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Author Topic: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure  (Read 8731 times)

Russell Ault

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #60 on: June 10, 2021, 03:28:37 PM »

{...} To each his own-I'm glad those that enjoy the city/urban life have that opportunity. I understand there are a lot of people that end up living the way they do without purposely choosing it-but it's not my place to tell them how to live.

In my mind, the real elephant that Randy is alluding to is not about lifestyle, it's about cost. In addition to the explicit, internalized cost of living in the suburbs/exurbs that Stephen just mentioned, there tend to be lots of externalized costs as well. People who live in the suburbs expect a certain level of public services (roads/water/sewage/police/fire/etc.), but those services are very expensive to provide in low-density areas, and it's not uncommon for a property's individual tax base to not cover even a fraction of the costs of providing those services. Municipality insolvency is starting to become a real problem, and a lot of ties back to infrastructure that doesn't create enough additional value to pay for its own maintenance.

I agree that it's not my place to tell anyone how to live, but I think it's important for people to at least be aware that certain lifestyles come at a much higher cost than others, and sooner or later those costs will have to be paid.

-Russ
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Steve-White

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #61 on: June 10, 2021, 05:26:00 PM »

In my mind, the real elephant that Randy is alluding to is not about lifestyle, it's about cost. In addition to the explicit, internalized cost of living in the suburbs/exurbs that Stephen just mentioned, there tend to be lots of externalized costs as well. People who live in the suburbs expect a certain level of public services (roads/water/sewage/police/fire/etc.), but those services are very expensive to provide in low-density areas, and it's not uncommon for a property's individual tax base to not cover even a fraction of the costs of providing those services. Municipality insolvency is starting to become a real problem, and a lot of ties back to infrastructure that doesn't create enough additional value to pay for its own maintenance.

I agree that it's not my place to tell anyone how to live, but I think it's important for people to at least be aware that certain lifestyles come at a much higher cost than others, and sooner or later those costs will have to be paid.

-Russ

So, you're suggesting municipal agencies are allocating and providing services at a below cost rate.  They shouldn't do that and it was a mistake at the onset and constitutes municipal mismanagement.

It's a bit different where I live.  Lots of high density housing embedded within the single family and duplexes in this area.  Most of the children in this 50's-60's spec home area live in the apartments.  I will guarantee you that the property tax rate in the high density apartment complexes pale in comparison to what the homeowners are saddled with.  In this case, we're paying the lions share for municipal services that we all use.  Trash, sewer, water, police, schools.  I guarantee you around these parts the rate for single family property tax is orders of magnitude higher than in apartments.  Whenever that topic comes up at a neighborhood association meeting with our district supervisor in attendance it gets danced around and avoided.  As does the bill for law enforcement in the high density housing areas.

If a city/county board of supervisors can't manage their municipalities, the solution isn't government imposed high density housing.  Cities that are insolvent are in thqat predicament because of mismanagement not lifestyle.  That's what needs to be addressed.
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Russell Ault

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #62 on: June 10, 2021, 06:30:33 PM »

So, you're suggesting municipal agencies are allocating and providing services at a below cost rate.  They shouldn't do that and it was a mistake at the onset and constitutes municipal mismanagement.

It's a bit different where I live.  Lots of high density housing embedded within the single family and duplexes in this area.  Most of the children in this 50's-60's spec home area live in the apartments.  I will guarantee you that the property tax rate in the high density apartment complexes pale in comparison to what the homeowners are saddled with.  In this case, we're paying the lions share for municipal services that we all use.  Trash, sewer, water, police, schools.  I guarantee you around these parts the rate for single family property tax is orders of magnitude higher than in apartments.  Whenever that topic comes up at a neighborhood association meeting with our district supervisor in attendance it gets danced around and avoided.  As does the bill for law enforcement in the high density housing areas.

If a city/county board of supervisors can't manage their municipalities, the solution isn't government imposed high density housing.  Cities that are insolvent are in thqat predicament because of mismanagement not lifestyle.  That's what needs to be addressed.

It's actually pretty typical, especially since municipalities tend to think of roads and sewers as "assets" instead the future-replacement-cost liabilities they actually are. For better or for worse, a road is effectively a perpetual promise that it will always be there, at which point the municipality doesn't "own" the road, they are merely responsible for paying for its upkeep and replacement literally forever.

As for the low-density properties subsidizing the high-density ones, if this is true in your location it would make your civic taxation structure basically unique in the world. The largest costs a municipality faces are infrastructure-related, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure to support an acre of development is basically the same regardless of whether that acre contains one household or one thousand. An apartment-dweller who shares their acre with 100 other households might have an annual tax bill that is 1/10th that of someone who has an acre all to themselves, but that still means the apartment acre overall is putting 10 times as much money into municipal coffers as the acreage while only needing approximately the same amount of expensive roads and sewers.

