I'm all for public investments that provide overall benefit: for example I'm for public education, public health care, publically funded police, publically funded military, publically funded firefighters, and so on.

At the same time, I'd like to see a better connection between taxes paid and benefits received or costs externalized. So if if it costs more per person to plow snow, repave the roads, pump sewage, send a fire truck or have drinking water on tap in former mayor Ford's non-dense community of Etobicoke on the periphery of Toronto, than in the dense neighbourhood of Riverdale close to downtown Toronto, then the municipal taxes that goes to those services/utilities should be higher in Etobicoke than Riverdale, rather than the perverse market value assessment we have in Toronto now, where smaller downtown homes that are cheaper to service, pay higher taxes than peripheral large homes that are much farther apart and miles farther from the sewage plant, etc. Riverdale is subsidizing Etobicoke's snowplowing and sewer services.

Regarding transportation (all of which is subsidzed to some degree), this is part of a larger debate on forms of regional development. If there are competing demands for more urban public transit vs more suburban freeway lanes, etc. or policy debates on whether to open up more land to new suburban development vs encourage infill development and intensification in existing neighbourhoods, it would be great to have good quality of information on how much each would cost, how many people would be served, what their self-rated quality of life will be like, what their contribution to GDP would be, how much air pollution would be created, how many people would be killed in accidents and so on; so the public, planners and politicians can have an informed debate and hopefully lean towards policies that maximize overall benefits. I'm pretty convinced that if you look at the big picture, it will make more sense in terms of tax costs vs economic benefits, quality of life, environmental benefits, regional competitiveness and so on, for regions to slant their policies in favour of urban density. I think the need to subsidize everybody's transportation would be a lot lower in that case. And anybody who doesn't want to live in the city is still free not to. In fact the denser the core city, the easier it will be to find a nice place outside it for the minority who want that, and the less crowded the roads into town will be.