431–440 of 477 posts
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The one that provides people (the illusion of) liberty through movement.
Cars and roads have plenty of problems, sure, but I have no idea what you mean by this "illusion of freedom".
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That’s a nice sentiment - in that case we should all work in the public sector and and get those things...oh yeah....
I'm just surprised that people would propose to solve a problem by taking those things away from people.
It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities.
In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in order to pay for the extremely generous union benefits of a public sector mechanic (who may make more than him)?
Lastly I would argue that municipalities have something of a fiducuiary duty to tax payers to get value for their tax dollar spent - rather than rewarding a voter block at tax payer expense.
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I just commented to someone the other day- I loved how clean the metro was but hated the prices for sub-par services. I hate the distance based pricing.
What's wrong with distance based pricing?
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> And the level of contempt for people riding subways? Where do you get off? Not only are they better for the environment, they're one of the great equalizers. I don't have contempt for people riding the subway, I have contempt for the organization that perpetrates that fraud on society. > Any person can ride the subway for the same price as anyone else and get around the entire city 24 hours a day. At what cost? As…
Your analysis is exactly backwards base on history. One of the main drives to create corporate campuses outside of cities was to prevent competing firms from recruiting employees. Same goes for creating company restaurants and dry cleaning etc. keep employees on your campus and a way from competition. When they work downtown and walk out into the community they bump into people randomly and those unexpected connectio…
However, if a corporation can reallocate labor capital into real estate, IMO what happens in the NYC area, that's what they'll do.
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Except that most of the wear and tear on our roads isn't caused by people's cars. People pay much more than their fair share of road maintenance via gas taxes etc than the industries that cause the most damage to the roads. Semis cause 1,400x more wear than cars [1]. [1] https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf
it is my potatoes in the trucks. I can pay the road tax, or more for potato. doesn't matter.
Net result would be better prices for local farms, less road maintenance needed, no impact to the end consumer overall (less taxes to support less roads).
The problem with urban transport systems is that no one sees them for what they really are... an expensive thing that drives the economy. There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself, but the reality is that a few billion invested in better public transport results in a lot more billions being made elsewhere. We need to get away from this idea that public transport systems ne…
Nobody expects the NYC subway to "break even or even turn a profit." The subway historically recovers less than 50% of its operating expenditures from fares, compared to 70% for Berlin, 88% for Amsterdam, and over 100% in Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio . MTA is broke because it costs several times as much for MTA to do anything compared to its counterpart…
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I'm just surprised that people would propose to solve a problem by taking those things away from people.
That’s fair - and again think it’s a laudable goal. It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities. In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in…
>how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic [...]
How do you tell a tax paying public sector mechanic that they're going to lose their pension and health insurance?
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> There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself Not a crazy idea considering how some systems operate in the East - Tokyo, Osaka and Hong Kong systems not only pay for themselves, but churn out profits along the way. Singapore’s MRT is designed to operate at break-even. The trick is to allow the transportation authority to own and manage its own real estate. This way when a ne…
> The trick is to allow the transportation authority to own and manage its own real estate. Well, that seems like a pretty major subsidy. So if a new line or station is built, the government uses eminent domain (or equivalent) to buy the land, and gives it to the transport authority? I mean, it might be better in that it lets the transport authority operate without being dependent on government handouts that can vary…
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Nobody expects the NYC subway to "break even or even turn a profit." The subway historically recovers less than 50% of its operating expenditures from fares, compared to 70% for Berlin, 88% for Amsterdam, and over 100% in Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio . MTA is broke because it costs several times as much for MTA to do anything compared to its counterpart…
I expect it to break even or turn a profit. It's the most perfect way to gauge it's true economic value. Unfortunately for tax payers, it's only subsidizing otherwise intolerable commuting conditions, and acts as a strong subsidy to downtown property owners.
Seems like an incredidibly narrow-minded way to gauge its economic value to me.
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You have a source for any of that? It's one thing to say labor costs are a primary driver of costs. It's quite another so say Labor Union costs are the primary driver.
Unions are definitely the primary driver. Construction unions in New York are using current contracts to pay for their pension liabilities. In other words, taxpayers today are paying for work that was done 30 years ago. This guy is sort of irritating if you have to read him for more than a few hours, but his blog is full of evidence and analysis on this topic. https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/an-open…
>One point construction experts are making, however, is that taxpayers are paying premiums for these public projects since they aren’t being done open shop. The Empire Center report calculated that the government ends up paying 25 percent more for public projects in New York City because of the high prevailing wages. This is the cost no one wants to talk about.
Good! Living in NYC costs more than living just about anywhere in the USA. Well over 25% more than where I live, a top 50 metro.