Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?

I live in NYC. It still befuddles me when I see people driving around Manhattan (why??). On a Saturday you can see traffic backed up half a mile to get to the Holland Tunnel. How was any of this not entirely foreseeable? Why do people endure it?

Anyway I discussed with someone how much space is allocated to free or highly subsidized parking. The going rate for land in Manhattan is >$600/sq ft now. Back-of-the-envelope estimates of the land dedicated to parking below 125th street puts the value of these parking spots at around $2 billion. A parking spot in prime real estate would be close to $100k. It's maintained by the city, chokes traffic and is given away for free (in a lot of cases). Why doesn't it generate revenues of $10k/year or roughly $30/day at the very minimum?

In most parts of the US living without a car is nigh-on-impossible. The dismantling of streetcars is many cities at the behest of the auto industry has been well-covered.

Something else I find interesting: the gun debate is contentious. Some argue guns make crime more likely. Others argue it's people not guns that are the problem.

Why isn't there this same debate about cars? I don't think they're inherently bad but you have to consider that the car made a lot of crimes possible that previously weren't (or at least weren't practical). Kidnappings, serial killings, bank robberies, burglaries, smuggling (eg cigarettes/alcohol across state lines) often feature a car or truck as a necessary component of the crime.

When people talk about crime getting worse over time, how much of this can be correlated with the ease and propensity of car ownership?

Anyway, as for urban planning, it's amazing how much people expect the city, state and Federal governments to subsidize their lifestyle choices with infrastructure like roads, sewer lines, water and the like. Rarely do these developments pay for their own infrastructure (it's at least subsidized to some degree).

How quickly society changes to where car ownership and all the infrastructure required became viewed as some God given right.

More like federally subsidized mortgage lending. It's like health insurance or any other market with a locked-in consumer base: putting more money the demand side en masse doesn't improve supply, it just increases the prices.

Creating a new road is more expensive than any maintenance/entire repaving since it shouldn't need to be re-graded/piped/utilities dealt with/etc. Sunnyvale in California quotes a variety of prices for street maintenance up to reconstruction and none are over $7/sq foot.[1] And this is in California where constructions costs are usually high compared to the rest of the nation.

[1] http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Departments/PublicWork/StreetMainten...

You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything.

That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.