26 ms·

Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it

• jtokoph 10y ago
  In the current world of automated tolling with FastTrak, IPASS and EZ Pass I feel like we should have already put tolls up all over the place.
  • lend000 10y ago
    FastTrak is a nightmare. The answer is gasoline/carbon taxes, since you are "consuming against the environment" on a per gallon basis, not a per mile/per toll road basis.
    • Clubber 10y ago
      It could be argued that the government should tax bikes and pedestrians instead, since they aren't paying their fair share of gasoline taxes that pay for infrastructure upkeep. I think the best idea is for people who want to ride bikes to ride bikes and enjoy their contribution to the environment without trying to impose taxes on people other than themselves.
      • emiliobumachar 10y ago
        Keep in mind that when bikers, pedestrians and public transportation riders are inconvenienced enough, they don't stay home. They get in cars, and get their cars in front of us, all while we have places to go. Incentivising alternatives to driving reduces traffic, and is in the drivers' best interests. Ideally, you and I would be the only ones left on the roads :)
        • Clubber 10y ago
          The suggestion from the OP, as I understand it wasn't incentivizing alternatives to driving but rather punishing car driving with extra taxation. I'm ok with the carrot, but not with the stick. The problem with taxation on things such as that is it's typically regressive, which is rarely good tax policy. Not only are you regressively taxing, you are regressively taxing people trying their best to keep their heads above water. If we really want to make a difference, electric cars should be heavily subsidized in the ballpark of 30-50%. Also have the government build out a charging infrastructure as part of the highway system. That would be a lot more bang for the buck against climate change than taxing waiters, clerks or everyday people trying to earn a living. I have a great idea, we should mandate 100% remote work whenever possible, and the savings companies get from paying less rents should go directly to the employees (minus a 20% management fee of course) who are now supplying their own work environment. If only ..
      • gpawl 10y ago
        The infrastructure upkeep of bike paths and side walks is less than the cost of trying to count it. When is the last time you had to repave the walk in front of your home? Meanwhile, your car is spewing toxic fumes into the faces of those bike riders.
        • Clubber 10y ago
          Oh god, is that the next thing? Self righteous bicyclists? Give me a break.
          • CalRobert 10y ago
            It's self righteous to want clean air?
          • hnal943 10y ago
            Have you ever met a bicyclist? Self-righteousness is as essential to that lifestyle as spandex pants.
      • Clubber 10y ago
        I'm going to stop contributing the political threads. Emotional people keep down voting me because they disagree with my argument. Same thing happens on the conservative threads where everyone is yelling at each other. I guess we can't break out of our political bubbles. Argue for the idea, not the party.
    • reeddavid 10y ago
      The environmental costs are one thing, and those could be served by carbon taxes. But that doesn't address the congestion costs or the infrastructure costs. Ideally we'd separately tax each thing appropriately: Tax carbon to account for emissions, tax road use (per mile in accordance with vehicle weight) to account for road wear, and tax congestion (by time-based demand for commuter corridors, bridges/tunnels, or central business zones) to account for the congestion cost of adding another car to the road.
      • lend000 10y ago
        I love the idea of pure consumption based taxes, but I think it's definitely possible to get carried away (and end up wasting more in tracking minuscule tax amounts owed for various things than its worth). This is especially so when you consider complications such as the indirect benefits of an interstate highway system to someone who never drives on highways (economic benefits). It makes sense to have a 'pool' of taxes, like an income tax, for general societal maintenance instead of having an individual tax for every one of the thousands of functions of government, especially those that are either insignificant or impractical to track, such as individual wear and tear on every road, benefits from having a military/police force, etc.
        • wtallis 10y ago
          I agree that it's possible to get carried away and that some consumption taxes would simply have too much overhead. However, for roads, I think it is mostly practical, if you're using the right methods. Don't try to tax cars by the mile for road maintenance purposes (but do tax the commercial trucks that are heavy enough to meaningfully contribute wear and tear). Tax real estate based on how many miles of road and pipe and cable it requires the government to maintain, so that a sprawling low-density neighborhood has to bear most of the cost of repairing the potholes and leaks that develop in their own maze of twisty little cul-de-sacs. The owner of an apartment building in town with a business or two at street level should probably pay less per acre toward road and utility maintenance than the owner of a mansion on the same size lot 10+ miles from downtown and far off any thoroughfare. (The apartment building will still be paying far more overall for the variable costs of water and electricity.)
  • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    No, screw that. Toll roads everywhere just creates another revenue stream that can never be gotten rid of. Automating it makes price hiking easy and silent. By putting tolls everywhere You've succeeded in raising costs and increasing congestion everywhere tolls aren't
    • gpawl 10y ago
      > putting tolls everywhere > everywhere tolls aren't see the flaw?
    • dingaling 10y ago
      > Toll roads everywhere just creates another revenue stream that can never be gotten rid of. Well it can be 'gotten rid of' once car usage is 'gotten rid of'. In fact, it would eliminate itself with no intervention. Without tolling there is no line-item cost for people who choose to live in car-only suburbs and developments; the costs of fuel and insurance and car maintenance are all just aggregated into 'cost of owning a car'. Adding a per-usage cost, for example each time they exited from their suburb, would provide an evident cost that couldn't be ignored. And would also level the playing field for public transport, which generally has a per-usage cost too.
    • bryanlarsen 10y ago
      Just building a road creates a massive obligation on future taxpayers to pay for maintenance for that road. It's even harder to get rid of a road than it is to get rid of a toll.
• JohanGB 10y ago
  What viable alternatives are there to cars in large countries like the United States, where it is not feasible to create the infrastructure for public transportation?
