The Automobile Subsidy
in [Drive]
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From: hancock4 on 12 Nov 2009 12:59 On Nov 12, 10:44 am, Brent <tetraethylleadREMOVET...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > If people knew how to drive it wouldn't be sucha an issue. But roads are public and open to all. That's a reality of the situation. You have drivers who are dangerous zipping all over the place. You have drivers creeping along. You have drunks. There are drivers whose licenses were pulled but keep driving illegally because they have no other way to get around, no alternative. As the baby boomers age the situation will get worse. > It's the same with transit...or at least it used to be... jammed full of > people where you can't even get a seat unless you put even more planning > to time your trips when it was less used. On some transit routes rush hour is crowded. But on others, such as commuter rail, everyone gets a seat. > But here's something to consider with transit, if you have your car you > pretty much know you'll be able to get back. What happens when the > transit line shuts down at 9 or 10pm and you have to go back at 11pm? Most transit lines run until about 1 am, some run all night. Of course, NO ONE is arguing to get rid of cars; that's just a paranoid fiction.
From: Brent on 12 Nov 2009 13:00 On 2009-11-12, hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com <hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com> wrote: > In developed areas, many transit routes run very frequently, like > every 2-3 minutes. NYC subway in rush hour? Where do you get this 'many'? I never saw the CTA running that frequently. The L was across the street. The train noise dominated over any other sounds so there was no way it could run every 3 minutes and I not notice it. Plus when I sat out on the balcony I didn't see trains running on the metra, two L lines, and a major N-S bus route with that kind of frequency. These were major lines serving the south side and south suburbs of chicago to/from the loop.
From: Brent on 12 Nov 2009 13:07 On 2009-11-12, hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com <hancock4(a)bbs.cpcn.com> wrote: > On Nov 12, 10:44�am, Brent <tetraethylleadREMOVET...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > > >> If people knew how to drive it wouldn't be sucha an issue. > > But roads are public and open to all. That's a reality of the > situation. You have drivers who are dangerous zipping all over the > place. You have drivers creeping along. You have drunks. Or a bus through a wall of your house. Anyway those conditions are a direct result of the stupidly run US road system. Germany's roads IME were no less croweded but flowed several times better. > There are drivers whose licenses were pulled but keep driving > illegally because they have no other way to get around, no > alternative. The US system encourages that sort of thing even if there was another way. > As the baby boomers age the situation will get worse. The boomer demographic has been making a lot of things worse for a long time. >> It's the same with transit...or at least it used to be... jammed full of >> people where you can't even get a seat unless you put even more planning >> to time your trips when it was less used. > On some transit routes rush hour is crowded. But on others, such as > commuter rail, everyone gets a seat. Some road routes during rush hour are not crowded.... you point to the crowded ones, fair is fair. >> But here's something to consider with transit, if you have your car you >> pretty much know you'll be able to get back. What happens when the >> transit line shuts down at 9 or 10pm and you have to go back at 11pm? > Most transit lines run until about 1 am, some run all night. Most? You mean most of that service was cut years ago. Least it was around here. It's that time of year in chicago again. Cutting out routes, shutting down routes earlier in the day, and raising fares and raiding more taxes for transit. > Of course, NO ONE is arguing to get rid of cars; that's just a > paranoid fiction. And this is in reply to what?
From: Stephen Sprunk on 12 Nov 2009 13:13 jim wrote: > Contrary to what Brent believes all the money collected for road use > taxes is spent on roads. No, 15% of federal fuel excise taxes is diverted to pay for transit, and many states also divert part of their fuel excise taxes to other uses (e.g. education). OTOH, plenty of money collected via _other_ taxes is spent on roads; it's a gigantic shell game that is virtually impenetrable to the average citizen. > He refuses to look at the simple fact that the total sum of money spent > on roads exceeds the total collected in vehicle and fuel taxes/fees by > users of the roads. This is undeniably true; even the FHWA's own statistics demonstrate this. The second problem is that a large fraction of roads are _not_ supported by fuel excise taxes, the so-called "user fees". The entire idea behind the Highway Trust Fund and fuel excise taxes is that the government would tax _all_ driving to provide a _few_ highways. Less than 5% of the mileage on my car is on a HTF-supported road, but I'm paying that tax on 100% of the miles I drive--in addition to the property taxes or tolls that I'm paying to fund the other 95% of my use. > Trucks pay considerably more per vehicle than cars but they also cause > more of the wear and tear. They pay more per vehicle because their fuel efficiency is lower (which is natural, since they're hauling cargo) and they drive a lot more miles per year. Still, they pay the same amount of tax per gallon of fuel, whereas the estimate road wear is _ten thousand times_ that of a passenger car. Road wear is proportional to the _cube_ of the vehicle's weight. > Like everything else in government today some of the current > expenditures on roads is coming from borrowing from the future. That to > me looks like both car drivers and truckers are getting a subsidy. "Borrowing from the future" is not a subsidy per se if it will be paid off by the people that benefit from it. The main problem with debt comes when you take longer to pay for something than the useful lifetime of what you used it to buy. Borrowing additional money to finance interest charges, like the US Government does nearly every year, is catastrophic. Aside from toll roads, though, what jurisdiction actually uses debt to fund roads? AFAIK, all non-toll roads in the US are paid for with current or past tax revenues. This is actually one of the _few_ things the government doesn't borrow much money for--and one of the few where it _should_, since roads are a long-lived asset that will generate new revenue over its lifetime that will easily pay off the debt. IMHO, the correct solution is to get rid of all fuel excise taxes; fund all limited-access highways with toll-backed debt, and fund surface roads with property taxes. Unfortunately, that's far too logical for our politicians. S -- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
From: Jishnu Mukerji on 12 Nov 2009 13:17
Matthew Russotto wrote: > Sure, there's I-295 in the northwest, and I-195 across the center. > But a rather large proportion of NJs major highways are toll. What about I-80, I-78 and I-287? Or do those not count as highways for some reason? |