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Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

latimes.com

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Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#241

Post by Yetanfou »

woolvalley wrote: post #215
reaperducer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. Which is why the California tax on gasoline is 48.7¢/gallon and the California tax on diesel fuel is 67¢/gallon.[1] Federal tax on gasoline is 18.4¢/gallon, and diesel fuel is 24.4¢/gallon.[2] I'm not defending the trucking industry. I think more stuff should go by train instead. But truck fuel is taxed more heavily than car f…

What is more expensive, train or road maintenance? What gets better total utilization rates?

Road gets you everywhere, rail only gets you to the nearest terminal. Depending on the signalling system used rail can have a higher capacity from terminal to terminal, leaving the 'last mile' (which in reality is more likely to be the last 100 miles) to be travelled by road. Road needs more maintenance and the work itself is more labour-intensive.

Imagine a package-switching network comprising an (electrified) rail backbone with roads spreading from terminal nodes to the destination points, fully automated package store-and-forward, electric self-driving trucks.

This would cost loads of money and loads of jobs. It might also solve parts of the problem. Maybe Amazon's successor is already thinking of something like this?

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#242

Post by Yetanfou »

icebraining wrote: post #240
pfisch wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would devastate the economy. For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion. There is no way to do what you are proposing without massive price increases in electricity, gasoline and virtually every other good. I wouldn't be surprised if when you priced all of this in you discovered that people couldn't really afford electricity anymore. Also this economy w…

> For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion. So you could cleanup one of the worst "spills" in history with a mere 10 years of a single company's profits? That sounds perfectly OK.

Even better, it would have been possible to avoid that spill with that money and you'd probably have enough left over for a healthy profit afterwards.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#243

Post by bsder »

dmitrygr wrote: post #64
bsder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity does not imply correctness.

in a democracy, popularity implies policy. literally the definition

Internment camps were popular. That made them no less an abomination.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#244

Post by Dylan16807 »

foepys wrote: post #213
mikeash wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the average car in the US gets about 25MPG, while the average tractor trailer is 6MPG, so about 4x the fuel per mile. Accounting for the higher tax rate, they’re paying maybe 5x the tax per mile, while causing maybe 5,000x the damage.

You could tax trucks like 1000 times more. But don't expect the butter and milk to stay the same price.

The milk would cost more, but we'd save even more money on road maintenance.

Then many trucks could be adjusted to have more axles and lighter loads, saving money on both ends.

The end result is a better system.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#245

Post by thegayngler »

pishpash wrote: post #189
thegayngler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the popularity of Uber and Lyft is a direct result of the lack of adequate city transit solutions. If big city transit was robust and at least at the level of NYC or more people would likely opt for it and the big cities could plan their real estate around it better.

Not really. In transit poor cities people own cars and drive their own cars. In transit rich cities you can feasibly live without a car and use rideshare to fill in the occasional gap. Transit and rideshare are complementary. Only rich people and businesses use rideshare as chauffeur rather than necessary transportation.

Not necessarily. When on vacation I used rideshare everywhere I went in Texas as I didnt rent a car. When I lived in Texas I had my own car because ride share isnt an option I could use regularly. In NYC I never needed ride share at all. I used it once in a blue moon. NYC grew in population but number of transit riders has remained steady or declined since 2015. Even the NYT did an article on 8/2018 linking Uber to the decline in transit usage.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#246

Post by jaggederest »

pfisch wrote: post #235
jacobolus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short term it would get passed on to consumers. In the medium term supply chains would figure out how to reduce shipping by road. In the longer term (in conjunction with other changes) we might be able to get larger-scale urban development on a more sustainable track. If we could properly price externalities (not just road wear but also ground water contamination, CO2 emissions etc.) there are many parts of ou…

This would devastate the economy. For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion. There is no way to do what you are proposing without massive price increases in electricity, gasoline and virtually every other good. I wouldn't be surprised if when you priced all of this in you discovered that people couldn't really afford electricity anymore. Also this economy w…

Mitigating climate change is essentially going to cost all of the direct profit ever made by all the companies in the fossil fuel discovery, extraction, refining, and retailing businesses.

Think 85 trillion USD, real value. That's about 1/3rd of the total current wealth of the entire world, by my back of the envelope calculations.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#247

Post by CalRobert »

SilasX wrote: post #39
shereadsthenews wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. If you are proposing a $5/gallon fuel tax then I completely agree. That would be about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel and consistent with the state's greenhouse ga…

That's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but that's not because of personal cars . Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.

Worth noting that the damage to the air, increase in noise pollution, and increased costs of health care spending from injuries, lung disease, etc. from both is substantial.

Re: Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads

#248

Post by jypepin »

> Ridership is now at its lowest level in more than a decade, driven by a shift to driving instead of using Metro’s sprawling bus network.

Maybe if they realised that the reason nobody takes public transit is because LA's is one of the worst of developed countries, they'd be a bit more incentivised into building a better system instead of trying to blame external things and create more taxes.

I barely use Uber/Lyft when I'm travelling in Amsterdam, Paris, London or NYC, but find myself having no choice but be in a car when I'm in SF or LA.

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