4 ms·

"Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle" Small town, in my case, 90 minutes from the nearest mid-size city. If you don't demand that I pay for rapid transi

by bdunbar 14y ago

"Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle" Small town, in my case, 90 minutes from the nearest mid-size city. If you don't demand that I pay for rapid transit I'll never see, or use, don't restrict the kind of car or truck I can buy, then deal.

philwelch 14y ago
If you really want people to only pay for the transportation infrastructure they themselves use, that's fine, but look for your gas taxes to triple. You might be paying for public transit you never use, but those of us living and/or working in cities are paying a lot more to maintain a highway to your small town that we never use.
- MisterBastahrd 14y ago
  Apples and oranges. Cities can't sustain themselves without agriculture and products from outside of the city. If I never go into a city, I will never use their public transportation. If you never leave a city, you will still use public roads in order to eat, even if you never actually step foot outside.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities. The whole point of infrastructure is that it benefits society as a whole. This is just as true of city infrastructure as it is infrastructure in the countryside. (Not to mention there's a whole lot of countryside that doesn't produce food...or much of anything, really, other than a place for misanthropic people to retire to.)
    - bdunbar 14y ago
      "The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities." I think it is possible you underestimate how much manufacturing happens outside urban areas. Your argument about 'how we need each other' has a point. Does that mean I get to vote on how you run your trains, down there in Big City, USA?
dalke 14y ago
To interject - there's a problem in any discussion about density. The frequent assumption is that either people live in skyscrapers or they live in the suburbs/exurbs. This is not true. Most people who live in a small or medium sized city live in single-family houses, and that's true for the ~100,000 population cities covered in this study. Also, cities of this size don't tend to have rapid transit systems, unless they are part of a large metro area. Instead, they have buses or sometimes trams. Your use of "rapid transit" suggests that you are using a 'Big City, USA' like NYC or Chicago as your reference, and not a medium-sized city like Green Bay, WI. This study did not examine the policies appropriate for a big city, but it's rather obvious that NYC can't handle even one car per household. In any case, the debate isn't in restricting the kind of vehicle you can buy, but in how much a medium-sized city should subsidize your ability to be able to drive to and park downtown, compared to the other things it could subsidize. For example, is it better to require more free parking through zoning laws, or to have more space for shops and restaurants though with more limited parking options? Is it better to have free parking, paid fixed-rate parking, or variable rate parking? If "better" is defined as "enable growth and development" then this paper suggests that more free parking is not the optimal choice.
saosebastiao 14y ago
I think your proposal is sound...the people that get primary benefit of the infrastructure should be the ones that pay for it. Unfortunately, that causes more problems for drivers than it does for transit riders (which is why we are in the current state that we are in). You see, the cost structure of automobiles is linear, and when you throw in density, exponential. The cost structure for transit is inverse to its ridership (within vehicle capacity limits). In other words, small increases in ridership produce huge decreases in costs per passenger. So much so that the most heavily used transit systems in the world are completely profitable (Hong Kong's MTR is an exceptionally profitable publicly traded corporation). Now currently, both roads and transit systems are subsidized. But since they are substitutes (in the economic definition), a small decrease in subsidies to roads will push more people to transit, thus requiring fewer subsidies to transit. But we can't have that, can we?

by bdunbar 14y ago

philwelch 14y ago

If you really want people to only pay for the transportation infrastructure they themselves use, that's fine, but look for your gas taxes to triple. You might be paying for public transit you never use, but those of us living and/or working in cities are paying a lot more to maintain a highway to your small town that we never use.

MisterBastahrd 14y ago
Apples and oranges. Cities can't sustain themselves without agriculture and products from outside of the city. If I never go into a city, I will never use their public transportation. If you never leave a city, you will still use public roads in order to eat, even if you never actually step foot outside.
- philwelch 14y ago
  The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities. The whole point of infrastructure is that it benefits society as a whole. This is just as true of city infrastructure as it is infrastructure in the countryside. (Not to mention there's a whole lot of countryside that doesn't produce food...or much of anything, really, other than a place for misanthropic people to retire to.)
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    "The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities." I think it is possible you underestimate how much manufacturing happens outside urban areas. Your argument about 'how we need each other' has a point. Does that mean I get to vote on how you run your trains, down there in Big City, USA?

dalke 14y ago

To interject - there's a problem in any discussion about density. The frequent assumption is that either people live in skyscrapers or they live in the suburbs/exurbs. This is not true. Most people who live in a small or medium sized city live in single-family houses, and that's true for the ~100,000 population cities covered in this study. Also, cities of this size don't tend to have rapid transit systems, unless they are part of a large metro area. Instead, they have buses or sometimes trams. Your use of "rapid transit" suggests that you are using a 'Big City, USA' like NYC or Chicago as your reference, and not a medium-sized city like Green Bay, WI. This study did not examine the policies appropriate for a big city, but it's rather obvious that NYC can't handle even one car per household. In any case, the debate isn't in restricting the kind of vehicle you can buy, but in how much a medium-sized city should subsidize your ability to be able to drive to and park downtown, compared to the other things it could subsidize. For example, is it better to require more free parking through zoning laws, or to have more space for shops and restaurants though with more limited parking options? Is it better to have free parking, paid fixed-rate parking, or variable rate parking? If "better" is defined as "enable growth and development" then this paper suggests that more free parking is not the optimal choice.

saosebastiao 14y ago

I think your proposal is sound...the people that get primary benefit of the infrastructure should be the ones that pay for it. Unfortunately, that causes more problems for drivers than it does for transit riders (which is why we are in the current state that we are in). You see, the cost structure of automobiles is linear, and when you throw in density, exponential. The cost structure for transit is inverse to its ridership (within vehicle capacity limits). In other words, small increases in ridership produce huge decreases in costs per passenger. So much so that the most heavily used transit systems in the world are completely profitable (Hong Kong's MTR is an exceptionally profitable publicly traded corporation). Now currently, both roads and transit systems are subsidized. But since they are substitutes (in the economic definition), a small decrease in subsidies to roads will push more people to transit, thus requiring fewer subsidies to transit. But we can't have that, can we?