How do the fare subsidies compare to other subsidies like road maintainence?
Even when you add in externalities (climate change, etc.) road subsidies are about $0.10-0.20 per passenger mile. (Of course, electricity on the east coast isn’t generated from renewable sources, so you have to add pollution externalities to the subway too.)
Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them. There are pollution externalities, but those can be addressed by mandating electric cars without changing the basic structure of everyone having private vehicles.
NYC for example has over 6,000 miles of road * a very conservative 60 feet ignoring sidewalks is ~40,000 acres or 20% of the city. Central Park by comparison is only 842 acres. As Property taxes add up to ~55 Billion per year that’s (55/.8*.2) ~= 13.8 billion in lost revenue per year.
There are of course options to build more roads underground, but then they start costing as much as subway systems.
Your whole point depends on the fact that almost everyone uses roads and of course everyone uses roads when there are no great alternatives. If things were structured differently, the same could probably be said for other transit options.
Bike lanes. for instance, are ridiculously cheap from every perspective, have none of the externality costs you mention, but no one can bike safely as of now and therefore much fewer choose to do so than the infrastructure could support.
Biking is cheap only if your time is worth nothing. It’s also untenable given the climate of most of the US (much wider temperature variation than in Europe where biking is more common), and the physical fitness of your average American.
How much would an equivalent amount of road capacity cost in NYC?
(For the sake of argument, ignore the fact that such an insane amount of road capacity is probably physically impossible in NYC without knocking down half the city)
> Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them.
[citation needed]. You haven't said that fraction of road costs are covered by subsidies (e.g., by property taxes). I suspect it's a substantial fraction.
Is New York any different?
It also includes sales taxes, excise taxes, registration fees, and tolls.
From yesterday;
The fact that tax revenue from cars & trucks pay for the cost of their infrastructure is true regardless. IF you want to analyze externalities, please by all means, take a tally of all positive and negative and show me the balance.
If this is in fact the case, I don't think it's a bad thing. The problem in that case comes from double standards, where the ground-level understanding of how society operates includes costs incurred by individuals/businesses which effectively disappear into a vacuum rather than being directly paid/passed onto customers, yet is used as evidence of the completely natural and inherent utility of cars over alternatives.
For a different doc more directly about who pays for roads, I've found this one useful. Made by a so-so thinktank, but seems well-sourced and rigorous.
https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
Trucks on last mile delivery are invaluable for some deliveries, as you mention, but then... why else does any other vehicle need to use most streets? Is it reasonable for someone who orders a truck to pay 33% of the cost of that truck on the road? What about 0%, or 100%? Which is best?
In cases where alternatives to trucks or cars are less costly overall in some situation, or additional efficiency can be achieved with batching, how much of that is ignored because of these accidentally created incentives? Not even mentioning the indirect cost to communities (walkability, clean air, autonomy of disabled people).
I don't have the answers, but I think these are good questions to be asking. For the specifics of policies, we need to base that on data ofc.
simply put, living in town is not financially or socially viable for many and the freedom afforded by auto ownership is not giving the value is vastly underestimated by those who would restrict their use by others.
as with most lifestyle conversations it is far easier to score internet points with altruistic comments let alone being part of the clique. about as useful as hashtag diplomacy
That's what excise taxes are for. For example, in my town, we spend $1.2m on highway maintenance, and $450k in snow removal, while collecting $2.4m in vehicle excise taxes.
There is also about $60k in fines income, but it doesn't break down exactly how much of that is vehicular.
The whole point is to keep the water away from the dirt, and when it's not possible, minimize (distribute) loads from the tires across as large as area as possible.
They tested alternatives extensively in the 50's, driving trucks in circles on different test tracks for literally weeks and months at a time. As poorly planned as some people believe the interstate system to be, the government didn't throw billions of dollars at it blindly.
Remember I carefully excluded everything except delivery from roads - this is horribly unrealistic. You can call it a strawman.
