Why would 736 gallons of water use per day almost make you sick? Presumably the water board continues to charge very little money for water, and so people use it accordingly. Increase the cost of water, people stop using it as much. Increase it enough, and people will decide they no longer need emerald green lawns, and, hell, maybe they will have make big sacrifices and put a nozzle on their hose when watering their car.
I've never understood why the California water boards don't just using pricing as a mechanism to moderate people's water use.
Here in Melbourne, water is priced on a tiered basis. 0.23 cents per litre for the first 440 litres per day (averaged over the quarter), 0.27 cents per litre for the next 440 litres a day, and 0.41 cents per litre beyond that. Plus a flat fee of about $100 a quarter.
If I used 736 gallons a day I'd be paying... hmmm, six bucks a day for water. Actually that's not that bad, I pay more than that for coffee.
Another nice thing about Australia - some areas have "Dual Flush" toilets - that allow you to use a different flush for solid waste - 6 liters/flush and 4 liters/flush.
I'm interested in what you pay for water -
The ceiling price on water "creation" (not including distribution) for countries near oceans with access to cheap energy (And Australia, for better or worse, has access to a LOT of cheap coal energy) - should be around $0.50/cubic meter according to this DBO (Design-Build-Operate) project in Singapore that Hyflux's SingSpring plant is going to deliver.
A Cubic Meter = 1000 liters, so that should be 50 cents / 1000 or 0.05 cents/liter.
That would suggest that either Desalination has jumped ahead of what other sources in Australia cost, and Australia just needs to get desalination plants online, or, more likely, the bulk of the cost of water (in your case, 70-90%), comes from things like distribution, and not water generation.
Water in SoCal _is_ very expensive. The problem is that by the time you make it expensive enough for the country club set to need to conserve, the rest of us can't afford to flush the toilet. There are solutions, but billionaires with green lawns while low-income workers are loosing service just doesn't work.
That seems insane! I know Australia is a bit more used to drought but it does seem to do astonishingly better at water conservation.
My water bill tells us our water consumption is 200L per day, or 100L per person. Brisbane average is 400L per day per household.
Let's assume our house is very conservative and twice as good as average and everyone else is using 200L per person per day - that's around 7 times better than the 360G (1362L) per day in California [1]! A 20% reduction seems completely unambitious on that scale.
Most of the solutions seem to be around water conservation (low flow toilets, showers and taps, water tanks, water efficient washing machines and dishwashers) and education (have showers lasting no more than 5 minutes, no baths).
Usage-based water bills were also used to drive down consumption, but it's now got to a point where 75% of our bill is fixed access costs - as people consumed less water, the access costs increased!
I wanted to emphasize that, if it's what I think it is. I saw a TV show about Australian property (one of those shows that follow a couple trying to buy a house). One startling thing was seeing houses there with large, multi-thousand liter water storage tanks along the side of the house. I assume these collect rainwater.
Is that what you're talking about? If so, that's quite uncommon in the USA. I've seen older houses that had a way to store rainwater collected from the roof into a cistern in the basement. But that sort of thing just is not done here in new construction.
The problem in the USA is people (generally) don't understand anything other than price. Which means there's no way a builder can include an expensive "extra" such as this. At least not in a subdivision. Of course out in the boonies where there is one house in 160 acres, wells and cisterns are used.
In Australia are these water tanks required by building codes?
First, I can't find the data for "Palm Springs" in the report, although "Desert Water Agency" reports a value of 736. Is that the same?
However, the numbers in the main table, Appendix B table 2, are the "Baseline GPCD" (Gallons Per Person Per Day - p7), which, as far as I can tell, is total use per capita, including not just residential use, but also commercial and public use. ("Baseline Gross Water Use and Service Area Population", Data Reporting, p.14)
That fact that "Vernon, City of" apparently describes itself as "exclusively industrial" with a 2010 population of 112[0], and according to the report has a Baseline GPCD of 94,111 (bottom of p.32) further supports this.
So while you may be correct in saying that the usage is "per residential customer", I think your wording is a bit misleading in that it can cause the reader[1] to think that the value you quoted is the residential usage per customer.
I've never understood why the California water boards don't just using pricing as a mechanism to moderate people's water use.