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Should Law Subsidize Driving?
- majewsky 8y agoGood morning, Mr. Betteridge.
- gpvos 8y agoSubverted in this case: if you read the abstract, you'll see that the expected answer is "no".
- expopinions 8y agoUber is the biggest loser, setting a record for losses of a startup. Silli-con billionaires have supported these losses (subsidized). Sustained losses are unsustainable. Uber presently keeps about 40% of ride cost. When uber raises prices and/or increases uber cut, competition will increase. Autonomous cars will not solve the problem and are a fantasy solution. I.e., no solution.
- nukeop 8y agoUber's strategy is to eliminate all possibility of competition before raising prices.
- gear54rus 8y agoHow would that happen?
- flexie 8y agoWhere I live, Uber is effectively banned and local alternatives are quietly doing much the same as Uber used to. I don't see Uber being anywhere near beating anyone in Europe.
- xfitm3 8y agoAre the local alternatives based on an app or a traditional taxi service?
- alkonaut 8y agoWhich laws in particular is it that the author things are subsidizing driving, that he concludes should be repealed?
- wongarsu 8y agoThere is a "download PDF" button. The author spends ~95 pages arguing that the interaction of various laws (or their (lack of) enforcement) create bad second-order effects. I doubt anyone will be able to summarize that in the space of a comment.
- Someone 8y agoI think the author has a point, but buries it in long-winding text and footnotes (there are pages where less than a third of the text is footnotes, but they aren’t the majority)
- alkonaut 8y agoI was hoping that the conclusion/solution bits at the end of the PDF would at least have SOME sort of summary. Reading the introduction and the end carefully, but skimming the main bits, I'm not even sure whether the laws in question are e.g. tort law or traffic laws!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tsukurimashou 8y ago> children, the poor, and people of color or with disabilities—pay the steepest price I can see why disabled people, children and poor people are paying for this but how is "people of color" relevant here?
- pjc50 8y agoSomething of a secondary effect really, but the two things that immediately come to mind are "nonwhite people are less likely to afford cars" and "nonwhite people are more subject to discriminatory traffic stops that (in the US) sometimes escalate to lethal violence".
- nightfly 8y ago> Cars are less likely to stop when people of color step into intersections, a study says. https://www.npr.org/2017/02/15/515336658/researchers-examine-race-factor-in-car-crashes-involving-pedestrians https://www.npr.org/2017/02/15/515336658/researchers-examine...
- wongarsu 8y agoFrom what I get from skimming the paper he suggests that America's focus on cars might be related to the end of segregation, with cars allowing white people to just decide to live in a neighborhood with few black people. Effectively the policy shift towards cars enabled a new form of segregation. Additionally "Experiments have found that motorists yield less often for people of color." (page 27). But those are minor tangents in a 100 page rant about laws and enforcement (as well as victim blaming in traffic accidents)
- Steltek 8y agoTraffic stops by police leading to fatal or seriously bad outcomes (jail, property seizure). You could also attempt to clumsily extrapolate PoC to mean "high crime neighborhood" or historically segregated/red-lined communities which would mean higher insurance rates or other ownership costs (parking, towing).
- bobthepanda 8y agoIn general, highway infrastructure was routed through minority neighborhoods to bulldoze them to the ground. Today, poor minorities get forced to live in the lowest value land, which is usually right alongside major roads. The lack of safe pedestrian facilities means that these neighborhoods have higher levels of pedestrian fatalities: https://www.inverse.com/amp/article/26210-pedestrian-deaths-minorities-racist-urban-design https://www.inverse.com/amp/article/26210-pedestrian-deaths-... Because they live alongside major roads, they also suffer from higher rates of respiratory disease from air pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4454972/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4454972/
- tomohawk 8y agoPersonal transportation is wildly popular because it has greatly increased the freedom people have. Any activity that is as widespread is going to have its downsides.
- dexen 8y ago>A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government >launched a social experiment in urban America: >the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Way to start with a false premise. Before the automobile took over, overwhelming majority of traffic - both personal and commercial - was either by foot, on horseback, or on a horse drawn carriage. There's a reason "horseless carriage" is how the early cars were used, perceived, and legislated. "Mass transit" was a limited thing mostly between cities - train and horse carriages, and in very limited numbers as inner city trams and metro. Going both by historical accounts, and by period photos, a tram or metro were not the default commute mode for most of workers. If anything, the mass transit - tram and bus - exploded in range and popularity thanks to the availability of cheap technologies popularized by the car.
- tonyvince 8y ago> ...and People of color pay the steepest price WTF?
- matthewfelgate 8y agoThis modern reinterpretation of blaming the state for cars being the main mode of transportation in the USA rather than people people choosing cars seems bizarre. Is there any evidence of this? People buying and wanting to drive cars seems largely consumer driven not derived from state enforcement.
- dsign 8y agoConsumer choices are made in some context. All things equals, I would rather have a car. But if society taxes me out of having a car (which it did), then I would have to sell/scrap my car and find arrangements to live without it. Luckily for me, that was possible. I would say that pointing out to the laws that transfer car ownership costs to other people is a very important piece of information, even if the complete picture looks more like "Interest groups lobby for regulation that promote car ownership". It's good business for car makers, traffic insurance, health insurance, and the medical industry. It's bad for the pockets of low income people, and generally for everybody's wellbeing. The more concrete data people have about this, the better their chances to improve things...even if I would still consider those chances very slim.
