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Actually, the poor drive the least. Subsidies on driving disproportionately benefit the well-off. Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and ena

by raldi 8y ago

Actually, the poor drive the least. Subsidies on driving disproportionately benefit the well-off. Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and enacted alongside a reduction in some regressive tax, like sales tax. The winners are poor people and people who don't drive. The losers, well-off people who drive.

closeparen 8y ago
That’s absurd. You really think it’s the rich commuting 2+ hours each way from the Central Valley far out of public transit range, and the poor paying $5000/mo for walkable urban high rises? San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).
- raldi 8y ago
  You're afflicted right now by one of those beliefs that is simultaneously obvious, intuitive, and completely false. See http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf for instance: "[In the Bay Area,] Low-income workers walk, carpool, and use public transit at higher rates than their more affluent counterparts". And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work. Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - closeparen 8y ago
    That's from 2004. The contemporary story of gentrification is higher-income workers choosing the urban core, and lower-income workers getting pushed to the suburban periphery where adequate transit coverage is less likely. The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time. [0] Page ix

by raldi 8y ago

closeparen 8y ago

That’s absurd. You really think it’s the rich commuting 2+ hours each way from the Central Valley far out of public transit range, and the poor paying $5000/mo for walkable urban high rises? San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).

raldi 8y ago
You're afflicted right now by one of those beliefs that is simultaneously obvious, intuitive, and completely false. See http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf for instance: "[In the Bay Area,] Low-income workers walk, carpool, and use public transit at higher rates than their more affluent counterparts". And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work. Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 8y ago
  That's from 2004. The contemporary story of gentrification is higher-income workers choosing the urban core, and lower-income workers getting pushed to the suburban periphery where adequate transit coverage is less likely. The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time. [0] Page ix