have to look at the market effects evangelist perspective to understand their position. A person believing in these forces might say that by having a large day laboring population and not building housing for them, there is now strong incentive for other areas to approve new housing and take advantage of guaranteed demand. And then they might go on to cite a location like (EDIT: not daly city but there is a bay area city that recently approved a ton of apartments whose name escapes me) that has taken this approach and really changed their municipal budget for the better as a result.

However, the market evangelists don’t understand that just because there is a business case to do something, doesn’t mean anything should happen either. People and therefore their markets don’t operate on entropy alone. There is a lot of irrationality that is hard to quantify.

And the problem is, zoning is almost never the answer to healthy growth. Is it useful for segregation? Yes. Is it useful for temporarily sustaining property value. Yes.

I know there are some counter examples, but I always think about the beautifully organic growth from some of America's greatest cities in the early 20th century. And how that growth would be categorically impossible today because everyone's afraid someone's gonna build a lard rendering plant next to a single-family house. Or that poor people will move in across the street. Goddamn I'm sick of selfish assholes.

That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much better tax haul per square foot.

You are assuming infrastructure costs would be the same for a 10x denser population. I’ve read articles where even on a per capita basis just about everything is more costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools. It would take some careful scrutiny to identify what is actually optimal, and I expect that to depend heavily on the local economy. For example maybe the fact that the lima peru skyline looks like lima peru and the san jose usa skyline looks like san jose usa is as simple as being due to the cost of labor and materials and what best pencils out. Of course we won’t know the answer to that experiment without removing zoning limits on density and seeing how the market responds over decades.

> I’ve read articles where even on a per capita basis just about everything is more costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools.

Link? This NotJustBikes video suggests it is the other way around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Here is one. Njb is another one of these strong towns esque orgs that parrots the usual points to people who get their text based content through a talking head speaking it to them.

https://arpitrage.substack.com/p/contra-strong-towns

> Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex.

I thought is is pretty well established that in US cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.

Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own maintenance from taxes.

Sewer, water, and electricity hookups are cheap to maintain and are on the burden of the home owner to repair. The initial hookups and construction are absolutely not covered by taxes (this is one of the significant costs you will find out when you build on a plot).

Street pavement is the only thing you mentioned that does cost the tax base, but how much the poor dense area subsidizes the suburbs is completely dependent on the split of funds. In many of the suburban sprawl regions of the western US, the dense urban city (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA) has a small jurisdiction and the suburbs are in completely different legal cities with their own road budgets.

>cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.

Definitely not well established. What you might be thinking of is poor dense neighborhoods subsidizing rural areas that depend heavily on federal or state grants for pretty much all of their infrastructure.

What are you talking about? King Soopers has plenty of food

Colorado producing less food is probably from market conditions and not urbanism. Like just consider the land area here. Sure denver is sprawly suburbia but what percent is that really of the massive swath of farmland that is all of colorado east of the front range? Its got to be in the single percent range just eyeballing it on google maps. And farm yields have absolutely soared over the last 100 years so fewer farms are needed to produce the same food.

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