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> the entire car hyper-focused model is unsustainable I disagree. There's nothing magic about the car. What is unsustainable is not budgeting for real costs

> the entire car hyper-focused model is unsustainable I disagree. There's nothing magic about the car. What is unsustainable is not budgeting for real costs nor planning for the future. E.g. we install pipes that are supposed to last 100 years, which just means that everyone alive figures they can ignore it and let the people three generations from today figure out how to deal with it.

brewdad 5y ago
That's just saying the same thing in a different way. It is unsustainable given our current model of taxation and government spending. Good luck convincing the populace to pay significantly more in taxes while the government "hoards" their money for some future expense beyond the average person's lifetime.
- Kye 5y ago
  Georgia uses SPLOSTs for stuff like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-option_sales_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-option_s... Here's an example of the result in this local interchange conversion from an intersection that wasn't designed for all the traffic going through it: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9462412,-83.7533688,476m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9462412,-83.7533688,476m/dat... It looks sparse in traffic now, but it used to take 5-30 minutes to cross! Another underway closer to Athens: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9400062,-83.7207463,3a,75y,20.86h,101.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLa9wkJ8NEAGu3a_4gCEmYw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLa9wkJ8NEAGu3a_4gCEmYw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D61.264313%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9400062,-83.7207463,3a,75y,2... This is part of a years-long project to turn highway 316/University Parkway between Athens and I-85 into a controlled-access highway to handle the next few decades of growth as what used to be sprawl from Atlanta turns into major population centers.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  My point is that switching to urbanized infrastructure isn't going to suddenly make the population more willing to fork out more in taxes. It just moves the problem.
  - acdha 5y ago
    They will, however, be seeing significant economies of scale. A suburban street with 20 houses on it has similar maintenance costs to an urban block but the latter expense can spread across hundreds of taxpayers and living in a city means they need less parking because many people don’t need a personal car to function.
acdha 5y ago
Cars aren't magic but they're very inefficient. Supporting the model where everyone owns a car and drives themselves around means that each person uses hundreds of square feet of road, buildings are usually required to maintain hundreds of square feet of car storage space per resident, business are often required to pay for storage as well (even if it's something like a bar which we really shouldn't have people driving to), and the high safety risks mean that beyond the basic road itself you end up with a lot of expensive dedicated infrastructure which is protecting people from cars or reducing congestion. All of that adds up to a lot of built-in carrying cost that people don't see directly but requires upfront payment and ongoing maintenance. Owning a car isn't just the $10-12k average annual expense but also things like paying a double-digit percentage more for housing to get off-street parking, having all of the prices at local businesses be higher to subsidize the bundled parking, etc.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This viewpoint makes sense for dense urban areas where space really is at a premium, but most of the united states is sparse and land is relatively cheap. > Owning a car isn't just the $10-12k average annual expense but also things like paying a double-digit percentage more for housing to get off-street parking I'm very skeptical of these figures. $10-12K is more than I'll pay for my brand new Tesla, and it's a hell of a lot less than that when you amortize those figures over its expected lifetime. Yeah, there's also the cost of fuel and maintenance, but I'm very skeptical that these costs added onto the car payment bring the cost up to $10k on average. Moreover, the average cost isn't very useful--it's influenced by people like me and people even wealthier than me who can afford to splurge. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual cost required to own and maintain a car--chip shortage aside, a used Toyota Camry with decent miles probably costs about $10-15k total and amortized over its ~20 year lifetime including fuel and maintenance it's probably on the order of $2k/year. And of course, if we're worried about people who can't afford that, as with anything, the government can subsidize those people. Similarly, off-street parking isn't an issue outside of large cities (virtually everyone else has a driveway, and the minimum viable cost of maintaining a driveway isn't anywhere near $1k/year). Ultimately, this conversation illustrates one of the major problems with federalizing infrastructure. You get people from urban centers making policies based on incorrect assumptions about other areas of the country.

brewdad 5y ago

That's just saying the same thing in a different way. It is unsustainable given our current model of taxation and government spending. Good luck convincing the populace to pay significantly more in taxes while the government "hoards" their money for some future expense beyond the average person's lifetime.

Kye 5y ago
Georgia uses SPLOSTs for stuff like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-option_sales_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-option_s... Here's an example of the result in this local interchange conversion from an intersection that wasn't designed for all the traffic going through it: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9462412,-83.7533688,476m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9462412,-83.7533688,476m/dat... It looks sparse in traffic now, but it used to take 5-30 minutes to cross! Another underway closer to Athens: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9400062,-83.7207463,3a,75y,20.86h,101.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLa9wkJ8NEAGu3a_4gCEmYw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLa9wkJ8NEAGu3a_4gCEmYw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D61.264313%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9400062,-83.7207463,3a,75y,2... This is part of a years-long project to turn highway 316/University Parkway between Athens and I-85 into a controlled-access highway to handle the next few decades of growth as what used to be sprawl from Atlanta turns into major population centers.
rootusrootus 5y ago
My point is that switching to urbanized infrastructure isn't going to suddenly make the population more willing to fork out more in taxes. It just moves the problem.
- acdha 5y ago
  They will, however, be seeing significant economies of scale. A suburban street with 20 houses on it has similar maintenance costs to an urban block but the latter expense can spread across hundreds of taxpayers and living in a city means they need less parking because many people don’t need a personal car to function.

acdha 5y ago

Cars aren't magic but they're very inefficient. Supporting the model where everyone owns a car and drives themselves around means that each person uses hundreds of square feet of road, buildings are usually required to maintain hundreds of square feet of car storage space per resident, business are often required to pay for storage as well (even if it's something like a bar which we really shouldn't have people driving to), and the high safety risks mean that beyond the basic road itself you end up with a lot of expensive dedicated infrastructure which is protecting people from cars or reducing congestion. All of that adds up to a lot of built-in carrying cost that people don't see directly but requires upfront payment and ongoing maintenance. Owning a car isn't just the $10-12k average annual expense but also things like paying a double-digit percentage more for housing to get off-street parking, having all of the prices at local businesses be higher to subsidize the bundled parking, etc.

throwaway894345 5y ago
This viewpoint makes sense for dense urban areas where space really is at a premium, but most of the united states is sparse and land is relatively cheap. > Owning a car isn't just the $10-12k average annual expense but also things like paying a double-digit percentage more for housing to get off-street parking I'm very skeptical of these figures. $10-12K is more than I'll pay for my brand new Tesla, and it's a hell of a lot less than that when you amortize those figures over its expected lifetime. Yeah, there's also the cost of fuel and maintenance, but I'm very skeptical that these costs added onto the car payment bring the cost up to $10k on average. Moreover, the average cost isn't very useful--it's influenced by people like me and people even wealthier than me who can afford to splurge. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual cost required to own and maintain a car--chip shortage aside, a used Toyota Camry with decent miles probably costs about $10-15k total and amortized over its ~20 year lifetime including fuel and maintenance it's probably on the order of $2k/year. And of course, if we're worried about people who can't afford that, as with anything, the government can subsidize those people. Similarly, off-street parking isn't an issue outside of large cities (virtually everyone else has a driveway, and the minimum viable cost of maintaining a driveway isn't anywhere near $1k/year). Ultimately, this conversation illustrates one of the major problems with federalizing infrastructure. You get people from urban centers making policies based on incorrect assumptions about other areas of the country.