IMO: transportation bailouts should be focused on essential everyday services (e.g. public transit, which is currently hemorrhaging money) and not for a mode whose purpose is to facilitate business trips and vacations
Normal line workers everywhere have to travel for business and don't have any choice about it. These people aren't travelling for fun and aren't elite by any stretch of the imagination.
Seriously though, we’ve become extremely accustom to a mode of travel (air travel costs have deflated over the last several decades) that generates ~3% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Anything that scales that back so essential travel is the majority of air travel is a good thing.
High level, we’re forced by COVID to re-evaluate what we perceive as needs, and what actual needs are. Again, this is a good thing, and pushes back against cultural inertia (open office plans, face to face for biz travel, commuting to work when you could just as easily work from home, etc).
[0] In normal times, 80% of commuters get to Manhattan via transit. ~1,500 rail passengers enter Manhattan’s central business district every six seconds between 8–9AM.
Trying to cram all those Manhattan-bound train riders into cars (or AVs) would be impossible. You’d need 324,000 more vehicles to accommodate them, and 100 new bridges or tunnels. [1]
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2009/08/10/what-if-everyone-drov...
Government is already reading license plates, might as well attach it to a billing system and charge people accordingly. Want to travel during high demand hours? Pay more. Watch businesses and people adjust their habits automatically to better use the shared resource.
And if the concern is that poorer people get shafted, then give them a certain amount of cash or credits for road usage.
It's literally regressive.
If life is too hard for people with less money, society should decide how much money to give everyone to make it better, and then let them make their decisions -- instead of declaring, "Passenger Vehicle Traffic And Parking Lots Are Virtuous And Worth Subsidizing."
Meanwhile, the government generally ends up building too many roads and not enough transit. All this easily overwhelms the other inefficiencies.
Other bad plans where we don't charge for resources: Let's give all the people free electricity, so poor people don't have to pay something regressive! Then a few jerks can use it to mine Bitcoin until there are brownouts everywhere.
Or you could just impose a gasoline tax as a proxy for travel (oh hey that's exactly what they did.)
This already happens in many places, especially with tunnels and bridges.
The free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low. For many forms of travel, the cost of monitoring such travel makes tracking far too expensive. Even just understanding a toll scheme has its own cost; you don't want to be too worried about misestimating the cost of every drive down to the grocery store.
For long-distance interstate travel, however, toll roads make a lot of sense. This is particularly the case where trucks are involved. You charge proportionally to axle weight, so the companies doing the shipping pay for the damage they are doing to the roads.
In other congested areas, tolls can serve as an effective form of rationing, particularly over bridges or through tunnels. This encourages more efficient resource usage, e.g. by making carpooling more worthwhile. This also makes more sense for city centers with congestion-charge fees. The alternative rationing scheme here, "sitting in traffic", is a very bad way to pay for things and imposes its own very high transaction costs.
norway has an interesting model which i don't agree with fully - new roads are toll roads until they pay for themselves. i guess support after that time is paid by fuel tax?
someone transporting it in a vehicle is also an option which I very seldom use for groceries but almost everything else does come to my house this way.
access to shelter, food and water should be a basic human right. access to a car and it's supporting infrastructure shouldn't. consider what would have to happen to not need a car to get groceries instead of fueling the positive feedback loop of communities designed for cars and cars only. i've been to a development surrounded by a highway on all sides, you literally couldn't get out of it legally in any way which didn't involve a car. of course people jaywalked to walmart on the other side of one of the two-lane roads.
How do you think it gets to the shop?
It's possible the amounts and/or split between grants and loans wasn't right...but some kind of bailout was needed to avoid chaos.