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Originally Posted by Mister F
Shoulders are actually pretty rare in most of the world. Even freeways don't generally have shoulders, especially on the inside lanes. There's usually no safe place to pull over except in designated areas. I've long thought that we overbuild our highways in this country; maybe if we relaxed our design standards a bit we could afford to build more.
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Next you'll be telling me that paved roads are pretty uncommon and that even that is a waste of money considering the low traffic volumes in the north.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1overcosc
As controversial as it sounds, I think the province should depopulate those isolated communities--expropriate everything, bulldoze it, compensate everyone with a free house somewhere else (like in Sudbury or Thunder Bay or something). They cost a fortune to provide services to and provide little economic benefit.
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Outside of certain circumstances, I'm not sure how legal it is. The Federal Government still has the right to do virtually whatever it wants with First Nations (since it owns them directly; private land ownership is illegal on almost all reserves) but relocating a settler community involves private land, and for the most part the people that are left in those communities are only there because they're too stubborn to leave in the first place.
Regardless, lets look at the cost: The average house in Thunder Bay costs over $200,000. In Sudbury, it is probably more. Both cities have a problem with too few houses on the market, and Thunder Bay is actually facing a lot shortage crisis. (We don't have enough parcels of land ready to build houses on). So, in most cases homes will have to be built new, and in Thunder Bay that costs a minimum of $350,000. Assuming 25% of the rural households move to Thunder Bay and 75% move to Sudbury, we're looking at increasing Thunder Bay's housing stock by 50% and doubling the size of Sudbury. We'll have to build nearly 1,600kms of streets for 100,000 houses. We'll have to expand water plants, we'll have to expand public transit systems, we'll have to expand hospitals, we'll have to build schools, we'll have to have to hire police, we'll have to build fire stations and EMS dispatches, while at the same time systemically dismantling all the old towns and hamlets in an environmentally responsible way (to placate the Southerners; in the North our method of removing populated areas is to simply burn them down. Literally. This is how we have dealt with our ghost towns in the past.) Assuming two new hospitals ($300M each), 30 new schools($3M each), a new water plant for Sudbury ($100M; Thunder Bay's plant is overbuilt and could serve another 25,000 homes), 5 new fire halls ($8M each), 5 new EMS dispatches ($3M each), and 1,600kms of fully serviced roads ($0.5M/KM), we're looking at around 1.6 billion dollars being spent in both Thunder Bay and Sudbury, over an undetermined timeline, to build the infrastructure to absorb the populations, plus 20 to 40 billion to build homes for them. And that's a conservative estimate; Thunder Bay's hospital cost $400M in 2003, and the water plant was $100M in 2007.
That's just the infrastructure, too. You can be sure that
a lot of people in those communities will fight any attempt to relocate them to the death.
In the long term it might be cheaper, but it's going to take a really long term to make up 20 to 40 billion dollars in savings, and the social and infrastructural issues that would arise from increasing Thunder Bay's and Sudbury's populations by double digit percentages over a few years would probably wipe out any hope of recovering that money.