Sure, police/fire/garbage/schools cost money too, and those costs do tend to scale with population (although there's always a geographic component as well), but in the end it's almost always infrastructure (or the debt taken on to maintain it) that puts cities out of business.

To be clear, I absolutely agree that this is mismanagement, and I'm not suggesting for a second that the government impose anything on anyone. All I'm suggesting is that low-density development is not nearly as affordable as it's been made out to be, and sooner or later I'd expect that pure economics (perhaps as the result of less government intervention) will start to encourage increased density and decreased car-dependence.

-Russ
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Steve-White

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #63 on: June 10, 2021, 06:51:44 PM »

I think I'll sideline this one Russ.  I'd like to see the math formula for education, local taxes paid per household in apartments -vs- houses -vs- schooling costs per student.

It's doesn't add up in my book using the rate per acre formula, as there are more students per acre.  Per household for school taxes is a lot lower in an apartment.  More students per acre, more toilets per acre, more crime per acre, more trash per acre, etc....

I'd perhaps entertain owning a small battery powered runabout, as I ride the dirt bike around the area but only in good weather.  However, they'll have to pry the keys to the Hemi from my cold dead fingers.

Cheers to ya!  :)
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Brian Jojade

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #64 on: June 10, 2021, 07:35:59 PM »

The more detailed you look at how things are spread across taxpayers, the more you may see that they are unfair in many ways.  If you have 2 pieces of land right next to each other, and one has a tiny shack on it, and the other a large mansion, the property tax bill for the mansion is much much higher. Does it cost the city any different to provide services to those locations? No.

What's even more unfair is that in many areas, you have the primary city, which the taxpayers of the city foot the bill for a lot of services, an then you have suburbs, which are right outside of an imaginary line. Those residents often get to enjoy lower taxes because their suburb town isn't required to provide all of the services that the city does, but in the event that they need access to said services, they are only a short distance away.

That being said, I do agree that those that choose to live in rural areas should be taxed more appropriately according to the cost of providing necessary services to those areas.  Internet service is a great example of this as well. The cost to provide internet service to an area is about the same for a single household as it is an entire neighborhood, but now we're talking about subsidizing the costs of internet to those that chose to live away from the service area.  It's one of those things where your choices should come with the appropriate different costs needed for that choice.
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Brian Jojade

Russell Ault

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #65 on: June 10, 2021, 09:31:46 PM »

I think I'll sideline this one Russ.  I'd like to see the math formula for education, local taxes paid per household in apartments -vs- houses -vs- schooling costs per student.

It's doesn't add up in my book using the rate per acre formula, as there are more students per acre.  Per household for school taxes is a lot lower in an apartment.  More students per acre, more toilets per acre, more crime per acre, more trash per acre, etc....
{...}

I can give you a local example (well, "local" is relative in a province that's roughly the size of Texas): at some point in the next month, the Village of Hythe, Alberta will cease to exist. That, on its own, isn't hugely remarkable (rural municipalities have been dying since the popularization of the car), except that Hythe still has about 850 people living there (which, in Alberta, is almost enough to become a town).

Hythe's ~850 residents pay just shy of $900k in property taxes every year, which covers all the usually basic services and, in theory, infrastructure maintenance. So what's the problem? Well, last year, an engineering report indicated that keeping all the Village's roads and sewers in a state of good repair was going to cost nearly $15 million over the next decade. Put another way, just to maintain the existing infrastructure would require property taxes to nearly triple overnight. In response, the residents of the Village voted 95% in favour of dissolution, with the area reverting back to the direct control of the surrounding county. (Although, of course, dissolution doesn't actually solve anything, since there's still only ~$1 million in tax revenue in the area to pay for $1.5 million per year in infrastructure maintenance, let alone services.)

If it's something you're at all curious about, I'd encourage you to check out the book (and now organization) "Strong Towns". The author (a municipal engineer and land-use planner) breaks down municipal finance through the lens of "everyone must pay their own way", and the conclusions he comes to are eye-opening. (I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, mind you; it is, after all, the kind of book that very rationally explains why married women entering the workforce en mass was, in purely economic terms, bad for the average American.)

