4 ms·

If you stop subsidising driving then the amount of driving decreases naturally.

• Spivak 10y ago
  Which is almost vacuously true -- the question is whether people will be better off overall and whether the value the subsidy is worth more than the cost. Surely someone must have thought so at some point since it currently exists.
  • wtallis 10y ago
    It seems extremely plausible that American society fell in love with the automobile and went on a nation-wide car-friendly infrastructure building binge after WW2 before many of the downsides were well understood. Were the people selling suburban homes to people with G.I. Bill loans doing environmental impact assessments, calculating emergency services response times, and giving their customers projections for what the commute times would be in 10 years after all the houses were built and occupied? We didn't even know the right questions to be asking back then, let alone have quality data to answer them.
• mason240 10y ago
  Great, but then we are going to stop subsidizing cities as well. No more state or federal aid dollars. No more Federal Highway Trust Fund dollars for mass transit projects in cities.
  • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    It's generally the suburbs and rural areas that get subsidized, not the cities. Cities get more spending but they have so much more economic activity that they end up paying even more in taxes.