[TimPC]

I think it's misleading to measure things in revenue per square foot. Most government services aren't provided based on the number of square feet but rather based on the number of people. The per capita revenue for denser developments is lower than the per capita revenue for single family housing. When you get to rural densities you have issues of providing services because of the lack of scale of communities but suburbs are generally dense enough to afford services like police, fire, community centres and hospitals.

[adgjlsfhk1]

the counter examples are things like roads, pipes, wires, and Public transit which make to up a high percent of city and state budgets and scale with density.

[TimPC]

These examples are fair. At the provincial level Transport, Pipes and Wires all are small enough expenditures to not warrant their own category breakdown in the budget and are lumped into a 14.6% of budget other category.

At the city level it's tricky because the breakdown my city provides in the budget separates into capital and operating rather than other categories. From what I can tell from the 50 page report, water pipes cost approximately 25% of budget and transport costs approximately 5%. Wires aren't listed in enough details to get an estimate.

My best sense from the numbers in the breakdown is the expenses for my suburb breakdown into roughly 60% per capita items, and 40% per area items. So 60% of our budget gets more expensive as you add people with low per capita taxation and 40% gets cheaper as you add more density.

[ericd]

How old is your community? Because road expenses are relatively low when they're new, but many communities aren't being fiscally responsible enough to budget appropriately for road maintenance.

[TimPC]

Markham incorporated as a town in 1971. Before that it was mostly farmland. Still over 50 years old is long enough to face road maintenance costs.

[ericd]

Yeah, should be, if it was pretty fully built out as of 50 years ago.