[saosebastiao]

For every mile of interstate in the US, there are over 100 miles of local roads that are poorly covered by the gas tax. Paying for a majority of the highway system shouldnt be much harder than graduating from kindergarten. Its pretty pathetic that the entire highway system can't be funded by the gas tax, given how little it contributes to car oriented infrstructure. 2x gas taxes still wouldn't come close to covering the costs of the infrastructure provisioned. Gas taxes in the UK are 8x what we pay, and even that doesnt cover the full cost of their infrastructure. Transit, in comparison, is magnificently cost efficient...only by deceptive means like yours can you appear to make the opposite case.

Regardless, the effect of even a tiny subsidy for cars affects the cost recovery of transit. By subsidizing cars, you actually force larger subsidies for transit. The operating and maintenance costs of car use scale linearly with vehicle miles travelled, whereas the costs of transit scale as a step function (you don't need a new bus for every user, you need a new bus for every 60 users...riders 2 through 60 ride for free) on the scale of an individual transit vehicle, and roughly log linear in aggregate. Therefore, every transit user you subsidize into a car increases the per user cost of all the rest of the transit users. If car users paid even a tiny fraction more than the pittance they currently do, it could push enough users onto transit to make it sustainable. And if they acctually paid their true costs, almost nobody would drive at all.