I must apologize for my lack of clarity. The intent of my statement was to say that "Cars should pay for..." and "Public transit users should pay for", not to imply that the users of these services cover their costs now. Cars are obviously subsidized by general tax revenue, and public transit is also subsidized by general tax revenue. Ideally general taxes would be reduced by the amount spent on these services, and the costs for these services would be increased accordingly.
I am in general in favor of nearly all services being based on user fees, except in cases of people who have handicaps that prevent them from otherwise functioning normally in society (physical disability, mental health issues, developmental issues, etc.) or have had a recent extraordinary event that temporarily impacted their ability to care for themselves (loss of a job, loss of a family member, birth of a child, severe illness, etc.). In cases where it is desired to subsidize services for less well off users, raise fees on more financially capable users. To achieve this, I prefer the airline model - offer a couple of classes of marginally better service at an order of magnitude higher cost. The people who truly have the means will pay it, and those who don't will not. For instance, someone with 150k income and $15k/year medical costs,$25k/year childcare costs, and $25k/year in student debt payments might not be as well off as their income suggests. The airline model allows people with means to self-select in a way that income-based taxation does not.
This is probably one of the most insightful comments in this entire thread. Density isn't the problem - zoning is. Even in a suburban area, if there was a corner store, you could just take a golf cart, provided that you live someplace with a climate like the West Coast. I live in an area that swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so for many months out of the year any transport without HVAC is not something you'd actually want to use.
Electric wheelchairs typically go 3-4 mph. They are not a replacement for point-to-point transit. My area also swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so anything that's not climate controlled is quite unpleasant.
On bad days, I either avoid extremely large stores or wait until I get a good spot. On good days, I walk from whatever spot I get. Either way, it's less walking than I'd do to/from a transit station.
I was in Shanghai for work for about 3 weeks a few years back. For the first week, I tried to use mass transit, because everyone said it was the best way around (and in shanghai, their mass transit is absolutely world-class, the best of the best). It was absolute hell - a perfect description; I was in constant pain.
After the first week I broke down and just took cabs everywhere. Perfectly practical, but only when somebody else (in this case, my employer) is paying for it.
I'm not sure that the drive should necessary be away from cars. With the advent of driverless cars, there is a new option: shared cars. They provide the time-savings of point-to-point transit for the already time-strapped lower class, can (optionally) enable ride sharing for cost and congestion reduction, use the existing infrastructure, and with sufficient percentage of self-driven cars should provide throughput similar to busses ... all while eliminating the need for parking in city centers. They are the best of everything.
I have medical issues that are completely unrelated to lifestyle. Unfortunately, autoimmune issues often don't respond to anything but drugs with horrible side effects.
Already in place, via mitigations that have been implemented. Fuel injection, multiple catalytic converters, exhaust gas recycling, and closed-loop control all add substantial expense to modern vehicles. They do, however, very effectively reduce/eliminate the smog problems that we had 30 years ago (which is a good thing).
Most modern freeway builds include noise mitigation in their designs. This cost should be passed on to the freeway users via use fees.
I think public transit would only be viable in dense urban cores. In other areas, if the city desires to provide transportation assistance, I think it's probably more efficient to provide other forms of transportation to the working poor (who are typically the primary users of public transit in midsized cities). Here in Grand Rapids, the busses are so lightly used that it would probably be cheaper for the city to hand out Uber or Lyft credits for the people that are now using the busses (and it'd provide a better user experience too).
Actually, I'm going to argue for just the opposite: Let users of cars pay for the infrastructure they use (through gas and plate taxes), let users of public transit pay for the services and infrastructure they use (through ridership fees). Right now, public transit is heavily subsidized by income taxes and use taxes for cars (at least in my area). I think that if all transit users were forced to pay for their share of the cost of the services they use, you would see public transit use decrease in many mid-sized cities, and potentially increase in extremely dense cities.
If you really have a desire to 'stick it to the wealthy' while still enabling all to use the roads, sell access to HOV lanes at some extremely high cost and use it to pay for improvements to the infrastructure as a whole. I honestly think that this is a much better plan than the current (ridiculous) trend of offering HOV access to hybrids and EVs, because getting people into hybrids and EVs does nothing to ease congestion, which is the purpose of HOV lanes. Charging an extremely high tax for single-occupied HOV use would provide additional money to build improved infrastructure for all users, which would achieve the HOV goal of reducing congestion and pollution (because for traditional cars, congestion = horrible MPG).