  • nsxwolf 10y ago
    I'm sure the answer is to dismantle the suburbs and force everyone into hirise apartments in cities, that we also will refuse to build.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • wtallis 10y ago
    What does size have to do with anything? This is a discussion of density. It's a foregone conclusion in discussions like this that the proposed changes probably won't apply to places like Wyoming, but that's not the kind of environment that most Americans live in.
    • JohanGB 10y ago
      I understand that this is mainly a discussion about density, but the US is super diverse in its population densities. I was just curious because I happen to live in a very rural area, but if you travel 30 minutes you would be in the most densely populated area of my state. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of these increased fees would be implemented at the state level and could seriously impact those that live close to dense population centers, but have no available transportation other than cars.
      • wtallis 10y ago
        If you live close to the population center but not actually in it, then you're probably highly reliant on its services. How far do you drive to buy groceries? Aren't you contributing to the congestion and pollution of the city every time you make the trip into town? Why shouldn't you have to bear some of their infrastructure costs, instead of just leeching off the city's tax base? Where I live (East coast) the counties are too small to cover the whole region of people who make daily use of the city. We don't really have an appropriately sized regional government to fully address the matter with any methods other than toll roads.
• gydfi 10y ago
  No actual numbers. After registration fees, fuel taxes, et cetera, to what extent are drivers actually being subsidised? Let us assume that roads need to exist anyway.
  • apsec112 10y ago
    False equivalence fallacy. Every country has roads, but Tokyo-style roads are a hell of a lot cheaper to build and maintain than American roads, where every city is a maze of six-lane highways intersecting ten-lane highways.
• panic 10y ago
  We learned that higher gas prices, for example, had a large and sustained impact on driving behavior. After growing steadily for decades, vehicle miles traveled per person peaked and declined after 2005 (as gas prices shot up). This produced knock-on changes in housing markets, and helped accelerate the move back to cities. It's too bad raising these prices intentionally using taxes is so difficult!
• frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  As much as the idea is nice I think it's just a political non-starter. Making this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. This is a stick and a stick wielded by "liberal elites who live in cities" against rural drivers and mega-commuters won't work in this environment. People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    well, implementation details matter. the premise of the article is to remove the "subsidies" (there language, I would have called them externalities that car owners benefit from) and move towards true-cost pricing for things related to automobiles. ok, that's a workable premise to start from. the true costs imposed by driving in urban environments are almost certainly much much much higher than those in rural environments. urban areas is where issues like air pollution, traffic congestion, bottlenecks on bridges and tunnels, scarcity of parking, and the need to share limited road space with pedestrians and cyclists are really big issues. in rural areas these are just not really major causes of concern. so my reading on it is that true-cost pricing of cars ought to make urban car use much more expensive, but only make rural car use a little more expensive. I think that's highly desirable, actually.
    • Cerium 10y ago
      One way I've seen the infrastructure problem handled is to have all city residents who own cars to be required to purchase unlimited use pass for all city bridges and tunnels.
      • metaphorm 10y ago
        I would add to that all of the following: * annual fee for road maintenance * annual fee for traffic enforcement * no free parking anywhere except your own driveway. every street parking spot should be metered. * excise taxes on gasoline to control air pollution and C02 emissions
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• impala454 10y ago
  As someone who lives in a giant spread out city (Houston) I have attempted to bus in from the suburbs on occasion and it was fun, but hardly a reasonable everyday occurrence. Our city is just too spread out. I've visited NYC and it's large as well but everything is so compacted together you don't have to go far from a train station to get where you want to go.
  • Consultant32452 10y ago
    I feel like this is a chicken and egg problem. Without the transportation infrastructure you can't get the population/business density, but without the population density you can't justify the infrastructure. Houston could probably build decent rail transportation to get you where you needed to go, but it won't happen. I live in a city like yours, our public transportation is atrocious. It takes at least an hour to get anywhere.
  • zaque1213 10y ago
    Hey another Houstonian! My thoughts exactly.
  • ButMyFavThing 10y ago
    You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSRPMFDTSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSRPMFDTSs
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    This is precisely because of the car-oriented policies. "We built this city for driving, and now you have no choice but to drive!" Well, duh. Now you can double down on that, I guess, but cars scale rather poorly, and they're probably part of why Americans are so fat.
• zaque1213 10y ago
  > Driving is a choice, and provided that drivers pay all the costs associated with making that choice, there’s little reason to object to that. I mean, kind of. I'm not sure where the author lives, but in Houston, I don't have much of a choice. I already pay tolls and taxes, gas prices and my car note. I live as close to work as is affordable, and still have to drive. There's no bus route from my apartment and I'm not about to ride my bike on I-10. I ask this next question in seriousness, because I'd love to change my habits without moving to a more expensive city with good public transportation: what are my options here? I'd rather not be "disinsentivized" from doing something I have no choice but to do.
  • apsec112 10y ago
    A good question, but in other situations, we don't object to middle-class people being required to pay the full cost of things they pretty much must buy. Food and water are mandatory to live, and in the 21st century US, electricity, phone, and Internet are all but mandatory to live a normal life. Yet nobody objects to ordinary citizens having to pay water or power or phone bills, rather than the bulk of the cost being subsidized from tax revenues.
    • flukus 10y ago
      We do subsidize those things to an extent though. Farmers get a lot of subsidies and the infrastructure (roads, rail) to deliver the food is part subsidized. Water, electricy and internet infrastructure are often built by government or with government funds (and that's not a bad thing). Are there any private dams?
