Just because you aren't aware of them don't mean they don't exist.

PEX is very common for new residential/commercial buildings for example. I'd be surprised if municipalities in need of water treatment plant upgrades aren't looking at technologies that weren't widely available 20 or 30 years ago when the original system was put into place.

Also, complaining about increasing price (which is modest IME) is an unusual tactic. The price would have to increase at a greater rate than inflation in order to account for the increasing concentration of wealth the past couple decades right? It's a little fuzzy for me, but I feel like that's just math. If 95% of your subscribers make less than they did two decades ago, but your per-subscriber bill is the same, then average cost is going to increase.

Also tightened environmental standards that didn't exist in 80's when the systems were put into place undoubtedly play a role in increasing costs.

I get 200amp service to my house today. It originally (in the 70's) had 100amp service. I'd call doubling the power requirements for the electrical grid quite an upgrade. Houses are most certainly increasing in size. Not to mention 20 years ago you didn't have the option to pay an extra half-cent per kWh to ensure the electric company purchased enough renewable power wholesale to cover your usage.

I pay all my utilities online with auto-pay. There's another upgrade.

The police of today are most certainly better equipped, better prepared, better trained, respond quicker and there are more of them. I don't agree with all of that but it's what the voters want. All that costs money, and it's most definitely different today than a couple decades ago.

Are roads worse today? I feel like they're not. At least not where I live (which is in Dallas proper where the average home is around 2,000sqft and $150K, so not some rich enclave). I feel like we spend too much money on roads in fact. The new 635 toll-road seems a terrible waste of money when we could have just had a DART (commuter train) run West/East along it (there are almost no West/East running lines in Dallas, which makes the public rail system not all that useful for many).

I can't remember the last time I drove on a gravel road. Even the state parks are fully paved. That definitely wasn't the case 30 years ago.

So sure, we pay more today than we did decades ago. Changing subscriber-base, voter priorities and deploying the exact tech you're complaining doesn't exist is a big part of it.

This feels like an argument of "Government Bad! Business Good!" at this point to be honest.

Like saying: "Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability."

Where do you get that from? Anecdotally that seems far from the truth considering the payment options and Customer Service available to people these days.

So they're not tearing up the roads every few years to upgrade the pipe. That's a good thing. They are OTOH purchasing more efficient fleet vehicles. Even in gas loving TX it's common for Municipal vehicles to run on LNG. My Dad as a TxDOT employee working on the Galveston ferry has been through a lot of training. I can personally guarantee you TxDOT is not the same agency or using the same tech they were 30 years ago. Except where it's not broken.

You appear to want to fix what isn't broken.

> Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years".

What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that.

> ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth)

That's the terminating equipment. The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more. You could easily have a municipal last mile and competing providers who supply their own terminating equipment at the endpoints.

> In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.

Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?

>"What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that."

You could have said the same of steel if its quality had not improved, or airline travel if it had not gotten much cheaper, and become available to the masses. You are falling into the trap of only analyzing the 'seen', and failing to think of the 'unseen'.

>"The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more."

It will soon have to change if we are to have fibre on the last mile, and may change again when the technology evolves further; one of my concerns is that utilitization causes ossification, and prevents further progress, as is the case with the sewer, power, and water last miles.

>"Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?"

Thanks for setting up a false choice, I love those! I have no idea why there should be a monopoly on the purification and distribution of water.

Having private entities selling water would reduce the number of droughts, as they are likely to price according to volumetric use, and to price based on scarcity. Droughts are a problem of pricing, not of the scarcity of water; if you want a good example of how this is the case, motor vehicles never fall from the sky, and there is no shortage of them.

P.S. people are coming by and down-voting all my comments at once (I have gotten at least 25 down-votes here so far), could someone please let me know if I am being offensive, discriminatory, or going off-topic?

There's only so much you can do with last-mile lines. There is no known way to get data to your house faster and with more bandwidth than using light. There is nothing that travels faster than light in a vacuum.

The only enhancement I can think of is propagation for ever-higher frequencies (UV, X-Ray, etc), allowing more bandwidth. But realistically node hardware improvements regularly boost the performance of the same fiber cable, much like how cable modems are still improving using the same RG-6 from the 60's. (RG-6 is old, but it is still very good- physics still works just the same)

Last-mile power/sewage/data/etc hasn't changed much because it is fundamental. Water travels in pipes. Sewage also travels in pipes. The only reason data changed (POTS to cable/fiber) is because data was originally piggybacked on a network never designed for it.

One day we might do fiber optics with gamma rays, or invent wormhole communication, but I'm prepared to invest in plain-old visible-light fiber optics for now.

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As for water distribution in general (not last-mile), that's a problem with water rights, not water companies. It's a legal nightmare that has nothing to do with public vs. private utilities.

The internal combustion engine has not improved much in the last few decades either. Perhaps whoever is building those things is incompetent too.

Oh wait, it's the laws of physics that have greatly diminished progress in this area...

One would think that true based on the thermodynamic first principles of the Otto and Diesel cycles, but you are actually incorrect due to a number of innovations such as fuel injection, EFI, direct injection, intake design, CFD analysis, materials advances which allow higher temperature and more efficient combustion, and turbocharging.[1] In addition, I happen to work on automotive and small engines, and can assure you that engine reliability has dramatically increased over the whole span of their existence, and every interval thereof.

[1] http://www.achatespower.com/pdf/opposed_piston_renaissance.p...

Please forward that link to my 2014 Honda Civic, which didn't get your memo and has the same fuel efficiency like my old 02 Civic.

So you bought a larger, heavier car, with a more powerful engine, and you think the problem is that engines are not getting more efficient?