Fighting to Replace America’s Water Pipes(nytimes.com) |
Fighting to Replace America’s Water Pipes(nytimes.com) |
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2009/3/30/the-cost-of-de...
In particular, the analysis considers whether the cost of a road along some properties will be repaid by tax on those properties. However, this ignores the 'network effect' present in society, and various other taxes that residents contribute to.
Residences don't provide property tax revenue in isolation - the residents also generate tax revenue in a variety of other ways that depend on transportation. For example, residents commute to work, and work for corporations that pay a high amount of property tax. It's commonly understood that commercial districts contribute far more tax than residential districts do. That's often why cities want to zone for it. But the two zones depend on each other. Neither works without the other.
Residents consume from various other businesses in the area where they live, and those businesses pay tax and have employees, and so on. Residents also generate income and pay income tax and sales tax. Residents who are connected via top-notch infrastructure generate value in inter-state, national, and even internationale commerce through their consumption of mail-ordered goods and use of Internet, phone, and cable TV.
There are certainly some rural areas where infrastructure might be a loss. I'm not saying that's not possible. Just saying this rationale and analysis isn't convincing.
It's also not necessarily a problem if individual small areas run at a loss, as long as larger society is willing to subsidize or pay for them. For example, imagine a small dense city like San Francisco that generates incredible wealth. Some people might commute to that area from nearby cities. Those cities and the transportation in between might not earn enough in tax revenue from local residents to pay for the infrastructure at the local level, but it may be the case that higher-level structures above the city such as counties, states, or the federal government receive enough tax revenue from the region that they're willing to pay for the transit. Those larger political structures can look at the big picture, like how transportation within the region is impacting the regional economy.
For example, the federal government recently gave a multi-hundred-million dollar grant to develop rail infrastructure between Seattle and Portland. Is that worth it? I have no idea. That seems like a high price to me to transfer a few hundred people per train trip. But the point is that the model works as long as society is willing to pay for this infrastructure. The articles haven't made the case that people can't or won't pay for it; just that in some very narrow analysis, properties don't pay for streets along the property. But roads are never useful in isolation - it's the network that matters.
You could argue that infrastructure could be more efficiently designed if people lived closer together, and needed less infrastructure. That's probably true. But that's not saying wealth is being destroyed. It's saying that society is willing to pay the cost necessary for the quality of life people want. (Assuming that we do have the money for it - haven't seen the argument that we don't) You could argue that wealth is being destroyed every time people buy "organic foods" because they're so much more expensive and wasteful, for example. It's the same idea.
The fundamental premise of the articles seems to be that growth of suburbia is unsustainable because suburbia does not generate enough property tax to pay for itself. An accurate analysis needs to consider all of the ways that those residents contribute to the tax base, as employees and customers, and add the sum of the effects up, before argue that it's legitimately wealth-destroying. One needs to consider the effect of infrastructure on tourism and the ability of an area to attract residents and businesses. You can't evaluate the cost/benefit of infrastructure merely by looking at the property tax revenue of properties adjoining it.
Since you just read until you thought of an objection to their thesis & then stopped, you failed to find the articles where they do the lifetime cost analysis over a whole town (i.e., both "suburban" and "business" districts) and find that this pattern of development means that the profits from the high tax business districts fail to make up for the costs from exurban / US style suburban development.
Have a trawl through the Best-Of lists. In particular: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/8/the-real-reaso... stands out.
There are a few other things. Firstly, network effects could also be seen as requiring the `ponzi scheme' to keep growing. That is, in order for the suburb to pay for itself, it needs to attract other suburbs. Obviously, this does not immediately apply to network effects due to more business. It should be noted that commutes suck and that having large suburbs starts to require large commutes to get to work. Thus for sufficiently labor intensive business, there are inherent issues with the suburb network effects. It is hard to say where this threshold of `sufficently labor intensive' lies though.