    • mathgeek 10y ago
      > Yet nobody objects to ordinary citizens having to pay water or power or phone bills, rather than the bulk of the cost being subsidized from tax revenues. All of those things are also subsidized, to some extent. Water is the classic example, but the government subsidizes both fossil-fuel and clean energy, as well as the companies proving phone/cable/internet. The difference here is that you're paying your taxes on your vehicle and the gas, the latter of which is essentially a use tax on driving.
• megablast 10y ago
  Why? It is not just about the cost. It is about over a million people dying every year. It is about pollution. It is about noise. It is about ugly roads taking up huge amounts of space. It is about entire cities messed up because of urban sprawl.
  • closeparen 10y ago
    It's about people getting to work in a reasonable amount of time and comfort from housing they can afford. Rich urbanites having ugly roads in their field of vision is not remotely comparable to middle and working class people having to move in with roommates or triple their commute times.
    • SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      How does supporting driving by subsidizing it help those people over spending the funds on, eg, public transit or denser housing in urban cores? It sounds like it just increases their health risks and lowers the quality of their landscapes over those other options.
      • closeparen 10y ago
        In principle, if you can make a 1:1 atomic swap between driving subsidies and a Manhattan-level subway system, you should do it. In practice, I think you're likely to eliminate people's current perfectly good option just to lift public transit from abysmal to mediocre. It would depend on the proposal.
        • gpawl 10y ago
          No one has a perfectly good option today. They have a pollution-choked, collision-prone, 20%-workday-wasting commute.
          • robertlagrant 10y ago
            This is exactly it - people are so used to thousands of road deaths a year, funding unpleasant oil-supplying regimes, polluting their neighbourhoods and traffic that they don't realise they are avoidable. As mentioned before, it's a lack of imagination.
• nether 10y ago
  Would this disproportionately hurt lower income earners who live in the cheaper suburbs and have longer commutes? Easy to ask for that pigovian tax when you've got that sweet downtown loft.
  • lmm 10y ago
    The other stereotype is that the poorest people are crammed into high-crime downtown areas while the middle class live out in the suburbs. I don't know which way the statistics line up.
    • nether 10y ago
      A gas tax is basically regressive according to this paper (pdf page 9): > The gasoline tax’s tendency to place a greater burden on low-income households is often stated as one of the strongest arguments against the tax [West, 2004a, 755]. Taxes on gasoline have been shown to be regressive in numerous economic studies. A 1989 study by Poterba concluded that gasoline taxes were about 15 percent of pre-tax income for the lowest income groups in the U.S., compared to 2.8 percent for the highest income groups [Poterba, 1989, 325]. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.554.7122&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.554...
      • lmm 10y ago
        Those stats could be true even if lower-income people drove a lot less than wealthy people - it's talking about what proportion of income they spend on gas on average.
• prklmn 10y ago
  Simply put - people like living in houses and having a yard. Until this changes, much of the public will continue to drive.
  • uiri 10y ago
    There are plenty of neighborhoods in San Francisco where one can get a house with a yard; take, for instance, Noe Valley. It is San Francisco so housing prices are expensive but I am inclined to believe that it is cheaper to live without a car in San Francisco than with a car in the suburban Bay Area. The difference, of course, is in the square footage of your living space. This isn't a phenomenon that is unique to SF either.
    • santaclaus 10y ago
      > it is cheaper to live without a car in San Francisco than with a car in the suburban Bay Area East Oakland is pretty cheap!
• Zomad 10y ago
  Wouldn't there also be an associated rise to the cost of living? As the cost of transport rises, food produce etc. will all become more expensive as a result? These costs typically impact the lower-income population more quickly and heavily than the middle and upper income earners.
  • wtallis 10y ago
    If food needs to be more subsidized, then it should be subsidized more directly, rather than with broad transportation subsidies that create perverse incentives for unrelated activities.
  • osdiab 10y ago
    Just because you prioritize transit in cities, doesn't mean that transport costs in general rise. Transportation between cities can remain car driven as those are inherently sparse areas anyway; you don't need to reduce use of all types of cars in cities, industrial use / deliveries can still exist in those systems anyway; and as a long term idea, self driving deliveries may also drive some of these costs later on. Additionally, while cost of transport rises for car commuters, it very well may fall for transit ones and especially for those car commuters who switch to transit. So it's not a given that prices would uniformly rise.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    The cost of driving would rise, but the viability of other modes would also increase, and those other modes are generally much cheaper than driving. Note how Americans spend close to double the share of their income on transportation as the Japanese do: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/archive/how-do-us-expenditures-compare-with-those-of-other-countries.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/archive/how-do-us-expenditures-...
• george_ciobanu 10y ago
  Interstate roads and highways are also critical elements of national security - they act as the internet for transportation (by providing multiple redundant routes that can be easily patched, unlike railways)
• andy-x 10y ago
  Good roads are incentive to drive, let's destroy all roads then.
• neumann 10y ago
  I can see where the argument is going, but it is too simplistic and so ignores the plethora of reasons we have developed to use cars after this many decades of IC. The problem is with public transport, and urban traffic, not cars. The problem is with poor rail infrastructure and cheap fuel that has allowed a nationwide and global distribution infrastructure that relies on trucks. Also: https://youtu.be/zcAqR-Hs9II https://youtu.be/zcAqR-Hs9II
  • osdiab 10y ago
    We get poor public transit in part because we disproportionately fund car infrastructure, and car infrastructure often makes neighborhoods less walkable in the first place. A sprawled out city means that you need a much more extensive rail network than a dense one; massive roads make actions as simple as crossing the street take a long time, intimidating, and dangerous; big parking lots offer nothing for pedestrians who walk buy to do, and need to be in the very places that people want to go in order to be useful. This is a chicken and egg problem, where investing in cars harms ease of transit, but reallocating investments into transit harms those car users. So we as a society have to make choices about what we deem to be more important, or be prepared to spend significantly more capital to make the two coexist (by tunnels and subterranean parking structures, densification of cities, major transit investment and what have you).
