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It “simultaneously improves safety, reduces construction and lifecycle costs, and improves yield,” a progress report from the city’s Building Better and Smart Suburbs idea factory says. “Improves yield” means it takes up less space, leaving more room for houses. Getting higher yield from the same land means more people can share what does get built, spreading the costs out further.

An even bigger potential savings is no longer routinely building medians in the middles of low-speed roads. That’ll save $275 a metre, the city estimates, and make for smaller roads. The whole right-of way (the road and bike lanes and sidewalks and grassy strips in between) can be five metres narrower. Much nicer to cross or just be near.

The total savings from those two changes, for all the roads the city’s planning to build in the near future, is $12.1 million, or $87 a house.

City Hall has pushed really hard to get denser suburbs, realizing that sprawl is expensive and inefficient, and it’s succeeded impressively. The standard new subdivision is far fuller of rowhouses and townhouses than it would have been 20 years ago. We’ve still been using old low-density standards for the public things we build to make the suburbs work.

Not everything in the package of ideas will be as welcome as the bike tracks. The city figures it wastes a lot of space in new subdivisions with “dry ponds,” extra holding areas for rainwater when normal “wet ponds” that form part of a neighbourhood’s drainage system are full. Nearly all the time they’re just empty depressions in the ground and we can get away without them, the planners think — if we put up with more water pooling in the streets during heavy storms. This particular rainy weekend, that might not seem like as good an idea as it does when the dry ponds are really dry.