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One more thing that occurred to me, most US retirees still own cars, and still pay car tabs! That is kinda the issue, payment for driving is spread across US society rather than being the burden of those that use cars. A strict counter-example, myself, I pay a _lot_ in property taxes and put almost zero wear on the roads. When I did last own a car, I was averaging about 500 miles per year. This is really the point. Drivers must be subsidized because the cost of driving does not go up linearly with miles driven. For example, if someone just spent 24 hours driving rather than say 4 hours, their payments for driving upkeep does not go up 6 fold (they do not pay 6 times on car tabs, 6 times on car tax, 6 times on property taxes, etc.. they only pay gas tax as extra). Now, this is kinda a tired argument, because it then goes to, "well, even if you don't use the roads, you still benefit." I sure do. Though, the issue is that the way things are incentivized, by spreading costs across everyone, we are put in a situation where otherwise unsustainably low density areas become incentivized. Which goes exactly to the point of charging people to drive through downtown. Seemingly it is a very rare example of a disincentives to car culture. The argument that mass transit is subsidized seems a bit obvious (and is it is true that mass transit is very subsidized), though.. given all the incentives to drive, not having to pay the full cost per mile traveled as those costs are spread out - why the hell not drive everywhere? Why at all would anyone take mass transit when the cost to drive 5000 miles compared to 500 miles are so similar. Let's look at the math:
Driving 5000 miles (my last car got about 400 miles to the tank, at about 13 gallons), requires about 130 gallons of gas. At about $0.50 per gallon for tax, that is a payment of just $65 dollars in tax to go 10 times further. Car tabs alone are over $100 in WA state. This hopefully illustrates really easily that users of the road are not paying proportionate to their usage of the road. This is a mixed bag, as I would very much not want farmers to have to pay the full cost of the roads connecting them to the overall transit grid. Yet, because how costs are shared, driving in a lot of ways is "too cheap" and the overwhelming incentive is to (unsustainably) drive everywhere. Further, because everything in the US is built with driving in mind, it makes it so everyone has to drive, whether they would want to or not. This is compounded in city policy with zoning laws that force there to be parking, force residential to be segregated from commercial that would otherwise for walkable neighborhoods. All that is to say, it's the second order effects of how we pay for driving that creates quite a number of sustainability issues and really diminish the quality of life we could have (quieter, less polluted, less time spent in commute, less time spent in traffic jams). |