• jasonmp85 10y ago
  <zoidberg>Why not both?</zoidberg>
  • wtallis 10y ago
    People who feel like they're being attacked won't listen to reasonable arguments and explanations.
• _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Eye opener to me "The High Cost of Free Parking", Donald Shoup (book not the paper)
  • nwah1 10y ago
    I second this recommendation. Car culture is hugely subsidized. It is arguably the largest social engineering project in world history, buttressed by endless amounts of regulation, zoning, and huge expenditure paid for by everyone, including non-drivers. It is certainly not a spontaneous outgrowth of the free market. We waste enormous amounts of prime land on trivial things, such as curbside parking. Mandatory minimum parking requirements impede new construction, and are a hidden subsidy to car culture. And simple concepts to improve efficiency and fairness, like smart parking meters and congestion pricing, are ignored. People hate the concept of paying so much, even though they will ultimately end up paying for it via queuing (congestion). It is interesting that much of what people actually hate about our economic system boils down to aspects of car culture. Atomization, sprawl, etc have many causes, but certainly car culture is one of them.
• didibus 10y ago
  One size does not fit all. Each state, city, town should adopt local policies that make sense. I think that was missed in the article, since the "city" they talk about in question seems to be an abstract generalization.
  • osdiab 10y ago
    I think this stuff makes sense for somewhat dense and populous cities; that said, I do think that the fragmentation of cities in places like the Bay Area could use some generalization (way too many independent, disagreeing suburbs that prevent rational coordinated action. Ridiculous numbers of transit authorities and inconsistent coverage with existing rail make the experience terrible).
• renlo 10y ago
  This is going to make peoples lives worse. People who still need to drive are going to drive, but will instead end up paying more. > That’s because most people, correctly, can’t imagine any time soon when they won’t need to use a car for most—even all—of their daily trips. As a practical matter, the fact that for seven or eight decades the entire built environment and most transportation investments have been predicated on car travel means that we can’t quickly move away from auto dependence. So, let's build better public transportation (light rail, subways, buses / self-driving buses) or other solutions (bike lanes / roads, affordable housing near commerce) before we start making life harder for people. Once we've reached a state where there are convenient options then we should enact such taxes and fees, not before.
  • hvidgaard 10y ago
    That sounds nice, but you will not get that movement going unless there is a reason for people to give up their car. The obvious suggestion would be to gradually make it more expensive to drive, and then gradually improve transportation and housing to deal with less cars pr household. /Edit: I meant to say you do both simultaneously. LEaving the original text up because the replies were made in that context.
    • ehnto 10y ago
      Our city made it more expensive to park in the city through taxation. The result was people pay more for parking. Cars and buses are just as backed up, and there are no new rail services. The public transit system was already failing to deliver it's existing customers. Infrastructure must come before taxation as a way to motivate people. It just doesn't make sense to make people pay for a failing of public infrastructure as a way of encouraging them to use said failing infrastructure.
      • hvidgaard 10y ago
        I meant to say, do both simultaneously.
        • 10y ago
• niftich 10y ago
  As others have said, driving really isn't a choice in much of the US, but rather an artifact of finding a residence with desirable attributes (price, size, form-factor, noise level, green space, school zone) in the same metro as one's workplace. Just as the article notes that framing driving with moralistic terms is a recipe for ruin, so is framing it as a conscious choice on parts of perfectly average people who "decide" to drive to work that day. So quit focusing on driving -- driving isn't the problem, despite the pollution deaths, despite car crashes, despite whatever evil cars and trucks bring upon the world -- they're tools, like just like fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries and other terribly unpleasant things that enable a modern, globalized, distributed, and hyper-specialized society. As this and other articles find, driving is a symptom of land use, but car-centric suburbia was not build because of cars, but merely enabled by them. Greenfield land has many perks, not the least the lack of pre-existing baggage like badly configured buildings, under-sized streets, and aging underground infrastructure. In the US, this wave was helped by white flight and the increased demand after WWII, but demographically homogeneous countries in Central and Eastern Europe are going through a wave of suburbanization right now, driven solely by income inequality. I've said it before [1], as car suburbs are aging themselves, they're becoming worse places to live, which makes it harder to pay for their upkeep, and those who can afford to move move either further out to brand new exurbs that have a better balance of commercial vs. residential, or back to revitalizing urban cores, leaving only those who can't afford to leave. Capitalism works within the same metro too; local governments compete against each other for businesses and residents. The low-populated outskirts are often at risk for annexation by a nearby town, so they can instead incorporate themselves to capture local tax base and keep it from paying for "somebody else". There is no free lunch and income is redistributed either way: either the city annexes a far-flung reach of greenfield land to build some high-profit industrial park to help pay for the city's aging infrastructure or its attempts to gentrify, or the local residents organize into smaller and smaller independent municipalities that focus on fostering the character of the particular neighborhood while keeping the tax income closer to the site, but fragmenting the metro into entities that compete for the same dollars. This is fundamentally an economic problem, one that's not driven by regulation and NIMBY, but mostly by average people looking to maximize their self-interest for 5-to-15-years at a time, but much longer if they're unlucky. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937
• marcrosoft 10y ago
  Let's remove ourself from government dependence first please.
