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Yes, people can adapt to having less mobility. That doesn’t mean mobility is useless or that removing it is without harm. People deciding to stay home because

Yes, people can adapt to having less mobility. That doesn’t mean mobility is useless or that removing it is without harm. People deciding to stay home because getting around is too much hassle isn’t a victory condition.

shereadsthenews 8y ago
Moving about from place to place is not inherently valuable.
- closeparen 8y ago
  It clearly has value to the people who do it when they have the chance.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    That doesn't mean the value of that travel is high. In fact it means the opposite: if the travel was so valuable, people would still do it when it's more difficult.
    - code_duck 8y ago
      I think what happens is people make a decision of the effort and risk vs the reward, like every other activity.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Sure, any rational person facing austerity cuts whatever they value least. And any rational person enjoying growth can only add whatever the value low enough to not have yet. Imagine the price of groceries rises to 100% of your wages, so you stop running the furnace. "If being warm were so valuable, you would still do it even when it means skipping a few meals." Welfare is still harmed by austerity and boosted by growth. A better line of argument, IMO: a denser environment would offer more value for less travel. Or, driving to a faraway discount store is only profitable because you pay 100% for manufactured goods and X < 100% for highway mileage.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  There are plenty of good arguments against cars, this is not one of them, this is not even remotely intellectually honest.
saosebastiao 8y ago
The real question is not about whether mobility is valuable or not, it is about how valuable it is. When it comes to infrastructure development, we throw tons of other people's money at the problem, but if drivers were paying their full costs via gas taxes and congestion charges, how much demand would there be? This article suggests that driving demand is a lot more elastic than we like to claim.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Can't you make this argument against any public service? We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. We throw a bunch of other people's money at the military. If people had to pay the true cost of America's autonomy, they'd suck it up and learn Russian. The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer more mobility at the same price point.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Cars are also major contributors to climate change and air pollution in cities, unlike schools. More cars also lead to more sprawl which leads to higher demand for cars. It's a vicious circle.
  - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    >We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. Education is fundamentally (mostly) a positional good - what it buys is the right to be considered for white-collar jobs ahead of competitors who haven't spent as much time getting educated. Families already spend as much as they can afford in education to win this tournament, the only thing that would reduce education spending is if everyone else stopped buying as much education.
  - saosebastiao 8y ago
    Yes, you can make that argument against any public service. And it is worth discussing for any public service. All public services have benefits, and all of them are capable of being overprovisioned. In the context of schools, literally everybody benefits from population wide literacy and education. The benefits are diffuse enough that it is worth subsidizing...although we're probably hitting diminishing returns on the amount that we do spend. And the idea that we need to learn russian if we don't have a military 10x bigger than the rest of the world is a cold war rhetorical relic. Of course we could do with less military funding. Cars though, are mostly a benefit to the occupant, and either a detriment to everybody around them, or entirely capable of being priced into the benefit of the goods they buy. Yes, I can afford paying $0.0025 more for a pound of apples if it means the trucking company pays their true costs. And why should we subsidize your drive in a BMW to your office when you can easily pay for the whole cost yourself, or take transit? Why should we be subsidizing cars over the much more efficient alternatives? Cars and transit are competing forms of transportation...a vehicle mile not traveled is very often a fare paid. Car costs scale linearly with the number of people-miles driven, until congestion and space constraints hit and then costs scale exponentially. Transit costs are step fixed costs, and therefore the more riders the less they cost per person. When we subsidize car travel, it forces us to subsidize transit travel even more, because taking away riders makes transit less efficient. It should be remembered that before we started price capping transit companies and subsidizing roads, transit was one of the most profitable industries in the world. That's the power of the cost efficiency of transit. So yes, mobility is important and roads shouldn't just go away, but the amount of roads and car infrastructure that we fund through general taxes is absolutely obscene and should be scaled back dramatically. Mobility can be much more efficiently provisioned to the public with transit.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

Moving about from place to place is not inherently valuable.

closeparen 8y ago
It clearly has value to the people who do it when they have the chance.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  That doesn't mean the value of that travel is high. In fact it means the opposite: if the travel was so valuable, people would still do it when it's more difficult.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    I think what happens is people make a decision of the effort and risk vs the reward, like every other activity.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Sure, any rational person facing austerity cuts whatever they value least. And any rational person enjoying growth can only add whatever the value low enough to not have yet. Imagine the price of groceries rises to 100% of your wages, so you stop running the furnace. "If being warm were so valuable, you would still do it even when it means skipping a few meals." Welfare is still harmed by austerity and boosted by growth. A better line of argument, IMO: a denser environment would offer more value for less travel. Or, driving to a faraway discount store is only profitable because you pay 100% for manufactured goods and X < 100% for highway mileage.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
There are plenty of good arguments against cars, this is not one of them, this is not even remotely intellectually honest.

saosebastiao 8y ago

The real question is not about whether mobility is valuable or not, it is about how valuable it is. When it comes to infrastructure development, we throw tons of other people's money at the problem, but if drivers were paying their full costs via gas taxes and congestion charges, how much demand would there be? This article suggests that driving demand is a lot more elastic than we like to claim.

closeparen 8y ago
Can't you make this argument against any public service? We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. We throw a bunch of other people's money at the military. If people had to pay the true cost of America's autonomy, they'd suck it up and learn Russian. The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer more mobility at the same price point.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Cars are also major contributors to climate change and air pollution in cities, unlike schools. More cars also lead to more sprawl which leads to higher demand for cars. It's a vicious circle.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  >We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost. Education is fundamentally (mostly) a positional good - what it buys is the right to be considered for white-collar jobs ahead of competitors who haven't spent as much time getting educated. Families already spend as much as they can afford in education to win this tournament, the only thing that would reduce education spending is if everyone else stopped buying as much education.
- saosebastiao 8y ago
  Yes, you can make that argument against any public service. And it is worth discussing for any public service. All public services have benefits, and all of them are capable of being overprovisioned. In the context of schools, literally everybody benefits from population wide literacy and education. The benefits are diffuse enough that it is worth subsidizing...although we're probably hitting diminishing returns on the amount that we do spend. And the idea that we need to learn russian if we don't have a military 10x bigger than the rest of the world is a cold war rhetorical relic. Of course we could do with less military funding. Cars though, are mostly a benefit to the occupant, and either a detriment to everybody around them, or entirely capable of being priced into the benefit of the goods they buy. Yes, I can afford paying $0.0025 more for a pound of apples if it means the trucking company pays their true costs. And why should we subsidize your drive in a BMW to your office when you can easily pay for the whole cost yourself, or take transit? Why should we be subsidizing cars over the much more efficient alternatives? Cars and transit are competing forms of transportation...a vehicle mile not traveled is very often a fare paid. Car costs scale linearly with the number of people-miles driven, until congestion and space constraints hit and then costs scale exponentially. Transit costs are step fixed costs, and therefore the more riders the less they cost per person. When we subsidize car travel, it forces us to subsidize transit travel even more, because taking away riders makes transit less efficient. It should be remembered that before we started price capping transit companies and subsidizing roads, transit was one of the most profitable industries in the world. That's the power of the cost efficiency of transit. So yes, mobility is important and roads shouldn't just go away, but the amount of roads and car infrastructure that we fund through general taxes is absolutely obscene and should be scaled back dramatically. Mobility can be much more efficiently provisioned to the public with transit.