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| 5/23 |
| 2012/7/29-9/24 [Transportation/Car, Transportation/Car/RoadHogs] UID:54446 Activity:nil |
7/29 Is it really true that we subsidize auto driving to the tune of
$5k/yr? Shit I could probably hire a private driver for less...
http://tinyurl.com/cars-suck-ass
\_ You might have missed the point. Hiring a chauffeur to drive your
private vehicle won't change the amount of gasoline your private
vehicle use or the amount of real estate it uses on freeways and
vehicle use or the amount of real estate on freeways and
parking lots it takes up for transporting you. So it won't change
the situation. The chaffeur only adds to the non-subsidized part
of the cost.
\_ Okay I could hire a bicyle rickshaw driver for less then..
\_ or live in a sustainable, walkable city with much lower
energy requirements, like the rest of the world.
\_ ... and hire a rickshaw driver to take me everywhere.
Like the rest of the (undeveloped) world.
\_ or ride bike like a well developed world (Denmark)
or slow down to reduce energy needs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUU6DJwkoyQ
(georgeous women alert)
\_ NSFW. Anyway, the one not being interviewed is hot!
\_ Our cities were built around the auto, not trains or
walking. Most of the First World's large cities are very
dense with almost nothing a few miles outside of them.
That's not us. What you are suggesting is building up
the urban cores of our cities and convincing people to
move back to them. This may happen, but it's not
something we can force. In the end, the populace will
decide. So far, even though your idea has some
traction, most Americans dislike the idea.
\_ Agreed. The following quote from the article best
summarizes the reason: "They are making the correct
economic decision, but not in a free-market economy."
\_ How much do other countries subsidize automobiles?
How much do other countries subsidize other
forms of transit?
Why is it better that long-distance automotive
commuting become "the exclusive privilege of the
wealthy?"
I don't know the answer to the first two
relative to the US and I view the third as a question
of liberty and equality. I also think that it has
less to do with subsidies than with personal
preference and the age of the nations involved.
Americans *don't mind* paying higher property tax
if it means they don't have to take a train and
the alternatives don't make sense for the way our
cities evolved. We can tax the hell out of gas
to force everyone to take mass transit, but *WHY*?
\_ Where do you live where people "don't mind"
paying higher property taxes? Here in CA they
passed Prop 13. If we can enourage more people
to take mass transit, we will gain lots of
advantages:
1) Far fewer highway and roadway deaths
2) Cleaner air leading to a healthier
population and fewer deaths due to pollution
3) Healthier and skinnier population due to
more exercise
4) Trade balance would be much better: the only
reason we run a trade deficit today is due
to imported oil, most of which goes to transit.
5) No US money going to oil shieks, most of whom
hate us and finance terrorism
6) No need to fight oil wars in the Middle East,
saving us lots of money and lives
7) Less congestion on the freeways, meaning buses
and trucks will be more efficient
8) Shorter commutes will mean less stress and
quality of life will go up for most people.
9) Less land being used for roadways and parking
should free up more land for housing, making
housing cost less, especially in urban core.
10) Fewer suburban homes mean less money wasted
10) Fewer suburban homes mean less money spent
on running power lines, cable, sewer lines,
etc on spread out homes.
I am sure I am missing a few things here, but that
should be a good start.
\_ The huge fire at the Chevron refinery in
Richmond today can certainly make the list.
More public transit -> less gas consumption ->
fewer oil refineries -> fewer accidents and
less toxic fume.
\_ More productive time spent when on public
transit instead of driving. One can get work
done using laptops, read a novel, or surf the
web and catch up with the latest gossip while
done using a laptop, read a novel, or surf the
web and catch up on the latest gossip while
sitting on public transit instead of
controlling your car and paying attention to
the road. 3G/4G coverage is wide, and there
is free WiFi on Google shuttles (I heard) and
AC-Transit Transbay Buses. BART also provides
WiFi (paid) and 3G even in underground stations
and tunnels.
\_ I think you should not confuse the public
vs. private issue with the gasoline issue.
If cars were powered by a clean, renewable,
cheap resource would that mean you still want
to force people to use public transit?
\_ No one is arguing for force to be used, we
are just sick and tired of having to use
our taxpayer dollars to encourage stupid
behavior. If cars were not polluting, safe,
and did not cause congestion, then they would
be great. Where are those flying nuclear
powered cars we were promised?
\_ Great. I'm convinced. Sign me up. Now where
is the effective mass transit system that I
can use to replace my car? I can get from home
to my office in 28 minutes in my car, but it
would take over an hour and a half by bus
(each direction, so that's a couple of extra
hours I'd be spending in transit every day).