• Hermel 10y ago
  > Travel monitoring firm Inrix reported that in 2008, the 3 percent decline in vehicle miles traveled led to a 30 percent decline in traffic congestion. Does that also mean that increasing street capacity by 3% would lead to a 30% reduction in congestion? That would sound like a worthwhile investment to me.
  • overlordalex 10y ago
    Interestingly the opposite occurs: increasing street capacity tends to lead to more congestion. Here is a Wired article that explains the problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
• gcatalfamo 10y ago
  You guys may all be right, but what if actually LIKE driving, and therefore cherish finding moments to drive for pleasure and not just for the daily commute?. Does this make me a dinosaur in the age of self-driving Teslas?
  • VladimirGolovin 10y ago
    It's perfectly fine to like driving. However, any manual driving, and yours too, increases the chances of injury / death for other people. So, basically, pleasure drivers get their pleasure at the expense of other people's safety. My solution would be to somehow segregate pleasure driving in such a way that people living their normal everyday life are not affected by it -- the same way pleasure shooting / fighting is segregated away from streets, restaurants and cafes to shooting ranges / fight clubs.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    There's nothing wrong with driving, but since it takes up a ton of space, there's no reason for it to be subsidized in urban areas; quite the opposite, in fact.
    • exprA 10y ago
      Speaking as an European, can you really call driving subsidized (if it is in one single area, such as building code) when much more cash is spent in social services paid by fuel taxes?
      • lmm 10y ago
        Compare the all-in cost spent supporting drivers (including e.g. the value of public land that's used for roads) with the total revenue received from them.
      • TulliusCicero 10y ago
        I'm less familiar with the economics of it in Europe, where gas taxes are much, much higher than in the US, and there's not nearly as much road and highway sprawl.
• cletus 10y ago
  Why not demonize driving? Roughly 1.3 _million_ people die in or from cars every year worldwide [1]. In the US that's 37000 per year, roughly equivalent to 10 9/11s. Yet we not only subsidize car ownership (roads, parking, etc) and seem blasé to this carnage, we defend this practice as some kind of freedom. It's utterly insane. Self-driving cars will imho be utterly transformative to society that one day we will look back on this century of driving vehicle ourselves as the barbaric hocum that it is. [1] http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...
  • SFJulie 10y ago
    What is insane is calling a death/injuries made by car an accident. An accident is utterly unavoidable. And cars are a deterministic cause of death. Cars are basically having way more kinetic energy than a bullet. Guns are free to have in USA, but are people free to shoot RPG, ak47, M60 in the street 3 feet away from kids without indignations or a cop intervening? The Jay walking is shifting the blame on the pedestrians. Injuries/deaths caused by cars should be considered like homicides or attempt of homicides. It is not a demonization in this case, it is a fair claim of responsibility since there is a causal link between driving a car with high kinetic energy and potential resulting death. I am not even talking of pollution and chronic diseases like asthma.
  • xtreme 10y ago
    It's a rather recent phenomenon that we have enough computing power to make self-driving cars a viable reality and not just science fiction.
• Shivetya 10y ago
  Self driving cars and EVs will just give people more freedom to live where they want and the mobility they desire. So much of his belly aching is already on the way out. People won't give up driving and living where they want but they will change to the EV/FC side provided it doesn't curtail either of those and in the next dozen years or so that move will be well underway. The one truth always ignored is that many cannot live where they want too. Jobs change and married couples have the double limitation that one may end up with a job further away than is desirable. they just cannot get up and move when work is ten to twenty miles further out and some won't burden their children with new schools and having to find new friends. on a per mile case we spend more to subsidize mass transit than other forms of people movement and sadly we aren't even paying the upkeep on what we already have. you think the roads and such need work, just wait till the bills come due to mass transit maintenance being skipped because of over priced extensions and such.
• gaius 10y ago
  In the UK taxes paid by drivers (e.g. on fuel) raise £50Bn/year and transport spending in total is £25Bn. The idea that drivers are "subsidised" is ludicrous.
  • lmm 10y ago
    What would be the annual rent on the public land that's currently dedicated to roads?
    • gaius 10y ago
      Paid by whom to whom? Or aren't drivers "the public" in your worldview?
      • lmm 10y ago
        Drivers are a subset of the public; giving them almost-exclusive use of valuable public land for free is a subsidy to them in the same way that handing them them tax money would be. How much value would we get out of the land that's currently used for roads if we used for other public purposes (social housing, mass transit, government offices, police stations, parks and museums, or even just renting it out commercially and returning those funds to general taxation)? However much value that is, that's how much we're subsidising drivers by by giving them free use of the road network.
        • gaius 10y ago
          How much value would any of those things be without access to them? Even if you don't sit behind a wheel yourself, if you use shops, the post office, or anything that involves goods being moved from A to B then you benefit from the existence of the road network. By all means build your "social housing" in long thin strips in the middle of nowhere, if you think that will help or thats what anyone wants. But it isn't.
          • lmm 10y ago
            > Even if you don't sit behind a wheel yourself, if you use shops, the post office, or anything that involves goods being moved from A to B then you benefit from the existence of the road network. Sure, and I can and should pay market rate for that. Yes a subsidy to drivers is indirectly a subsidy to shops and post offices, and even more indirectly a subsidy to parts of the wider population. So? It's certainly not an equal subsidy to everyone. > By all means build your "social housing" in long thin strips in the middle of nowhere, if you think that will help or thats what anyone wants. But it isn't. Out in the middle of nowhere there probably isn't a better use for that land (reflected in the fact that rent for it would be pretty cheap). In the city centres is where the land is valuable, and that's where I'd look to reclaim road space for more valuable uses (and perhaps introduce things like the congestion charge if some road access is absolutely necessary, so that the costs drivers pay reflect the land they're using up).