Secondly, there is an issue of gradual density increases. In the suburbs, it is a lot harder to upgrade the house on a lot to say a three-story flat. Besides tough zoning laws, there are HOAs to content with. Even more troubling is parking. Because suburbs require a car, such flats require a lot of parking.
Finally, there is a simple argument that more gradual growth that works via a mix of density increases (i.e. building up, or just putting more houses on a lot) and a slower expansion of the city is plain better. This of-course no longer argues that suburbs are a `ponzi scheme' but if this model is more sustainable than suburbs, it is kind of a moot point whether suburbs are sustainbable.
The argument that this model is better than suburbia is more difficult, for it is inherently comparative. Notably though, this makes the argument `suburbs cost more than they bring in locally' relevant presuming that suburubs have the same network effects as the proposed model of growth. To a first approximation, this depends on the quality of life, and the ability to grow to match demand.
With regards to water pipes. I don't care how my water is delivered. What I care about is that it is proven safe, durable, and the least expensive solution meeting those requirements is used. There is no reason that the Federal Government or a coalition of states and cities cannot formulate a set or rules governing the use of each type.
While there are concerns about poisons leaking into some types of pipes more attention needs to be focused on getting those poisons out of the ground or routing around them. So perhaps using plastic where its known safe to keep costs down and resorting to more expensive solutions when clean up options fail or are exorbitant in costs
Do you really believe the government is going to spend $300b, and no company is going to fight over the allocation of funds?
To your point though, have you seen any evidence that private companies are better or more cost effective at providing or maintaining water and sewage infrastructure?
* Sewer & water can be done in a piecemeal fashion, whereas fiber requires complicated & precise connections to make work. Not to mention, needs connection to the electrical grid.
* Sewer & water pipes are typically much deeper underground, not necessary for fiber which doesn't freeze.
* Running fiber along a pipe would be difficult, at best. Typically an underground pneumatic pipe trenching tool pulls flexible copper pipe behind it, for water or gas. Pulling fiber along with it on the outside gets complicated or requires some new type of pipe.
Even just laying conduit (layer 0?) would be an amazing public service.
I think the majority of people agrees there needs to be changes in things... but putting "government" in charge of the backbone of the internet? Would definitely not a change for the better.
Personally... I think there should be one of two rules: Companies can't own content AND infrastructure (IE: Comcast)... or a higher cost (taxes? fees?) for companies that do and/or don't have reasonable competition.
Now everyone (or almost everyone) in Switzerland can have fiber internet with gbit up and down.
This anti-governmental prejudice is tiring. Governments are made of people - what makes you trust those people less than other people?
Protecting citizens freedoms, roads, airports and ports, education for all, social safety net (medicaid and social security), supplying fuel, CDC, protecting the environment, 911, policing, science and research funding.
No one was there to think through the long term investment in infrastructure.
The prices have skyrocketed due to regulation and now the government can't pay for all that regulated work.
Similar thing will happen in EU. Pipes are failing all across the western world.
Overall I think the big advantage is going to come from actually getting the aged pipes replace more than from the choice of which new material to use.
My wife worked for a water utility in an old city. Outside her bosses office was a lined wooden pipe that had been in place since 1680 or so, and was removed during a construction project.
Unless the pipes are riveted, they have a surprisingly long service life, and techniques exist to spot at risk pipes and even make some repairs without digging.
And those 500 year old wood pipes may still work, but they probably leak like sieves. NYC, for instance, loses billions of gallons a year to leaks in the pair of hundred year old water tunnels it can't afford to shut down for repair, and more from leaks in iron water mains all over the city.
The US northeast arguably can afford to waste that much water. Many parts of the world can't.
Those individuals were held criminally responsible. Unfortunately, society and the citizens of Flint bear the cost and consequence of their misbehavior.
The problem is that taxes have been cut and costs like pensions have gone up (both in absolute terms from things like favorable contracts and life expectancy and in relative terms because of the tax cuts).
Construction productivity in the U.S. is actually DROPPING:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-...