People stick with their cars because the mass
transit options are very limited in their
utility. I *want* to take public transit, but
it just can't get me where I need to go in a
reasonable amount of time. Until it can, I'm
stuck with driving.
\_ Yeah many are stuck with cars. Vote for
politians that will change the status quo.
There are some places in America where
transit works.
\_ Yeah, about three. Let the free market
decide. So far, most would rather get
22 MPG in a Ford F-150 than get on a
bus with a bunch of weirdos for a
commute that is twice as long but
costs just 25% less.
\_ Exactly. Let the *free* market decide.
As the article above pointed out, the
problem now is that the market is
not a free market. So all the
proposals about stopping mandatory tax
from subsidizing gasoline and roads is
to, in other words, make the market a
free market again.
\_ As long as we stop subsidizing
rail and other public transit,
sure. |
| 5/23 |
|
| tinyurl.com/cars-suck-ass -> www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20The%20Automobile%20Subsidy.php Recently the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) released its draft Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed I-69 Interstate highway through southwestern Indiana. That statement identified the I70/US41 route as the route that would result in the least amount of environmental damage as well as the route that would be cheapest to build. Nonetheless, INDOT rejected that route because it didn't meet its criteria. What is that criteria, then, if not to deliver transportation at the lowest cost to society? Perhaps, as the article below suggests, transportation building has become an end in itself and the higher the cost, the better. Transportation building has become as American as centralized bureaucracies, five-year plans, and state-controlled industry. SUBURBAN NATION: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000) THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY To what extent is automobile use a "free" good? The cost of these subsidies-approximately $5,000 per car per year-is passed directly on to the American citizen in the form of increased prices for products or, more often, as income, property, and sales taxes. This means that the hidden costs of driving are paid by everyone: not just drivers, but also those too old or too poor to drive a car. And these people suffer doubly, as the very transit systems they count on for mobility have gone out of business, unable to compete with the heavily subsidized highways. Because they do not pay the full price of driving, most car owners choose to drive as much as possible. They are making the correct economic decision, but not in a free-market economy. As Hart and Spivak note, an appropriate analogy is Stalin's Gosplan, a Soviet agency that set arbitrary "correct" prices for many consumer goods, irrespective of their cost of production, with unsurprising results. In the American version of Gosplan, gasoline costs one quarter of what it did in 1929 (in real dollars). In Europe, where gasoline costs about four times the American price, long-distance automotive commuting is the exclusive privilege of the wealthy, and there is relatively little suburban sprawl. In the current structure of subsidization, trucking is heavily favored over rail transport, even though trucks consume fifteen times the fuel for the equivalent job. The government pays a $300 billion subsidy to truckers unthinkingly, while carefully scrutinizing every dollar allocated to transit. Similarly, we try to solve our commuter traffic problems by building highways instead of railways, even though it takes fifteen lanes of highway to move as many people as one lane of track. The American Gosplan is not a conspiracy so much as a culture-albeit one strongly supported by pervasive advertising-and it is probably unrealistic to hope that legislators will soon take steps, such as enacting a substantial gasoline tax, to allocate fairly the costs of driving. Pressured by generous automobile industry contributions on the one hand and a car-dependent public on the other, politicians have lately been using gas-tax elimination as an election strategy, with some success. But there is encouraging information suggesting that a gas tax may not be the political suicide that most politicians suspect. According to a recent Pew Foundation poll, 60 percent of those asked favored a twenty-five-cent-per-gallon gas tax to slow global warming. Although suburban sprawl is the concern in this book, it is not the only sad result of this fundamental error. The problems of automobile subsidization have been well documented; And yet it is news which few people seem to understand, and which has barely begun to influence government policy in any significant way. So, to all the concerned activists nationwide who are banging their heads against the wall on this issue, we do not have very much to say except "May we join you at the wall?" Fortunately, the automobile subsidy is only one of many forces contributing to sprawl, and there are other avenues along which anti-sprawl efforts are likely to achieve meaningful results. FOOTNOTES ^1Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak, The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial. Perhaps the most serious soft cost of driving is pollution. Already, cars and other vehicles are seen as the worst polluters of urban air and the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, the chief suspect in global warming (The Economist, "Living with the Car,"). About half of US air pollution emissions come from motor vehicles (MacKenzie, Dower, and Chen). Conclusion: the people are way out in front of the politicians again" (Nyhan, "For the Planet's Sake, Hike the Gas Tax"). |
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