• SFJulie 10y ago
  American drivers used to be demonized for 3 years, and it gave outstanding results: it seems that without moral incentive and ethic considerations the driving problem does not find a solution magically without frictions. PS most efficient ways of using cars that "worked" in USA (WWII) were about demonizing the privatization of cars and make it a common. When you ride alone you ride with Hitler: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/13293 http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/13293 Patriotic "saving gas" poster http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-14.jpg http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride... Help with the war squeeze one more http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-15.jpg http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride... Another propaganda poster on cars http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-11.jpg http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride... Save the food http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-20.jpg http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride... List of WWII USA poster for conservation http://gonzalocamacho.com/2015/09/ http://gonzalocamacho.com/2015/09/ WWII was won partly due to the USA production effort and notably thanks to the change of behaviour of citizens accepting to (temporally) adopt a more conservating and frugal way of life. So, the point is: american citizens can do it, because they already did it. What is lacking is for them to reproduce this is their own government to literally shame them into correct behaviours like kids. Which is depressing. Is a new war required for USA to stop being the biggest contributor per capita to the global warming effect? http://www.english-online.at/environment/copenhagen-climate-summit/co2%20emissions%20per%20country.gif http://www.english-online.at/environment/copenhagen-climate-...
• MrsPeaches 10y ago
  Slightly off topic but I've seen it repeated a few times that it is illegal to build shops near houses in parts of the US. To me this seems kinda crazy. What is the justification?
  • dec0dedab0de 10y ago
    To keep the neighborhood quiet.
    • AstralStorm 10y ago
      And a boring wasteland? It is not shops that generate the most noise.
      • CalRobert 10y ago
        There are people who agree with you in the US, but far too few of them are on planning councils.
• kasey_junk 10y ago
  I worry that we are fighting the last war instead of the next one when we talk about using cars less. The business models that led to centralized white collar work forces in city cores are going away. Automation means those work forces are smaller. More decentralized companies and work from home means that there is less reason to have them all in one place and its usually easier to provide modern utilities cheaper and easier outside of the context skyscrapers and dense city centers. As that happens, places that do have public transit infrastructure, largely built on the commuter model, will find it ever less efficient as you aren't shuttling people to the same places or in the same patterns. And places that don't have existing transit will have to experiment with untried models in a context where experimentation is very expensive.
• 6d6b73 10y ago
  Why can't we have small cities where in the center we have libraries, medical facilities and schools. Next let's build parks and recreational areas. Around that we should have residential area. Next zone retail, and another one industrial . This, or a similar setup would change how cities work. Kids could walk to school, libraries and parks. Adults could walk/bike to stores and to work. Medical facilities would be close to most of the population. The whole area from retail to the center of the town could be car free, with just few areas for transportation, but even that could be moved underground.
  • msimpson 10y ago
    You just described London.
    • 6d6b73 10y ago
      But I don't think huge metropolis are the way to go. It would be better to have many smaller cities.
      • msimpson 10y ago
        To create and maintain smaller cities you would need to enforce controls on population growth and distribution. Controls which are abhorred by the civilized world.
        • 6d6b73 10y ago
          There are thousands of small cities all over the world and nobody has to enforce population growth.
          • msimpson 10y ago
            > There are thousands of small cities all over the world and nobody has to enforce population growth. Yet, there are many instances where population growth or decline has become an issue due to economic drivers, alone. Over the last 23 years Detroit has lost 34% of its population while Austin has gained 44%. You can't just assume people will distribute evenly into nice small groupings when they are granted freedom of movement and the right to pursue happiness. Like everything else, you build for scalability and do your best to maintain.
• bogomipz 10y ago
  I am interested in this idea posited in the post: "We shouldn’t require third parties such as homebuilders or renters or local businesses to subsidize car travel and parking. This isn’t about creating a “disincentive for car use,” but, as a matter of fairness and practicality, dropping what have essentially been subsidies for financially and socially expensive and dangerous behavior." They don't mention how how third parties are subsidizing car travel and parking but I am assuming they are talking about taxes no? I agree with this, if I live where I don't need to own a car then I understand not wanting to pay the same taxes towards roads as someone who uses a car every day. However part of my tax dollar that subsidizes those roads also goes to commercial traffic that brings my food and essentials into the city where I might live and shop. How do you implement this without increasing the costs of goods even further in our cities? The delivery costs of goods into cities already makes those same good more expensive in a city with the current pricing scheme.
  • CalRobert 10y ago
    Parking minimums. Forcing people to build off-street parking is a subsidy to everyone else who enjoys their on-street parking welfare. It can add tens of thousands to the cost of a unit. This illustrates the problem well: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062 Consider - how many times have people complained about a lack of parking, but really mean a lack of FREE parking? I mean, how ludicrous is that??? I don't complain about a lack of free hotel rooms! We've decided the government (aka taxpayers, including those who don't own a car) should pay for places for cars to sleep, while making it challenging to even _build_ places - when there's a market demand!- for humans to sleep. "The delivery costs of goods into cities already makes those same good more expensive in a city with the current pricing scheme." - do you have a source for this? The expense of land in a city must have a lot to do with it. The expense of providing free parking to customers in a city with expensive land might have even more to do with it. If a shop has free parking, everyone who walks there is paying for the drivers' parking.
