[Spivak]

What are you talking about? The roads in my city are paid for my taxes remitted to the city. I guess you could call that a subsidy but that's also just known as being paid for by taxes. And if you're in an area where everyone needs a car to get around then there's no argument that drivers are mooching off the tax revenue of non-drivers. I swear people are so salty about roads when they don't drive but nobody complains about public schools when they went to private.

Owning a car isn't enormously expensive except in online discussions where people quote the MSRP of $year+1 models and act like folks making minimum wage are actually paying that. My primary car is a 2012 Honda Fit that was $6000 when I bought it at 30k miles and is now pushing 120k. I bought it in cash, but the monthly payment with insurance would have been 15% of my rent.

[programjames]

I'd recommend watching this video by "Not Just Bikes": [Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI).

The city also has to pay for utility lines, which are much more expensive in suburban sprawl than the urban center. Also, zoning laws make it more expensive to build apartments, so you really only get single-family houses in the suburbs and apartments in the inner city. If you use property taxes to pay for infrastructure, the inner-city residents (living in apartments, and likely poorer) are paying most of the money for infrastructure they never use.

[Spivak]

This isn't even moving the goalposts, this is switching to water polo. You don't get to tally every cost of suburbia and then say that's the cost of people driving cars. The argument doesn't apply to someone who lives in a city and drives a car nor someone who lives in a rural town who drives a car.

You're really just arguing that suburbia is a drain on city budgets and I can agree with that, it's a drain on a lot of things. I think the reason it persists and gets special treatment is because a significant number of people consider it the goal and see themselves moving out of the city eventually.

But more generally people get so stuck in the idea that tax dollars will be spent on things that aren't for you. Am I the weird one that's unbothered by this? If your vegan you're paying for meat and dairy subsidies you don't use, if you don't have kids you're paying for schools you don't use, if your house is all electric you're paying for gas subsidies you don't use, if you're not outdoorsy you're paying for parks you don't use, if you're acab you're paying for police you don't want, if you believe that caging people is immoral you're paying for whole prison systems you don't want.

[verall]

Most Americans do not drive solely on city/town roads, we rather frequently take highways and interstates which are federally subsidized - not mostly paid for by city taxes.

You or your city may be exceptions, you might drive only on city roads, but the parent comment's point about subsidies is broadly correct.

[bombcar]

Federal taxes come from ... citizens.

Even the fuel taxes come from ... citizens.

There's not some magical source of funding that doesn't eventually come from taxes.

[kube-system]

I don't think anyone here is under the impression that government subsidies don't come from taxes. The criticism above is that subsidies skew the observed relative prices of transport at the point of use.

[bombcar]

If I am reading https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/F... correctly (and I'm almost certainly not) the budget in 2023 was $60 billion (which to be fair includes more than just highways) and if this is correct (which it may be biased) https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t... then federal fuel taxes raised $43 billion of that.

It's within 2/3rds (and frankly lower than I thought, $60 billion doesn't get you @#@^ these days).

[verall]

Yes, but I think the poster's point was that their locality maintained the roads using tax dollars collected from the locality - i.e. their local roads are sustainable system.

All US dollars are created by the US government, the ability of the US government to create valuable dollars comes from the tax base, so of course everything eventually goes back to taxes.

But it's not really relevant to the point.