That's a good point - I also completely excluded sewer prices, which are actually considerably higher than water prices.

Warning: no data, just intuition, in the rest of this comment.

I'm a bit confused by that, actually, since California is in a significant drought and there is a lot of pressure to get people to cut back on washing their cars and watering their lawns. I would imagine that, in a residential setting, roughly 100% of water consumed for purposes besides the external use that we're trying to reduce then goes into the sewer.

So why don't we just increase water prices and cut sewer prices equivalently? You'd expect the average consumer's bill to go up only in proportion with the amount of externally used water that they "waste". One potential complication might be for houses with septic tanks, but those are probably fairly uncommon in the area served by SFPUC. Perhaps, as a utility, they're constrained to charge relative to their actual cost in those areas.

Edit: retric - thanks, that makes sense. I'm a renter here, so I don't pay a water bill (except indirectly via rent).

Sewer is not tracked separately in most (all?) areas. It's just based off of water used.

Seattle tries to estimate sewer use by billing it based on extrapolation from winter water use (when lawn watering isn't happening)

I've seen large homes in Texas that have two separate water hookups, each with their own meter. One goes to the indoor faucets and pays water+sewer, and one goes only to the outdoor faucets and pays only water.

Lynn has its own water supply, and they switched us over to MWRA for a couple months during some maintenance work. The MWRA water has a funky taste, not a fan. http://www.lynnwatersewer.org/Images/LWSC-MWRA%20General%20N...

Huh, where do you live? I think Boston water is the best tasting water I've ever had. I'm in the South End.

Belmont: I think the MWRA water itself is OK, but then the local towns modify it. I remember Brookline water was even worse tasting somehow.