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by mlsu
970 days ago
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California, with a population 4x that of Seoul, recieved 25 billion dollars in federal highway funding (plus 2 billion dollars of its own money) for a single year (2021). Highway funding. Not counting roads. That figure, of course, does not include the amount of money that we spent on our cars to drive on those highways. Maintenance. Insurance. Fees. It does not capture deaths from car accidents (over 4,000, children among them) life changing injuries and maimings (many more than 4,000), choking air pollution, the thousands of tons of tire plastic that washed into the Pacific that year, and obviously the carbon emissions, which probably approached a hundred million tons. Smaller things as well; the stress, the noise, billions of hours spent sitting in traffic. The natural environment that was destroyed to build roads and highways. If you spent 4 billion to cut that incomprehensible number by just 10 percent you would come out ahead -- not by a little but by a monstrous lot. Sorry that came off very heated. I really do hate cars, it's not really directed at you. |
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The Seoul Capital Region is 26 million people crammed in a 4,500 square mile metropolitan area.
California is 40 million spread across 156,000 square miles.
It makes sense that CA gets more funding for roads and highways given that the population is much less dense.
Even when you factor in Metropolitan areas in CA, the distances are much larger - the Bay Area has the same population and area as the state of Massachusetts (9,000 square miles and 9 million people), yet I don't see subway connecting Boston to Worcester or Springfield.
That's functionally the same ask that a lot of Public transit supporters (which I am btw) are pushing for, and it doesn't make sense. The area is way too large for a system like the Boston T or the NYC Subway to be created, and the Bay's current setup of local subways (Muni/VTA) mixed with commuter rails (BART/Caltrain/ACE) makes more sense given the size.