Trucking is responsible for transporting roughly 12 billion tons of cargo annually, with an estimated value of $9 trillion dollars. As a total share of goods transported by value, trucking makes up about 70%, and 60% by weight. The trucking industry employs 10 million people (3.5 million of which are drivers), and directly contributes to about 5% of GDP, to say nothing of the share of GDP which indirectly depends on trucking, which would be roughly... all of it.
The United States' $20 trillion GDP is entirely dependent on a functioning and well maintained highway system, and it is absolutely irreplaceable as a means of economically and rapidly transporting goods throughout the country.
In that context, the roads that regular everyday taxpayers get to drive are basically free and paid for, because most of them would have needed to be built anyway for the basic provisioning of goods and services, health & safety, building materials and as a right-of-way for water, sewer, electrical, data, and communications infrastructure.
If you want to talk about externalities, you have to have a clear-eyed analysis of both positive and negative externalities. It's a very difficult analysis, because they both total in the trillions of dollars. I'd welcome a well researched scientific paper on the subject.
But since they are very visible, very direct taxes (And in addition to them, you have to pay for gasoline itself, insurance, parking, etc), drivers who have not done the math mistakenly believe that they aren't being subsidized.
1. Ignored the amortized cost of all that roadway construction. You can't just look at maintenance costs.
2. Ignored the state and federal funding that went into it.
3. Ignored the cost of 'free' parking.
4. Ignored the cost of highway and parking enforcement (If you have even one officer doing it full-time, the fines don't pay for it.)
5. Is quite atypical.
2. State & Federal funding of highways currently totals approximately $175 billion per year. I think inflation adjusted that has been fairly steady of the last half century. It's one of the few things where government spending has actually remained constant. [2] Income from fuel taxes has been reducing over the last decade, while income from sales & excise tax has been increasing.
It's reasonable to project that for the last several decades that infrastructure costs have been more than covered by vehicular income, and will continue to be covered for the forseeable future. Setting policy for today and tomorrow should be based on the facts of today and tomorrow.
It would be claiming more than I need, to state that vehicular direct revenue has always exceeded direct expenses, when we can at least clearly state this was true for the last decade, and the next. Economically speaking, it would be extremely costly to reduce the utilization rates for infrastructure we have already paid for, for example, in terms of infrastructure cost per passenger-mile.
One aspect which will eventually need reform is gas taxes will continue to drop with the spread of EVs, so a new form of usage-based billing will need to be developed -- hopefully one that doesn't involve a national tracking system, but I digress. It's fortunate that roads are so profitable that we haven't needed to raise the Federal fuel tax rate in over a decade, and have ample time to develop a solution.
3. The cost of 'free parking' is a relative rounding error in the $175 billion/yr we're talking about. Don't confuse the theoretical economic value of selling parking, or the potential value of re-purposing the space, with what it cost to build it.
There may be a subsidy here, even possibly a large one, but that's not based on the cost of building the spot, but more the perceived theoretical value in renting it. Again, we've gotten into externalties and strayed away from the basic cost analysis.
In reality, most parking costs are paid for by the parking consumer in one way or another. For example, at the mall, while you might not pay a fee to park, the store's rent includes the cost of building and maintaining the parking, and the prices of the goods at that store cover that rent. At your place of employment, you might not pay to park out back, but rest assured that the profit margin of the business includes the rent on the building, leaving less room in the P&L for salary. Again, whether the parking "benefit" is taxed as income to the employee is a different discussion as to whether roads pay for themselves.
4. You're getting into externalities here, without considering the positive ones. Police use the roads to prevent and respond to crime, which includes vehicular crime. Don't underestimate how much money is collected by governments through fines, fees, and forfeitures. In D.C. it works out to over $200 per person. Yes, it turns out, highways are overall very lucrative for the police. [3]
5. Thank you!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
[2] - https://edit.urban.org/sites/default/files/hr_4.png
[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2016/10/26/police-c...
And a dozen or so States have increased fuel taxes in the last 5 years, so maybe the trend is starting to reverse.