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No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).
by twoodfin 11y ago
No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).
You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive (as you admit in your other comment they do in Europe at much higher rates). Very few public transportation systems would.
If your definition for "subsidized" is "receives some amount of funding from general revenue, or forbearance for hard-to-capture externality", then just about every commercial aspect of our lives is "subsidized" in one way or another and the term fails to have much meaning.
- TulliusCicero 11y ago> You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive That's very intellectually disingenuous. Whether one form of transport could survive sans subsidy is orthogonal to whether they're receiving large public subsidies right now. You said > public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not. which is flat out wrong. Yes, roads probably do not have to be subsidized, and they'd still be around at least for freight transport and the affluent, but right now, they are still heavily subsidized.