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf...
http://harvardcgbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Wang_2Page...
Can you provide a source ?
The only thing I could find is this
>The Institute for Supply Management said Friday that its manufacturing index slipped to 58.2 last month from 58.7 in October. Anything above 50 signals that U.S. factories are expanding. American manufacturing is on a 15-month winning streak.
Nothing on it being the greatest time in history, I believe that was during and after the 2nd world war, but I could be wrong.
The prices have skyrocketed due to regulation
and now the government can't pay for all that
regulated work.
This would be really interesting to understand in more detail. Does anybody know if attempts have been made at quantifying these costs specifically for infrastructure?Part of this is caused by parking minimums requiring half or more of any commercial lot be paved (forcing buildings further apart and causing excess parking to be built, and in residential settings this is caused by zoning and minimum lot and building size regulations.
All this causes a magnitude more infrastructure to be built to service this sprawl, from roadways to water, gas, power and sewer pipes.
To say "companies" have blame and "government" doesn't?
That's... interesting...
And Government may have helped get the ball rolling but they didn't get us to where we are today alone - and if they were the only ones in charge, we wouldn't be where we are today.
You see, old lead pipes are safe once they build up a patina; but untreated, acidic water erodes that patina (and also leaches lead from the pipes more readily) and allows the lead to enter tap water.
Even with proper treatment, when lead pipes are disrupted by construction, the patina/scale can be disturbed and the pipes can become dangerous again.
So yes, the failure to treat the water is the immediate (and I agree, criminally negligent) cause of the crisis. But the root cause is old lead pipes; resuming treatment doesn't fully eliminate the danger (which will continue to be elevated for as long as it takes for the patina to build back up); and one of the solutions under discussion has been replacing them.
http://m.startribune.com/flint-water-crisis-reveals-vulnerab...
Without the crisis created by criminal negligence, you had a much more sustainable situation that could have been addressed while controlling impact to consumers of water.
Note that I'm not agitating for old pipes. Far from it -- but in a world of limited resources, advocating for magically conjuring up money to do wholesale replacements of water supply (and sewer, as disrupting old pipes will disrupt old sewers) is a fantasy that distracts from solutions to these engineering problems.
It seems Swisscom owns some lines, but not all of it. Like some of Swisscom Internet goes on lines that is not owned by them.
I guess a lot of the households in the mountains and other large terrains do not have fiber.
If you look here: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=nga&mobile=false&lang=en&bgL...
Plenty of households have >=100 Mbit/s Internet. This map pretty much covers the same area as "where most Swiss people live."
Search "us manufacturing output history" if that isn't sufficient.
It makes plenty of sense, even if the postwar era was a boom, the US population is much larger and external markets are much larger and richer.
That marketwatch article is somewhat skewed because it only talks about the US domestically versus how it does relative to the world.
How about you take a stab at looking through this.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf page 5
>Congressional Research Service: U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective
>The United States’ share of global manufacturing activity declined from 28% in 2002, following the end of the 2001 U.S. recession, to 16.5% in 2011. Since then,the U.S. share has risen to 18.6%, the largest share since 2009. These estimates are based on the value of each country’s manufacturing in U.S. dollars; part of the decline in the U.S. share was due to a 23% decline in the value of the dollar between 2002 and 2011, and part of the rise since 2011 is attributable to a stronger dollar
>The U.S. share of global manufacturing value added has declined over time, from 29% in the early 1980s to 18.6% in 2015 (see Figure 2). Similarly, Japan’s share of global manufacturing value added has contracted from a peak of 21.5% in 1995 to around 7% now, and Germany’s has fallen from 10.4% (in 1992, just after the incorporation of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic of Germany) to 5.9%.
Surprising Fact No. 2: Manufacturing output is a near a record high.
The decline of the global share of output is true, but it is sort of inevitable that ~5% of the global population will not maintain a vast share of global output. I'm also not terribly interested in arguing about whether Our ability to produce material goods really is greater than at any time in history. was a valid response to the post I responded too.