PS - hybrids and EVs don't make sense in all areas. I have a Fusion Energi which has a plug-in range of about 20 miles, and I live in Michigan. I bought it because I wanted to be able to eat lunch in my car without idling the engine (to save wear and tear), but in general, hybrids and EVs are a complete waste of time in the midwest. 1/3 of the year is spent in arctic conditions below 30 degrees, and another 1/3 of the year is spent in sweltering 85+ degree temperatures ... and in both cases, hybrids and EVs don't do notably better than gas cars (first hand experience here).
As an additional aside, until we build more nuclear plants, and/or provide infrastructure to charge EVs during the day, they are kind of pointless. Solar power is not available at night (when most people charge EVs), so the electricity ends up coming from hyrdocarbon fuels plants. The conversion and transmission losses associated with going from Thermal->Mechanical->Electrical->High Voltage->Transmit->Low Voltage->DC->battery are so high that EVs really are currently not better than gas vehicles in much of the country. In areas where the waste heat from the gasoline is used to provide cabin heat, EVs are significantly worse in terms of overall energy use (especially those that use resistive heating for cabin heat).
I live in a mid-sized city in Michigan (Grand Rapids). Housing in the inner city is relatively expensive (3x+ the cost of the housing 20 miles out). Congestion is not really a thing ... maybe for 1/2 an hour right at 5PM and for 1/2 an hour in the morning. Parking is solved by having cheap lots at the fringes of the city center and providing a shuttle in (parking in the city center is only for higher income folks). Affordable point-to-point transit enables lower income folks to have nice houses and work jobs in the city, all while still having enough time left over for cooking & hanging out with family.
For instance, a nice 3br 1500 sqft house can be had outside of the city for under 100k (which works out to < $1k/month for principal, tax, insurance). A nice 3br 1500 sqft condo rents in the city for nearly 3k/month.
Ironically, drives to eliminate cars typically disproportionately negatively impact poor people. Wealthy people value their time over money, and so tend to retain their cars even when faced with higher costs. Poorer people will give up their cars to save money in exchange for spending hundreds of additional hours per year walking and commuting on public transit. In an ideal world, yes, they'd move closer to their jobs. In the real world, they'll commute, have to make multiple transfers between different modes of transportation, and lose precious hours from their days. This is particularly of a great impact to lower-income folks since they can't claim back those hours by hiring out things like cooking, cleaning, and maintenance. Affordable, efficient point-to-point transportation is of great benefit to this class.
I think that if you do the same calculation to find the benefits (access to a greater variety of goods and services, access to a broader selection of employment, stable childhood environment due to not having to frequently move for work, etc.), the cost might not be as high. However, I have not seen any paper that attempted to account for this, so I cannot be sure.
Why should public transit be paid for by automobiles? Let the users of each service pay for what they consume. Cars pay for roads, maintenance, highway patrol, etc. Public transit users pay for rail, buses, dedicated lanes, etc. Forcing automobile users to pay for public transit obscures the true societal cost of implementing public transit just as much as using tax revenues outside of gas/license taxes for roads obscures the true cost of driving private cars.
I'm amazed that so many people who consider themselves inclusive in their thoughts don't realize how exclusionary anti-automobile policies are. As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. On the bad days, even standing in line at a checkout for an extended period of time can send my knees and hips into a painful state (and the thought of riding across town standing on a scooter, frankly, horrifies me).
Cars and the point-to-point transit that they offer are a GODSEND for me and many other people who are somewhat mobility restricted, but not so bad that we need wheelchairs or crutches. They enable me to live a very normal life that would be impossible in a heavily pedestrian optimized environment. The fact that you don't even consider some of the alternatives as viable - automated shared cars, electric cars, strong hybrids ... all of which solve the problems you identified (wasted space on parking, pollution, etc.) leads me to believe that you actually just hate cars, and not any of the (solvable) problems that are caused by their current embodiment.
Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans.
