Though, it makes me wonder how much better cities fair, as I’m not so sure they’re doing much better being able to afford covering the costs of all their crumbling infrastructure.
That’s going to depend on density. Higher densities means more people paying for the same amount of infrastructure, leading to better affordability.
It’s also going to depend on the type of infrastructure - car infrastructure scales hilariously poorly, while transit generally becomes better when you add more riders.
while transit generally becomes better when you add more riders.
I’m generally pro-transit, but it seems like there’s some serious congestion problems (that is, upper limits to how these systems scale) to deal with here too - looking at relatively rich but crowded cities like New York and Tokyo and how people are frequently packed in like sardines.
Terrible examples. New York and Tokyo made the bulk of their investments in transport decades ago.
Look at China for an example of it working. Things are not congested at all there, and they just keep expanding the network if it gets near any bottlenecks. Like adding hundreds of miles of metro, light rail, high speed trains etc. per year.
That’s going to depend on density. Higher densities means more people paying for the same amount of infrastructure, leading to better affordability.
It’s also going to depend on the type of infrastructure - car infrastructure scales hilariously poorly, while transit generally becomes better when you add more riders.
I’m generally pro-transit, but it seems like there’s some serious congestion problems (that is, upper limits to how these systems scale) to deal with here too - looking at relatively rich but crowded cities like New York and Tokyo and how people are frequently packed in like sardines.
Terrible examples. New York and Tokyo made the bulk of their investments in transport decades ago.
Look at China for an example of it working. Things are not congested at all there, and they just keep expanding the network if it gets near any bottlenecks. Like adding hundreds of miles of metro, light rail, high speed trains etc. per year.