5 ms·
I would gladly pay a large high-income tax to get an amazing transit system. Something like a 5% tax on income between 100 and 200k would probably do it.
by foota 7y ago
I would gladly pay a large high-income tax to get an amazing transit system. Something like a 5% tax on income between 100 and 200k would probably do it.
- enz 7y agoFor Dunkirk, I believe the shops, restaurants,... now pay more tax to sustain the free transports. It’s better than taxing individuals because everybody wins: residents have more money to spend, shops pay more taxes but they now have more customers who are now richer.
- Mirioron 7y agoBut that also means higher prices in the shops and restaurants. This makes markets outside of the city more competitive. Eg order from Amazon instead of buying from a local store.
- opportune 7y agoYeah, I think this would not be a bad solution. Public transit, once it’s built with sufficient coverage, is a lot cheaper and more effective than private transport. I think it would also make sense to fund it via land value taxes since usually land captures a lot of the value that public transportation generates
- xyzzyz 7y agoPublic transit, once it’s built with sufficient coverage, is a lot cheaper and more effective than private transport. What makes you believe so? The better coverage public system has, the less effective it is. At very low coverage, where you cover only a handful of popular routes, it is indeed much cheaper than private SOV transport. At the other extreme, where you have a regular bus coming every hour to every house in very sparsely populated area, it wil obviously be very expensive and inefficient. Thus, somewhere between these two extremes, there must be a break even point. Public transit can be definitely be cheaper and more effective, but it isn’t always automatically so.
- opportune 7y agoYeah, of course if you build coverage everywhere it is not cost effective. There is definitely a point where cost effectiveness peaks. What I mean is that when you get there, it is much cheaper. It very rarely gets to that point in most of the world
- xyzzyz 7y agoIt almost always gets much farther beyond that point. In Seattle, where I live, farebox recovery is just 27%, which, given that fare is $2.75, means that riding a bus is much less cost effective than driving.
- selectodude 7y agoSound Transit has an FRR of 42 percent now.
- xyzzyz 7y agoYeah, because Sound Transit only covers a handful of the most popular routes. The agency that actually tries to have good coverage of the city is Metro Transit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]