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Comment by frogpelt | Hacker News Reader

This is a simple concept. It's about liberty.

People, Americans especially, want the liberty to come and go as they please, at the speeds they choose, by the path that they choose.

I'm not sure every Bloomberg writer would understand that.

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That's fine, just pay for the societal costs you impose while exercising such a liberty. The article isn't is talking about taking away the liberty to drive, but rather not subsidizing it through tax loopholes. It's kind of a libertarian perspective, actually.

EDIT: wording

We do pay. We pay taxes when buy cars. We pay taxes when register cars. We pay taxes when buy gas.

Perhaps you can understand why those of us who put liberty above almost everything on the scale of desirables get squeamish when we hear the about more taxes being needed.

A popular libertarian maxim is "Your rights end where my rights begin." This is usually ignored in discussions about unaccounted for externalities like pollution. Why do you have the right to pollute my (our) air with your automobile?

Yet traffic means that you can, in practice, do none of these.

...at some times of days in the most heavily populated urban centers.

For the rest of the country, Google Maps is generally glowing green.

I agree to some extent. But I can set my schedule and/or my path such that I avoid most of it.

Spoken like someone completely oblivious to the costs they're offloading onto everyone else. The liberty of people who want to breathe clean air, walk down streets that aren't noise- and fume-choked hellscapes, or who don't want to pay for your subsidies, the police & EMTs to show up & clean up your car wrecks - what of their liberty? It's a simple concept.

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