-Russ
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Steve-White

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #66 on: June 10, 2021, 09:45:27 PM »

^^^ Yes, understood.  Our leaders have run the train off the tracks.  Underfunded retirement plans and on and on - the basic infrastructure is in a shambles and crumbling and more and more on the govt. dole.  There are towns in California, 60 miles south of where I grew up in Fresno that went without municipal water for a couple of years.  California is busy building a bullet train.  Makes no sense at all and the media has in large part ignored it.

https://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/story/news/2018/02/27/east-porterville-gets-water-some-regret/375061002/

Regardless, I'm keeping the Hemi.  :)

Good discussion.
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Jonathan Johnson

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #67 on: June 11, 2021, 01:42:32 PM »

Taxes are, almost by definition, unfair. Some pay more in taxes than they receive in benefit; others pay less than they receive. There will never -- can never -- be a tax that is truly "fair."

If they were fair, there wouldn't be any taxes and everybody would contribute only what's necessary for their own benefit -- but everybody would be a little worse off. We probably wouldn't have paved roads, let alone gravel. Well, maybe you'd have a paved road in front of YOUR house that becomes dirt when it passes your neighbor's house. How will your BEV manage on a western-Oregon dirt road after three months of winter rains? Taxes are necessary for infrastructure that benefits us but which would not be workable as individual, interconnected parts.

Oh, we'll just make infrastructure maintenance private instead of public, you say? So then you are forced to pay maintenance fees to a private company or HOA instead of the local government, and that makes it not a tax somehow? Haha, tell me again how you don't pay "taxes."

So we have taxes because society, in general, benefits from the forced extrication of cash from individuals. And, as a result, areas of low-density assessment are subsidized by areas of high-density assessment. A mile of roadway in an urban or suburban area costs $2X to build, while in a rural area it's only $X (very rough numbers; consider that rural areas generally don't have sidewalks and streetlights and underground utilities). But the urban area has higher assessment density; if the rural area is $Y of assessment per mile of roadway, the urban area may be $10Y. So the urban area ends up subsidizing the rural area. That's the nature of property taxes as they are currently structured.

(What would be more equitable? By taxing according to road frontage? My neighbor has a thousand feet of frontage. I have thirty. Our use of the road is the same. But I travel a thousand more feet on my way to town, so maybe I should pay more since I'm further from services? What about the town in the other direction?)

But those in the urban area might still benefit by subsidizing the roads in the rural area: those roads enable more produce from the rural areas to be brought to market more easily, increasing the selection of goods at lower prices.

(Of course, the above is an idealized description. Reality is far, far messier.)

One more thought: there is some (perhaps anectodal) evidence that while a paved road is more expensive to build than gravel, the maintenance costs are much, much lower. A well-built paved road could be cheaper in the long term.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2021, 01:50:42 PM by Jonathan Johnson »
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W. Mark Hellinger

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #68 on: June 12, 2021, 02:54:02 PM »

So, you're suggesting municipal agencies are allocating and providing services at a below cost rate.  They shouldn't do that and it was a mistake at the onset and constitutes municipal mismanagement.

Good discussion.  I've approached this relative subject with our local town council, as a sitting council member.  The matter was having to do with an LID street dust abatement proposal that benefitted relatively few of the total community that would be paying the bill.  Council was all for it collectively (except myself)… and I asked:  If this is such a good idea, how many of you would voluntarily pay for that exact service of the street directly in-front of your house?  And if you would, why haven't you already?  Because you sure could have just as I did to the streets bordering my house, but I decided to not continue the dust abatement because I couldn't justify the cost benefit after trying it.  Silence.  Then I asked:  Why would you consider imposing costs on the public that you personally wouldn't fund on an individual cost/benefit basis?  Silence.
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John Roberts {JR}

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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #69 on: June 12, 2021, 03:00:53 PM »

Good discussion.  I've approached this relative subject with our local town council, as a sitting council member.  The matter was having to do with an LID street dust abatement proposal that benefitted relatively few of the total community that would be paying the bill.  Council was all for it collectively (except myself)… and I asked:  If this is such a good idea, how many of you would voluntarily pay for that exact service of the street directly in-front of your house?  And if you would, why haven't you already?  Because you sure could have just as I did to the streets bordering my house, but I decided to not continue the dust abatement because I couldn't justify the cost benefit after trying it.  Silence.  Then I asked:  Why would you consider imposing costs on the public that you personally wouldn't fund on an individual cost/benefit basis?  Silence.
OPM, politicians love spending "Other people's money".

JR

PS: Ironic perhaps but some politicians are paying for their own private security while defunding the police. (I'll stop now and apologize in advance).
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Re: Battery-electric Road Vehicles and Energy Infrastructure
« Reply #69 on: June 12, 2021, 03:00:53 PM »


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