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You aren’t paying the full price for the roads you use or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your tran

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > You aren’t paying the full price for the roads you use The large majority of the cost of roads is a sunk cost, because regardless of whether cars are used for individual transportation, roads would still be needed for delivery trucks, buses and emergency vehicles. The incremental cost of an additional car is generally not going to be more than what the car owner is paying in fuel taxes and property taxes on it. > or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice. These are both the same thing. If you live in the suburbs, you paid for the space where you park your car. The actual problem is minimum parking requirements in cities, which are stupid and should be gotten rid of, but even if you did there would still be many people who want cars and choose housing that provides parking. > You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive Modern cars are pretty clean in terms of particulate emissions, to the point that the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the engine in some of the cities with dirtier air. > or compensating them for the lowered quality of life This isn't math. Are you proposing to compensate them for the lowered qualify of life of not having a car? If someone else has kids, do I get to bill them for the cost of having to compete with their kids for scarce resources? Or should I bill them for not having kids and depriving society of their contributions? Everything everybody does affects the whole of society. At some point you either have to accept that they'll make choices you don't like and in exchange you get to make choices they don't like, or you have to embrace totalitarianism, in which one person gets to make decisions they like and if anybody else doesn't like it they can go to prison. > or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet. This isn't really a cars thing, it's a burning fossil fuels thing. You can perfectly well charge an electric car entirely from solar panels.
  • acdha 3y ago
    > This isn't math You might be unfamiliar with it but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There’s a long academic literature around the cost of road infrastructure to the adjacent communities, and how that’s been disproportionately borne by people who are poor, undervalued minorities, etc. The average American city has a significant fraction of its area committed to car infrastructure for people who don’t live or pay taxes there, and it’s their communities divided by highways or unsafe high-speed roads, their health being lowered by the constant noise, their kids getting asthma at higher rates, and their families having to live with the consequences of fatal car crashes.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      This is the kind of research that doesn't support the conclusion you think it does. Of course living near an overpass isn't any fun. So why do they do it? Because it's cheaper. But if you got rid of the overpass, it wouldn't be cheaper anymore, some upper-middle class professionals would move in there and the poor would have to go find some place they could still afford to live, which will be at least as bad or less affordable or else they'd have already moved there as it is. The actual problem isn't the overpass, it's the undersupply of housing that isn't next to an overpass. Build enough that they can afford to live someplace nice and they would. Meanwhile you can put industrial plants and warehouses and railroads and power lines next to the overpass instead of residential housing.