    • acdha 10y ago
      I live in DC and this came up on every development discussion because it was so absurdly against good policy. You could be building a neighborhood bar next to a metro station in a place where 80% of the residents walk, bike, or take transit and still be required to pay for bunch of parking spaces. In the neighborhood where I live there's a big development proposal literally on the same property as a metro station. The design and image is squarely aimed at a transit / bike / car-share lifestyle (why pay the premium if that's not what you want?) but even the reduced city requirements are greater than the number of spaces for which the developer anticipates renter demand and there are a few vocal obstructionists demanding more because they still think you need at least one car per resident. That attitude is so deeply entrenched in our culture that they literally make excuses for why the older building a block away has something like a 40% usage rate, because it's just inconceivable that there won't be a big demand spike in the future.
• coding123 10y ago
  With self driving looming, no policy changes should happen until the self driving stuff shakes everything up. Far fewer people will be using their own car when that happens. Also this identical argument can be said about ANYTHING, replace cars and roads with police and protection. This feels like there would be no end to this line of thinking. Just people wanting to be involved in something "drastically different".
  • jkaptur 10y ago
    The fact that changes might be coming is no argument against changing policies in the world that exists today.
• driverdan 10y ago
  In economics these issues are called negative externalities and are well known. If you're not familiar with the term I suggest reading the Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality There's even a page about the externalities of vehicles, although it's fairly sparse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_automobiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_automobiles As a society we're better off by eliminating these externalities. They're a market imbalance that harms people.
  • frogpelt 10y ago
    And I submit to you the Wikipedia article about Unintended consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences We can outlaw cars but what will be the consequences? One reason Americans have a fascination with cars is because Americans have a fascination with freedom. When governments attempt to eliminate imbalances they usually take away liberties. This is not necessarily an improvement.
• intopieces 10y ago
  Surprised this article missed the opportunity to point out that the fuel taxes, both federal and state, have not been sufficiently raised in years to decades in most states. To my mind, that's step 1: raise the fuel tax in each state such that it adequately pays for the construction of roads. As it stands, the fuel tax in most states only services the interest on road projects, with the rest being siphoned from the general budget.
• norea-armozel 10y ago
  If only this desubsidzation was met with an offset on mass transit because sadly many folks either have a home in town and have to commute to the burbs because the company built their campus that way or vice versa. In the Midwest, there's no real push to augment mass transit even with BRT and dedicated lanes for it. All kinds of NIMBY complaints seem to be holding back any kind of progress on such things. So odds are that it'll still be politically easier to subsidize the roads and cars until the cities break apart under the pressure of infrastructure maintenance costs and loss of tax revenues as working populations move or age out.
• strictnein 10y ago
  > "Every car driver ought to pay for their parking space they use—whether it’s in the public or the private realm." I do pay for private parking spaces already. Stores and businesses provide them and they're paid for by the money I pay them.
  • savanaly 10y ago
    There's a lot of parking on public streets, isn't there? That's a big subsidy for car owners that comes at a cost to non-car owners.
    • strictnein 10y ago
      That's true, but has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote.
  • pseudonom- 10y ago
    You pay for private parking spaces, in part (i.e. in combination with other customers). I also pay for parking spaces, in part, by my patronage but never use them. Consequently, your share of the usage is higher than your share of the payment. So again, even private parking of this sort is subsidized.
    • strictnein 10y ago
      The store didn't add parking spots in case you decided to buy a car.
      • pseudonom- 10y ago
        I don't follow. You're saying that the store didn't provide parking to help some future, possible me-with-a-car? How is that relevant?
  • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    Only if there is no minimum parking requirement (which there usually is). Otherwise they provided the parking space because the government compelled them to, which is a subsidy on your parking space.
• bougiefever 10y ago
  I think it's a wrong approach to focus on incentives or disencentives of driving and car ownership. Why do people drive? A lot of it could be eliminated. Shopping is one reason. If it becomes more feasible to order things online and have them brought to us, that would cut down on driving. I know, it would arrive by a vehicle, but it would be one vehicle instead of the many it delivers to. Work - many jobs could easily be done from home. I work remotely, and it cuts down on driving a lot for me. I think the culture needs to catch up on this one. We absolutely need to travel to see our friends and family, Skype notwithstanding, but if public transportation was better, we wouldn't need cars for that either. I live in a rural area, so not having a car for me would not work at all. I carefully plan my trips to the store because it takes so much time to drive there and back. Another thing, why are people saying street parking is free? Have you never received a ticket? That quadruples in the amount you owe if you don't pay it in 5 days?
• LordKano 10y ago
  Cities are growing again, don't kill them. I get the feeling that this was the author's semi-intellectual tantrum because he got cut off by a car when he was in the bike lane. He comes in long on agenda and short on facts. For example, he says that trucks should pay for the damage they do to roads but he is completely ignoring the fact that they do. Diesel fuel is taxed so heavily specifically to compensate for the amount of damage big trucks cause to the roads. It's also why there are spot checks for un-taxed agricultural diesel. I see formerly crime ridden, low income neighborhoods being gentrified and young professionals are moving in. There are parts of the city where one could have bought a house for less than $50,000 ten years ago where the same house is going for over $200,000 today. You will ruin that trend and reverse that growth if you make it too difficult, inconvenient and expensive for people. I have chosen to live my life in such a way that car-free, urban living is just not going to happen. I can easily put my three children into my vehicle and go to the mall just to browse around and spend time together. I'm not loading three children onto a bus. I have a three bedroom house about 14 miles away from the center of the nearest urban area and it sits on 1/6 to 1/8 of an acre of land where I'm free to grow a garden, have a swimming pool and still pay less for my mortgage than I'd pay in rent for a three bedroom apartment in the city. There are a lot of people like me who will never live in the city and if you make it too inconvenient to travel into the city, we'll stop going. You will create more sprawl due to the fact that just because we don't go into the city for goods and services doesn't mean that we won't require them. We'll still need and want these things and someone will service those needs in a way that works for us. Automobiles are not going away. If you stop planning for and accommodating them, you are going to cause many more problems than you resolve.
