[californical]

I think that alternatively, considering how approximately every death of a bicyclist or pedestrian, or car driver, is all caused by someone driving an enormous 5,000lb machine irresponsibly, we should redesign our cities in such a way that most people don’t need to drive those cars in the first place for most trips. And if you do need to drive a car, you have much less congested and smaller streets for those trips.

That also allows us to repurpose some of that road space that’s not needed anymore, for separate bike and bus infrastructure that will also be more convenient and safer for everyone.

I don’t want to live in a world where you have to own a giant dangerous $20k machine just to move around, when there are cheaper, safer, healthier, and better-for-the-environment ways to accomplish the same thing.

And I drive too, a lot! I just don’t want to be forced to anymore, but we’ve kinda built society so that you only have one option, and it creates all sorts of problems.

[notch656a]

That sounds pretty nice to me. There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation here IMO. We should privatize all the roads and let the free market dictate what people like, and I think a lot of people would fall back to bicycles and walking more if they actually had to pay private tolls wherever they drove.

[californical]

I like your thoughts… I don’t agree about privatization (since the private companies would be a guaranteed monopoly and we see how well that works with internet…), but maybe something similar could also be accomplished by making car registration fees proportional to number of miles driven and size of vehicle, to pay for road damage. Charge 2¢ per mile per ton of vehicle weight or something. Exempt mass transit (busses).

Average 2 ton car pays 4¢ per mile, or $400/year at 10k miles.

Drive a big unnecessary truck, might be 10¢ per mile in road maintenance.

Since road damage is exponential relative to vehicle weight, bikes and pedestrians are basically negligible and we could just round that to $0. Motorcycles under 300 lbs could be small flat rate.