Technology

Infrastructure alone to Bungalow jungle is never cost-effective: as Detroit learned, it never pays for itself with property tax.

I say we jack the property tax on low-dense residential to properly reflect a 20-year amortization and all the operating expenses of the infrastructure used, all the way back to City Hall, so that it does pay for itself (and the farther out, the more expensive to fix, the more expensive the tax).

At the same time, the city will

• wreck a park (wait for it)
• put up 40 storeys of mixed use
• offer to buy the shitty bungalows around the building, with an option to buy into ready condo space
• same for businesses, because #mixed-use
• use adjacent bungalow space for central square. Start with transit station underneath
• build 7 more towers
• offer same buy-up to adjacent bungalows
• surround with greenspace and one really ineffective laneway to connect garages under building with roadway out there
• begin offering more incentives for bungalow people to give up their home for agri space and move into mixed-use
• repeat until city is transformed to efficient walkable oases linked by transit

People think they can't do apartments, but I'm sure a spacious 1200sqft place planned with an eye to sight-lines isn't what they're thinking. We love our (smaller) apartment near the mixed-use block that sprung up , and everything we need is within that block. From daycares and pet stores to restaurants and coffee-shops and take-out, and gyms (plural) and insurers and a market and a chemist and an insurer and a physio... it's endless, and they're still building out more commercial space.

But you have to build the new space, properly configured with GOOD (rail) transit, before you can get people out of their cars.

It's really isn't difficult

Our government just won't spend the money to do it

Most suburbs have plenty of density to support transit as proved in other countries that provide good transit to their areas of similar density. However most suburbs have such bad transit you can't use it for anything and to people start believing the idea that it is impossible to get them good transit and so they won't agree to get it.

Plenty of US cities are built like NY, on grids, as circles, etc. The problem is that everything is far away.

I think that number is a bit off. Yes, there is overhead when charging a car to run its battery management system, heat losses in the wiring, etc. But it's not 20-30% of the ~kilowatt of power you'd run through level 1. A quick search says that 20% loss is at the higher end for level 1 (probably 15% on the lower end) but even level 2 has about a 10% loss.

The bigger issue is that level 1 just doesn't have nearly as much power as level 2. Most cars charge at level 1 at 8-16 amps. Most level 2 setups charge at a few times that, plus the voltage is doubled so the total power ends up being about 10x as much. But that's not to say everyone needs that power either. Honestly, for the average driver it's quite easy to make level 1 work.