[thx-2718]

" At the same time, cities should develop bike stations and tramways for people to move around quickly in car-free areas, paid for by gas taxes, which should be raised, and road tolls, which should also be raised."

Huh? If no one is driving who is paying gas taxes? Road tolls everywhere?

[raldi]

If no one is driving, we can take the unbelievable amount of public spending currently going into subsidizing automobile traffic and redirect it to fund public transit.

[thx-2718]

I don't have a problem with doing that. Of course how you get public transportation into rural communities is a bigger challenge but we don't have to have society be based around the car.

My issue is that the previous post said they would pay for public transportation and walkable carless cities through increase gas taxes and road tolls.

[raldi]

An increase in gas taxes and road tolls would make people drive less, requiring less road maintenance, traffic policing, etc, and allow buses to move more efficiently, freeing up funding that can then go into improving transit.

[thx-2718]

If your over all take home is lowering though eventually you don't have money to repair the sidewalks and the bike racks and so forth because no one is driving anymore to pay for it.

Or you raise the cost to ride public transportation or pay for those things from somewhere else (like property taxes).

[raldi]

You seem to think the government makes money when someone drives a mile, but in fact it loses money — significantly more than if that person had taken transit instead.

The fewer miles people drive, the more money the government has available for other things.

[thx-2718]

> The fewer miles people drive, the more money the government has available for other things.

Yes if everything else is kept the same. People's income. Business profits. Etc.

However you're overlooking the point spending on transportation infrastructure which is to get resources from one location to another.

People drive to work where their income is taxed. Businesses have things delivered to them to sell and have ways to get customers to them. So now the business is paying taxes. And people use that income they earned to pay for rent or own a home so there's property taxes.

Now let's just remove the way people get about to doing all those things because that would save the government money from spending money on transportation.

Oh great no one is going in to work. No one is going to business or shop. No one is paying taxes. But hey we saved a bunch of money by not building roads.

Please read that I am not opposed to changing our society to be less car dependent (obviously for the environment it is better)

I am objecting to the notion that you can pay for a carless society by just not paying for roads or by imposing taxes on cars more without raising taxes or fees elsewhere.

[ZoomerCretin]

People will still drive, just not in downtown areas.

[thx-2718]

If you raise the price of driving higher the the number of drivers lower. Will the increase revenue from the pricehike overshoot the loss in revenue from less drivers on the road?

You've also effectively eliminated owning a car in the city. So now you're asking rural residents to pay for more expensive gas and more expensive toll roads while giving all that money to people living in the city.

I have a feeling politically that would be rather unpopular.

[ZoomerCretin]

There's not a single state in the country where tolls and taxes pay for all road upkeep expenses. There's not a single state in the country that raises taxes and tolls automatically when revenue drops.

Very few people drive in the NYC area anyway. I think 30% of people? It's not a big deal.

[thx-2718]

But we want to pay for tramways and bike stations and our nice carless city through raising taxes on automobile transportation (which just plummeted because of above policies).