331–340 of 910 posts
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People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.
People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads
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No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better. So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to ci…
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
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No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better. So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to ci…
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne. I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externa…
The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.
> The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
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Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
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Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions). There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc. All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
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Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
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I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I…
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself. The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized. It’s important to call these out whenever they are be…
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
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It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself. The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized. It’s important to call these out whenever they are be…
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguab…
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.