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Infrastructure is a subsidy for everyone. With roads you can build a building anywhere and get stuff delivered to it, you can get customers from a wide area to
by jjk166 4y ago
Infrastructure is a subsidy for everyone. With roads you can build a building anywhere and get stuff delivered to it, you can get customers from a wide area to come to your location, you can access a variety of suppliers, you can hire workers from a wide area, you can live anywhere and still get things like emergency services. It's a subsidy for construction, it's a subsidy for retail, its a subsidy for manufacturing, it's a subsidy for agriculture. We were building roads for millenia before the invention of the car, and for good reason. That's the whole point of infrastructure - it helps everyone, often indirectly, and thus it makes sense to share the burden of its construction and maintenance.
- Tiktaalik 4y agoif it was one lane it would be a reasonable public good for everyone, as public transit and delivery doesn't use that much, but it's a lot more than that. The reason we have 8 lane highways etc is because of private automobile use, and the enormous space inefficiency of automobiles, of private vehicles being driven back and forth with single travellers in them. We've gone too deep into fundamentally inefficient private automobile use and are having to spend a fortune on the infrastructure to keep that paradigm functional.
- jjk166 4y agoExcept there are tons of people who derive massive benefits from private vehicles that can be driven between arbitrary locations at arbitrary times by single travelers. And for the most part it is single lane roads - no one is building an 8 lane superhighway to a farmhouse. You only see such large infrastructure near hubs where all those smaller roads are coming together. Yeah, maybe the people who live and work within a city don't benefit much from the infrastructure directly, but the people who commute to or from it do.
- jMyles 4y agoScreaming truth into the void. The only explanation for the downvotes and asinine arguments against what you're saying throughout this thread is denial.