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Comment by _zskd | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this so much.

I am sick and tired of subsidizing drivers.

I am done with the irresponsible and unsustainable policy of ignoring costs associated with road maintenance in the United States.

I am done with building roads through lower-class neighborhoods and damaging their property values.

End welfare for drivers. Make the drivers pay their own way.

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I strongly agree. Also let's end welfare for upper middle class commuters by ending subsidies for rail transit. Here in D.C., taxpayers subsidize Metro commuters, who are typically white collar and make more than the average taxpayer in DC/MD/VA. Why would you expect anything else, given the stratospheric price of housing near Metro stations?

Low-income people take the bus. That's what we should subsidize.

Both rail and bus are heavily subsidized -- buses come nowhere close to paying for either their operating or capital expenses with fare revenue. It is probably true that if you broke down the WMATA budget and looked at the degree of subsidy per passenger mile on rail vs. bus, you'd get a higher number for rail than bus, but it's tricky to do an apples-to-apples comparison because the rail figure will include the cost of the stations, tunnels, and track, whereas the bus figure won't include the cost of the roads, but the government pays for the roads too, just not as a line item within the transit agency.

The reason to subsidize rail is that if you didn't, many people wouldn't take the train, they would drive or take the bus, and we don't have the road capacity for that. Rail is an exceptionally efficient means of moving lots of people with not very much space, and drivers and bus riders benefit from those people having been moved off of the roads in the form of reduced traffic.

That might be a relevant point in some cities, mainly New York. But in the DC metro area, only a tiny fraction of commuters take rail to begin with, in part because Metro is geared to getting people in and out of DC while most jobs in the area are outside DC. I’ve always found it very odd that folks who work ordinary jobs in the suburbs subsidize the relatively high income professionals that work in DC and can afford to live near a Metro stop.

> only a tiny fraction of commuters take rail to begin with

If you define "metro area" expansively, that's true, but rail mode share in the closer-in suburbs (Montgomery county, Arlington county) is decently high, and individual counties' contributions to WMATA's budget are commensurate with use. Not many people in Loudoun county use metro, but they also don't contribute very much, and nobody it Charles county does, but they don't contribute anything.

WMATA is at the low end of the farebox recovery ratio (42%). Meanwhile SF's Muni is at 35%, BART at 70%, and Caltrain at 63%.

Life and government isn't this simple. Subsidizing metro draws in high-income earners and thus builds the economy and increases tax revenues. The stratospheric price of housing near Metro stations increases real estate tax revenues as well.

The increased cost of housing near transit also reflects that various costs associate with sprawl no longer have to be funded (e.g commute time, roads).

I used to follow libertarian (the American propertarian kind) communities online, and one of the recurring challenges to libertarians is "but who will build the roads if government doesn't?" Of course, libertarians have all sorts of detailed responses to this challenge. Now that I don't really follow or align with libertarianism any more, my response is simple: if government subsidized roads less, there would probably just be fewer roads, and that would probably be a really good thing.

The history of major roads, especially interstate highways, is a history of the need for roads capable of allowing large military vehicles and troop movements. Has that changed?

I’m sure a very small portion of the benefits of the interstate highways goes to national defense. If it’s truly necessary for national defense, there should still be tolls levied for the side effects: namely the massive subsidies on personal travel and commercial freight.

The benefit in this case potential, so it's hard to quantify it unless and until it is realized. But if it comes to that, it would be absolutely crucial for national defense.

I don’t think the analysis is that difficult. Imagine that the interstates were only used for military transportation (both for emergencies, which presumably haven’t happened much, and for regular logistics). Surely the ongoing maintenance costs would be vastly reduced.

Those costs would be the costs that “we the people” accept as valid usage of taxpayer money. You could throw in costs for other public interests like emergency logistics (e.g. FEMA moving goods and personnel for hurricane relief), first-class mail, etc., and you’re still probably only accounting for a very small portion of the taxpayer money that is currently going toward regular interstate maintenance.

The rest of the taxpayer costs are just subsidies of private interests, namely commercial freight and personal transportation. Those subsidies aren’t “free.” They come at the expense of other private interests, like freight and passenger railroads. These subsidies undoubtedly drastically change the economy, pushing everything toward just-in-time fulfillment, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, etc.

I would like to see these private subsidies reduced or eliminated, perhaps by charging tolls.

Practically speaking you’d be shifting the burden from the people who can afford it, to people who can’t. I see similar arguments from people who resent paying into social security and other things. It seems to be a combination of ideological convictions, lack of empathy, and unawareness of why these kind of measures were created in the first place. Ignoring all of rhe knock-on effects of a massive road network and it’s upkeep, it’s ability to reduce the cost of freight, and subsequent lack of rioting from people who couldn’t afford milk without those “subsidies” seems ultimately short-sighted.

I’m not quite convinced that the effects would be so regressive, especially in the longer term. Couldn’t most national food transportation (including perishables like milk) be done with rail freight? Even if the retail costs stayed the same, surely the environmental costs would be drastically reduced (and surely the longer-term costs of climate change will be extremely regressive).

In other words, I question the premise that federal interstates reduce the cost of freight if you include the environmental externalities.

Ok, that’s a good question to raise, but maybe you should move beyond asking the question and try answering it. You could learn about how different shipping methods are used, how they interact, and just how extensive a rail network a country as massive as the US would require to replace roads. You could also consider that withnthe death of those roads, you’d be utterly snuffing out smaller rural communities, which would be too small or too distant from major population centers to justify a massive rail project.

All in all, if you have such a strong proposition about not paying for roads, it seems like you should already know these things. Now, could roads be replaced? Probably, at enormous cost both financial and environmental. Building massive rail networks is not quick or cheap, you’re talking about megatons or steel and iron being welded after all.

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