[bretthoerner]

The problem is that rural and suburban living is heavily subsidized in relation to urban living, which has economies of scale. This doesn't even factor in things like per-capita pollution. If people who would "rather" live a certain way actually paid their fair share (i.e. for negative externalities) it'd be a different story.

[bergenty]

Infrastructure is used for a lot of things including transportation of goods and produce. It makes no sense to further incentivize moving to cities/urban areas as they already have plenty on incentives already.

[bretthoerner]

> including transportation of goods and produce

Forgive me, if your rural land is on a major interstate then I definitely agree! For every branch off that major arterial the road becomes more and more specific to a few number of people, who rarely pay the full cost of the road/utilities that service them.

> It makes no sense to further incentivize moving to cities

I'm not asking for any incentives. I'm asking to stop sending my money to highway expansion, road repair and other services to people who live very sparsely. Let them pay for the extension (and maintenance) of service themselves, and then they can decide whether they would "rather" live there.

[bergenty]

You’re inadvertently arguing against having a nation wide road system. In your ideal would cities be isolated? Have most of the country inaccessible to people? Have no small towns or villages? Have nothing quaint, no national parks, beach towns or farming communities? I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

[bretthoerner]

You're effectively saying my family (in a city) should keep paying to make your life equivalent cost to a city life. I'm saying your life should come with the full cost of the burden it bears, that's all. We'll still have farming communities and beach towns but they can price their externalities in.

As an aside, it's a wild stretch to pull the national park system and state beaches into "I, one person, prefer to have multiple acres to myself", as if these programs exist so that you can live X many miles away from anything, for free.

[wolverine876]

> who rarely pay the full cost of the road/utilities that service them.

There are costs that are higher in cities too, such as public housing. There are costs that are higher in mountains and in plains, in the north or the south, on the coast or inland, for commuters and people who stay home and people with kids or without, those that have ICE or electric vehicles or bikes, etc.

Allocating taxes or fees based on service usage has a lot of negative effects: 1) It's very complicated to quantify: Those rural roads also carry goods to the city, for example, and each person in the city uses those goods at different rates. 2) It requires a metering, collection, enforcement, etc. infrastructure. 3) It's divisive: Instead of bringing the community together and saying, 'this is good; we should do this together', it becomes 'you used 10 micro-whatever more but only paid X'.

Instead of spending my energy and time on fees, I think this is a much better deal: I'm happy for my neighbors, urban and rural, to do well and have what they reasonably need, and they are happy for me to do the same.

At the same time, would you happen to know about any data or research that tries to sort out the economics of #1 above?