[toast0]

> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning.

It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars. OTOH, the roads also need to support fire engines, so there's that. Certainly stores devote more real estate to parking than they would if I didn't live in a car dependent infrastructure, but I'm paying for that in some way or another.

Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized? I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.

[ryan_lane]

> Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized?

The city you drive into is subsidizing your ability to drive into the city, the space to park in the city (which could be used for more housing), paying the cost of your emissions and noise, so that you can live a cheaper life in an area that's generally more expensive to sustain per-capita.

> I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.

The power and telcos generally do not pass these costs onto you. The costs are spread across the entire user-base, and it's more expensive to support you because it's more infrastructure for less people. Streets/roads/highways are also generally subsidized.

Suburbs and extreme white-flight areas are heavily subsidized by cities, especially if you're commuting into them for work. If the costs of sustaining your living situation were truly passed onto you, you wouldn't be able to afford to live there.

[acdha]

> It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars.

This isn’t true and it’s also missing a bigger point: you need many more lanes for cars than buses. That space is not providing economic value and has to be subsidized using general fund revenue when it could be used by businesses or for housing.

[toast0]

Busses weigh a lot more than most cars, and require a better prepared road bed if you want the road to last. If it's just private light duty vehicles, you can build to a much lower standard; gravel roads are perfectly servicable for cars, but will suffer heavy wear from frequent busses. Road preparation is especially important where many busses are expected to stop and wait for long periods of time, bus stops are often built to an even higher standard.

In the city I live in, nearly all roads are one lane in each direction. Even if we had a lot more busses, I don't see how we would have fewer lanes. If we had a lot less traffic, one lane roads could work.

The minimum infrastructure for busses is more than the minimum infrastructure for cars. Although, if you're getting municipal roads, it makes sense to build them to standards so you can use busses.

[acdha]

This thread is about one of the largest cities in North America and that’s the context of my comment: if gravel roads are an alternative you’re not looking at congestion tolls, and you already need to build the roads to handle things like trucks.

Re: lanes, yes, rural areas are different but if you look around suburban or urban environments there are a ton of 4-8 lane roads, complex interchange ramps, etc. which exist only because people drive solo and the resulting congestion leads to a massive amount of dedicated space. If you count the number of people on a given block, it’s usually an amount which will fit on a single bus. This is really eye-opening if you’ve ever driven in New Jersey where there are these huge congested roads full of cars and a single train goes by with more people than every car in eyesight.

[toast0]

You started with

> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation,

Which I felt moved the topic out of NYC. Lots of people live in NYC without car ownership.

[acdha]

That was someone else, but I think the point of comparison was the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs whose drivers are affected by this change rather than rural drivers. Those kind of places are where you see such a large amount of the local budget going to road construction and maintenance because they have the combination of high population and limited transit options.