When higher density helps pay for low density

Re: “Fix our problems with amalgamation,” letter, April 13.

Let’s think about all the shared costs of car use.

There’s the “free” roads, “free” parking, all the public health costs from accidents and inactive lifestyles, and increased housing costs due to parking requirements, to name just a few.

Cycling, by contrast, has a net longterm benefit for society. Bike lanes are significantly cheaper to maintain once built, cycling is wonderful for your health, and all the money saved by cycling is more likely to be spent at locally owned small businesses than at foreign-owned corporate big box stores on the outskirts of town.

One big shared cost of driving is the increased infrastructure expenses to sustain car-dependent residential areas. It simply takes more asphalt, piping and wiring per person to supply low-density areas, and maintaining that infrastructure is expensive.

The property taxes raised from suburbs do not come anywhere remotely close to the true long-term cost of maintaining them. Supposedly wealthy suburbs are running massive deficits once their infrastructure debt is taken into account, and Oak Bay with its half-billion dollars in infrastructure debt is a prime example.

Municipalities habitually service this debt with a Ponzi-like expansion of new developments. The unfunded maintenance costs take a few decades to really kick in, and until that happens the extra revenue — from taxes on the new properties — looks like responsible governance.

When this scheme stops working, perhaps because the ocean got in the way, they raid the coffers of sustainable and financially responsible urban neighbourhoods through measures like amalgamation.

Remember this context when you see arguments like those presented in the letter. The writer is effectively demanding that their lifestyle be paid for by others — by those who live in higher-density areas or get around without a car.

Michael van der Kamp Victoria