281–290 of 327 posts
Amen. Uber and Lyft are adding congestion to our roads and undermining public transportation, all while profiting off public infrastructure and a class of driver “partners” who incur all of the costs for a razor thin upside. Id like to see the start of a state owned rideshare network with specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don’t get access to.
You mean a bus.
> Uber and Lyft “are using public roads, and the profit is going to their companies,” Phil Washington, Metro’s chief executive, said at a recent meeting. Public roads are supposed to be paid for through fuel taxes, which every Uber and Lyft driver pays. California has gasoline taxes of: * 55.22c per gallon (second only to Pennsylvania) * 18.4c per gallon (federal) * 2.25% sales tax Additionally, taxing only rideshari…
Do Uber and Lyft pay those drivers' fuel costs?
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All the delivery services park illegally as well. For a long time I assumed they had some sort of exemption because it was so common. They just eat the tickets as cost of doing business.
I suppose tickets should have exponential increase and decay built-in - this way, collecting a bunch of tickets in a row wouldn't be edible for companies, but intermittent tickets (corresponding to base rate of traffic violations) would cost no more than before.
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Talk to anyone with a reasonable public transit system about how ridesharing is clearing up the roads (spoiler alert: it's not, they're decreasing public transit ridership and contributing to a constantly worsening congestion issue).
Perhaps public transit systems could look into what ride-sharing is doing, what elements of it are so appealing to users, and if there’s any similar actions they could offer to make public transit more appealing.
They're undercutting public transportation and traditional taxi services that need to operate with a realistic budget that isn't fueled by billions of VC dollars.
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Talk to anyone with a reasonable public transit system about how ridesharing is clearing up the roads (spoiler alert: it's not, they're decreasing public transit ridership and contributing to a constantly worsening congestion issue).
Perhaps public transit systems could look into what ride-sharing is doing, what elements of it are so appealing to users, and if there’s any similar actions they could offer to make public transit more appealing.
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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.
> The milk would cost more, but we'd save even more money on road maintenance. This would adversely affect the poor as they drive less and still need milk.
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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…
How much of our wealth is being wasted this way? I'm guessing that it's a lot.
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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.
For those wondering about the source of the "4th power of weight per axle", I found this after some short, but intense, Googling: http://co-asphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TrashTruckD... Reference 1 lead me to this: (Page I-11) https://habib00ugm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/aashto1993.pd... From that: " The load equivalency factor increases approximately as a function of the ratio of any given axle load to the…
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I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states. Would you have to keep track of how many miles you drove in State A and State B, and how would you pay State B if you lived in State A? Since we'd need to replace the federal fuel tax as well, would the federal government require states to hold yearly odometer inspections, or would you have to fill out a form on you…
In Norway the use of GPS has been discussed for a few years, and as far I understand the newest solutions being discussed have been approved by the data privacy watchdog, which generally tends to be very negative to government surveillance. There are many options there, at the cost of making audits/complaints harder, such as e.g. only keeping GPS traces for a very short time (or not at all), and gradually overwrite m…
I would assume that there is some law which requires the detailed data to be deleted, but I'm not sure about that.
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For those wondering about the source of the "4th power of weight per axle", I found this after some short, but intense, Googling: http://co-asphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TrashTruckD... Reference 1 lead me to this: (Page I-11) https://habib00ugm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/aashto1993.pd... From that: " The load equivalency factor increases approximately as a function of the ratio of any given axle load to the…
I am bad at math... could you help me understand. A 80,000 truck and 5,000 car drive down the road... how much more damage does the 80,000 truck do? Thank you.
Because the damage scales with the 4th power, then the damage ratio is the 4th power of the axle weight ratio:
(16k/2.5k) ^ 4 = 1677x as much damage.
Edit: Sorry, that oversimplifies it a bit. For the same vehicle, the damage scales that way, but for a fair comparison, you'd have to account for the fact that the weight is distributed over more and bigger tires on each axle. Still, that should show you how the math works.