- matt4077 8y agoI imagine fewer people would own cars if the money spent on roads had been invested in train tracks and subway tunnels.
- watwut 8y agoIf zoning codes did not required the building to have large amounts of parking, there would be more people who would choose to drive cars - as parking would be expensive. There would also be more apartments on one place so public transport would be more likely to appear. Had there be more crossing and people allowed to cross out of crossing where crossing is not available, more people would walk. People choose to have or not have a car based on many factors.
- bobthepanda 8y agoIn most of America it is illegal to build a pedestrian oriented town in the fashion of the old colonial New England towns or the small towns that dot railway lines along the east coast. In fact, in most of America it is illegal to build a building without parking at all, or a building with retail on the ground floor and apartments or offices on top. It is thus illegal to even consider alternate built environments for the majority of Americans and the choice is not available in the market to begin with. The one signal we do have is price, and price per square foot in walkable neighborhoods is higher than in unwalkable ones. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/06/17/a-citys-walkability-drives-real-estate-values.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/06/17/a-citys-walkability-driv...
- drtillberg 8y agoThese subsidies exist because for decades there was no reasonable alternative to owning and occasionally using a car, and no alternative to a community allowing car traffic on their streets. Since everyone is (or wants to be) a driver, and people need to be protected from the externalities created by driving (e.g., look both ways before crossing to avoid injury) you get the current system. If you look at gas taxes, insurance regulation, and toll policies-- the subsidies aren't going to be rolled back. The unsafe, inefficient, and distant are protected from the consequences of their actions and choices.
- Annatar 8y agoI see that the tin foil hat conspiracy theorists are out in force today, trying sensationalist headlines in an affort to get people to pay for the subscription. Doesn't this violate this website's code of conduct or some such? Bless the ruined internet where a common plebeian can make nonsensical, unprovable claims like "In the United States, motor vehicles are now the leading killer of children and the top producers of greenhouse gases." Not only is this sensationalist claim impossible to scientifically prove (and prove repeatably, which is the foremost requirement of the scientific method), but a single container supertanker generates as much pollution with just one trip as all the cars in the U. S. in an entire year, but hey!, "details-schmetails"... And once again, no technology is discussed.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoGiven your rant, a source would have been appropriate.
- Annatar 8y agoDon't get worked up over it, it's just an observation of the state of affairs, I don't have a tin foil hat. I think the U. S. should have better public transportation infrastructure and more pedestrian sidewalks and, oh! drivers which actually comply with the law and stop for pedestrians at pedestrian crossings, but that's completely beside the point to this nonsensical "study". That's just, like, my opinion man.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoI just hoped for a citation on your surprising tanker claim.
- Annatar 8y agoToo lazy to search it for you (and I read it roughly seven years ago); use a search engine yourself. Really, the sense of entitlement in this place... And if that with the tanker surprised you, maybe you should spend more time researching and less time reading sensationalist studies which hope to hook people into a subscription (:-) Just a suggestion (;-)
- Mvandenbergh 8y agoI haven't read all 102 pages, but essentially the reasons that the author says US law subsidises driving are: Killing someone in a car accident is not taken terribly seriously, especially is exacerbating factors such as alcohol consumptions are not present. Exacerbating factors other than alcohol are not taken seriously. This is at odds with the legal approach to accidental killing in virtually all other circumstances. "Criminal law takes both unofficial and official cognizance of the inherent difficulty of driving safely. First, car crashes are rarely prosecuted as crimes even when fatalities result. Second, when they are, they often come within a special, lesser form of manslaughter created by law for instances where the instrument of unintended death is a fast, multi-ton machine rather than, say, a negligently thrown lawn dart" Speed limits and other legal constraints on dangerous driving are chronically underenforced. Roads and signal timings are engineered to maximise traffic flow, including the timing of pedestrian crossings in such a way that they can be dangerous for people with mobility restrictions. This is often driven by federal standards - so not law necessarily in this case but similar. Crossing the street other than at a crosswalk is illegal in many places. Federal funding for state energy conservation required the adoption of rules allowing turns on red, despite the fact that we know this leads to higher injury and death rates for vulnerable people. In many places, the price of driving on streets is set at zero by law (local government can't charge congestion prices). It is actually quite rare to make such an intervention prohibiting charging for the use of a scarce and congested asset. Land use law across the US favours private cars: Municipal law in many places sets prices for street parking at zero outside urban centres. In some places state law limits municipal control of parking charging. In many places zoning codes require the building of large amounts of parking which raises the cost of new building. It especially raises the costs of building new apartments and drives them farther apart. Effectively this makes it almost impossible to develop walkable centres - you're going to be paying for parking anyway and because of the distances created by these planning laws you will need a car. The density reducing effect of requiring so much parking makes bus systems either totally non-viable or so marginal in terms of service frequency that only the desperate use them. Services only used by poor people are never going to get any attention. Emissions regulations focus on tailpipe emissions and neglect brake pad and tyre particulates.
- Mvandenbergh 8y ago