It's probably a trade off- more people may need better infrastructure for certain facilities like highways, sidewalks, so the increased cost is spread among more people. Things like postal service can really suffer, when we all have to bear the cost of hauling a dozen letters a thousand miles by dog sled. :lol:
Are you sure it's a dozen and not half a dozen? How is it possible that it would be less expensive on a per-letter basis to haul a hundred letters to the highrise next door than half a dozen letters a thousand miles by sled?
On a serious note, I think one solution would be for governments to put an end to subsidization of those who choose to live apart. For example, about a decade ago Quebec and Ontario underwent urban amalgamization. BC didn't. This would mean that a suburb in BC has to raise funds to maintain its own infrastructure and can't count so much on urban subsidization, whereas in Ontario suburbanites can sponge off the urbanites to subsidize their roads more owing to a common local government and local taxes.
Any subsidies to the gas and automotive industries have got to go (e.g. the auto bailout during the recession, and comments I've heard that supposedly we're subsidizing the petroleum industry). We need to cut subsidies to bus passes too. And I'd say let postal services and so on charge according to local costs too. If you did that, the real market costs of living in the middle of nowhere would quickly surface, and suddenly living there wouldn't be so appealing anymore. Now if the cost of living goes up in an area but the local resource industry is so profitable that it's still worth staying there, then it will survive. But we should not be subsidizing people's mountain shallets. In some more isolated areas, I could see highways charging tolls for intance. But we have to stop such subsidies.
Ummmm because there is more miles of road per capita in Canada than the US or just about any country in Europe....for starters.
Oops. I thought my question above so stupid as to make it obvious it was tongue in cheek. But you do have a point. Some people probably really do not get it and just can't understand why we can't have infrastructure of the same quality as Europe, Hong Kong, or Japan without our taxes skyrocketing.