I love my country and for the most part trust the Government... but on the same token - you'd have to be blind not to see how inefficient they are compared to private organizations (IE: Post Office compared to FedEx. Private Hospitals compared to the VA.)
You'd also have to be blind to not see blatant growth and abuses of privileges. The ACA growing government meddling in healthcare. Snowden - and similar - releases showing abuses. Daily revelations about different groups abusing their privileges.
"Arguments like this" continue to be made because examples are PLENTIFUL of how inefficient, self serving and abusive large organizations get. The same can be said of Unions - which are great in some aspects... horrible in others.
In terms of private hospitals you’ve obviously never had to pay a bill from them. They engineer the system to maximize profits, which is different than getting people out the door as efficiently as possible.
Large institutions like the post office / va have problems. I’d argue large companies often have similar problems. But the distinction between what problems these orgs are solving and what private companies are solving is a very important distinction.
Massachusetts as a state would be in the top in the world right their with Finland, and that includes Boston http://blogs.wgbh.org/on-campus/2016/12/6/if-massachusetts-w...
Also our Universities are also the top educational system in the world. 7 of the top 10 Universities of the world are US institutions. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
PS Rant, Why is that Conservatives and Libertarians like to make things look worst in America and they consider themselves the only patriotic ones?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2....
> When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.
Police? Baltimore is losing people left and right for decades now because they can't meet basic security needs. Again, this is basic competence.
Education? Are you kidding? Why is it that "good schools" is one of the top reasons to move to an area? It's because parents have little or no impact on schools and there's no accountability. If your local school is incompetent, then you can either move, homeschool, or somehow get your kids into private school. It's a disgrace.
Our Interstate System is what fueled out economy and is the main reason why our economy is the largest in the world. That was 100% Federally funded
> Police
Our crime rates are WAY Down over the past 40 years and probably is the lowest it has ever been. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-abou...
Also my son gets pulled over for DWB (Driving While Black) about once a month. There are absolutely racist and abusive police but it is finally getting exposed.
> Education? Are you kidding?
Yes take out the cities andwe are top 10
I pay $50 a month for the internet and two mobile contracts, with 4GB data each and unlimited texts/minutes, from BT.
TV is free (freeview, with hundreds of channels). You can pay for Sky or Virgin and get every channel ever, but why would you.
These are all based on the public records, please consider why you stated that the funding is equal? Federal funding for education has also been less and less.
http://www.openpagov.org/education_revenue_and_expenses.asp
(My city) Allentown SD per student = $13,949
(Next town over) Sailisbury SD per student = $21,519
(Highest in the state) Lower Merion SD per student = $28,495
Screen Shot of Data:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pa-high-court-revives-scho...
"Here is ti challenge this statistics: Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that high-poverty school districts spent 15.6 percent less than those in the group with the least poverty.
In Pennsylvania, that difference was 33 percent"
Federal Funding title 1 for Inner City Schools funding per student is quite low, averaging about $500 to $600 a year. 50% of public schools qualify for federal money and the 14 billion works out to much less than most people believe. It amounts to a 5% increase in funding for some schools.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-federal-spending-on-d...
Here is the Heritage Foundations paper on how Inner City racial groups get more money and so there is no unequal funding problem based on race. This is just crazy statistics gymnastics. http://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-dis...
My point is not race it is socioeconomic disparity at the school district level and Heritage wants to say school in districts favor the poorer schools. Poorer schools in School District isn't the problem it is school districts getting under funded.
Funding isn't the answer but why should my daughter or son have 9 gym classes a year (School doesn't have a gym, nor a library room, and certainly no art class room) She also gets 9 art classes and 9 Music classes a year.
They also don't get recess due to funding problems for monitors. My daughter in kindergarten got no recces from August till January. Though she had 2 hours of reading and 2 hours of math per day. http://www.macon.com/news/local/article28555831.html
> When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent