| > The fraction that doesn't work is either too young to pay taxes anyway, or they had used road commutes before they retired. Everybody else are within the margin of error. The argument that either everyone was already a tax-paying driver or will soon be one is hard to believe. Without data, I won't take that at face value. Even that 'margin of error,' I think needs some examination. Any 'margin of error' means there is a subsidy. Notably, drivers are simply not paying the full cost of their road usage. If so, it would not matter at all whether there were retirees or not, the costs would be payed for entirely by drivers. That is not the case, ergo, drivers are subsidized. Now, let's argue about what that percentage is. > So in practice, car owners don't get substantially subsidized by transit users. This is moving the goal posts as far as I can tell. The statement is that car owners get subsidized by everyone else, not just transit users. > So in practice, car owners don't get substantially subsidized by transit users. While the inverse is overwhelmingly true, transit users are massively subsidized by car users. >> This is simply incorrect. Per the reference: https://lacrossetribune.com/what-causes-roads-to-wear-out/ar... “Cars usually do not have that much loading impact on the road,” said John Mueller, a DOT Highway Mainten-ance Engineer. “The main source is the water that sits in the joint that freezes and thaws.” "It is once concrete deteriorates that traffic loads pack a punch. Large trucks can accelerate the process." Thus, you have it the other way round. Weather deteriorates roads, then it is traffic that amplifies that damage. We can still make the example more extreme, let's say that group of 300 are 1 mile away, and half take light rail. At this point, it's very clear that the 30 people living 10 miles away (perhaps even 50 miles!), are being subsidized considerably. Regarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law, I think I understand what you are trying to get at. In my example, I was trying to keep things about equal and was assuming that both groups of people were driving similar cars. I would suspect in most realistic examples that are similar, that group that is 10 or 50 miles away are probably driving larger vehicles (and maybe farm equipment & logging trucks are more frequently on those roads). Cutting to the chase though, we don't have to argue to what extent drivers are subsidized, there are numbers for that: > A report published in the April of 2022 issue of Ecological Economics teased out the lifetime cost of driving a small car to be roughly $641,000, with society subsidizing about 41% of that cost. [1][2] [1] https://stacker.com/society/how-driving-subsidized-america#:....
[2] https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/slideshow/How-driving-is-s... Then there are more subsidies at play to keep oil cheap and gasoline artifically low in price, as well as the cost of purchasing cars, and the cost of parking is amortized to property owners [3] [3] https://medium.com/radical-urbanist/cars-gets-billions-in-hi... |