  • soperj 10y ago
    If you've been anywhere with a half decent bus system, it's really easy to bring three kids on the bus. My kids love the bus, it's an adventure. Also there's no way that this would encourage more sprawl. Places that don't rely on the car are not sprawled, they just have more compact town centers that are close by. Look at Denmark or the Netherlands.
    • LordKano 10y ago
• helthanatos 10y ago
  I don't understand what thought process was used to write this: driving is necessary and will be until we decide to live as we did in the 1800s. Subsidize driving? Gas tax, taxes, etc are not inexpensive by any means. >>"When we experienced the epidemic of drunk driving, we didn’t go back to prohibition. Instead, we raised penalties to make drivers more responsible, set tougher limits on blood alcohol content, and put more money into enforcement. People still drink—but there’s a different level of understanding of responsibility and consequences, and fewer people drive drunk." I have to disagree. The fact they were drunk is just hidden from the public. The penalties for drunk driving are not nearly harsh enough to expect people to not do it. The past 3 accidents involving death I've seen have involved people that were certainly drunk, but the toxicology reports were never released and will never be. The public should know. I drive 25 miles to school each day. Being forced to live on campus because of the dangerous pollution would be insane. There should be no penalty for driving besides the costs of infrastructure, which are, in fact, well covered by taxes or would be if it didn't take 2 years to do something that should take a month, cities didn't randomly decide they need to change intersections or randomly add them. 4 deer ran in front of my car this morning. Nothing would have helped besides insurance if I would have hit them. Driving is dangerous but there is no reason to penalize it or hinder it. Yes, I support walking to work if you live in a city and you're near it, but that is purely logical. The pollution caused by cars is one factor of many in climate change. It will not magically stop or even drastically decrease by penalizing driving. Gas is usually $2.40 - that is expensive enough.
  • soperj 10y ago
    If driving was more expensive there'd be more options than driving 25 miles. You could take a bike to the nearest train station which would arrive fairly frequently and take that to campus.
    • hnal943 10y ago
      That's great unless you are anything but a commuter, carrying little and traveling by yourself.
      • 10y ago
• jackskell 10y ago
  Driving is a choice... Unless you're crippled... Maybe you'd prefer I just vegetate at home (on whose dime?) instead of being employed. Remote work is a reasonable possibility to consider, but having to start a new field, it makes sense to keep an office presence for training, mentoring, and other intangibles that come with human contact. I like drive-thrus at restaurants, too.
  • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    Transportation subsidies for people who are crippled is a conversation worth having (and some public transportation systems actually do this), but subsidies for everyone just to benefit a small number of people who need it is silly.
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    I see wheelchair bound people on buses/trains/etc all the time.
• krisroadruck 10y ago
  How the heck do people shop without a car? Do you hand lug 50+ lbs of groceries several blocks on foot? What if you need to buy something larger than will fit in a backpack? I'm absolutely mystified by people who live sans-vehicular transport.
  • q845712 10y ago
    I've lived without a car for most of my adult life (mid-30s now), and never owned one. In rough order of my own preferences, I've tried all of: 1.) I buy it someplace close and walk. 2.) I have larger-than-usual bags for my bicycle 3.) I order it online 4.) I pay for delivery 5.) I piggy-back with a friend who's driving to the same store and doesn't mind dropping me and my purchase off at my house. 6.) I rent a car 7.) I take it on public transit
  • cbhl 10y ago
    Five factors greatly reduce the amount of food I carry home: - eating out at restaurants - having a case of Soylent at home - eating weekday breakfast and lunch at work - living alone - going to the grocery store more often (sometimes two or three times in a single weekend) so I can carry less home on each trip These things are only feasible because I live alone and I'm in my 20s.
  • cbhl 10y ago
    Growing up, I lived in a family of six in the suburbs, and yes, we did the weekly "buy $200 of groceries in one go" car trip. But it's not always about car vs walking. It helps to just reduce vehicle miles traveled. If you have the option, that might be "drive five minutes to the local independent grocery store twice a month, instead of driving an hour to the Wal-Mart every week".
  • whorleater 10y ago
    > Do you hand lug 50+ lbs of groceries several blocks on foot? I get my groceries multiple times a week. > What if you need to buy something larger than will fit in a backpack? I...don't usually buy anything that I couldn't fit in a backpack? When I buy furniture and other large items there's almost always a delivery service for that.
• dangjc 10y ago
  I did a road trip in New Zealand where petrol is $2 a liter, ie about $8 per gallon. It made us much more conscious about how much we were driving. It's the only place I've seen hitchhiking still socially acceptable and not creepy. A gas tax that size would help pay for roads and encourage gradual densification. Maybe everyone could receive a refundable credit during the first few years of phase in to avoid sticker shock.
• aanm1988 10y ago
  > Many people—transit boosters, cyclists, planners, environmentalists, safety advocates—look at the end result of all this, and understandably reach the conclusion that cars are the enemy. The overriding policy question, then, becomes: “How do we get people out of their cars?” Many people live in their own version of reality. One where no one lives with kids in the suburbs. Where stores just get their products airdropped or something. Where it's not cold and snowing large chunks of the year. I'm all for more walkable/bikeable cities, and public transit is good too. I just feel like so many of these people arguing just live in a totally different world.