EDIT:
To those who are saying that we'll still allow those with disabilities to have cars: many states require that you be able to walk less then 200 feet to get a disabled plate. On most days, I can walk at least 500 ... so by almost all standards, I do not qualify. However, walking 5-600 feet doesn't get you far enough to survive without a car. If the world were to go this route, we would have to reconsider what constitutes 'disabled'.
Another thought that surfaces is that with my 36-37" inseam (I wear 36" pants because that's as big as they sell, but they're really still too short), I do not fit in most public transit, and most cars. Thankfully, because cars are privately owned, I can pick from the 2 or 3 models that I actually fit in. A public transit world is a world that marginalizes peoples who are in the last 5-10% in terms of height/weight.
Typically, everything in civil aviation is done to DO-178C. Almost everything we work on is level A, the highest level of criticality. Military stuff is generally much less rigorous, believe it or not.
Even if it's not now, their intention is to provide higher levels of SAE automation on the same software as time progresses, which means that the current hardware probably has to hit a higher design assurance level than the current software.
That's not exactly how it works. Development doesn't freeze - change requests, PRs, etc. can all be rolled in right up to the end and even after release if the appropriate process is followed, and in software, even in a safety critical world, you can pipeline updates out in a reasonably fast manner (we can get it down to about two weeks for minor updates). Hardware is an entirely different beast. You have to do FPGA development and prove-out, gate-level sims, timing accurate sims, thousands and thousands and thousands of simulated testbenches (hardware sim is orders of magnitude slower than software sim - hours per second, even on the most advanced equipment). Therefore, each testbench must be developed to test a very specific thing - in general, you can't just run your high-level software unit tests. Anyway, even if Tesla is the kind of company to roll software (doable) or boards (doable, but harder) right up to the last minute ... they do not (and neither does anybody else) spin a chip over and over again during the course of the development cycle. Speaking as the lead of a SW team that proved out a safety-critical custom SOC, it is colossally expensive. Every single iteration takes many months and millions of dollars.
4 years is a big lag if you're not doing safety critical work. If you are doing safety critical, 4 years isn't particularly fast, but it's not unreasonable. If you've never worked in aerospace or automotive, you would be shocked at the requirements for software and hardware that can kill people if it breaks (assuming that Tesla is following the automotive equivalent of DO-178/DO-254, ISO26262)... I guess the automotive guys do have an advantage because they're not required to have independence for the various stages of verification, but it's still a big chunk of work (more than the actual development).
It wasn't through the Internet. We had a dedicated phone line for it (quite an expense for a 5th grader). Others dialed in directly, and when one user was connected, anyone else trying to connect got a busy signal. If the user wasn't remote, they paid long-distance charges by the minute to the telco. Larger BBSs had banks of phone lines to enable multiple users to connect simultaneously. Just the concept of multiplexing a single physical connection between multiple applications (or even users) via SLIP or PPP and TCP/IP was a pretty revolutionary change that came with the move from terminal-based communication to binary communication.
EDIT: I guess I should have said 'from circuit-switched networking to packet-switched networking', but ... you get the idea. The change largely occurred simultaneously.
I have fond memories of using Prodigy as a small child. When they added images to the news service, it was magical. I can't think of anything now that brings the same level of excitement as the progression of technology during my childhood in the late 80's and 90's (Maybe self-driving cars, but they're far less accessible).
On the architecture, I can't help you. We did run a small BBS when we were in 5th grade, but it fit on a single PC with a dialup line. There were several common software packages that provided file hosting, forums, games, extensibility, etc. that were used to run them. Towards the end, some (including ours) were even going graphical (google 'remote imaging protocol'). Much of the online world was confined to BBSs prior to the advent of the Internet.
Fusion power is already here, in the form of solar. The reactor is just not located on our planet. I think storage of the sun's fusion power is probably an easier problem to solve than actual fusion, and I think that very shortly the economics will become compelling enough that it will happen without the government spending billions of dollars of OPM (Other People's Money) to do it. Any utility that can feasibly cut the cost of its fuel input to 0 with a reasonable capital expense would be insane not to do so, and I think that capital expense for this is in the process of crossing the 'reasonable' line in many areas of the planet.
(Sadly, in my native eternally cloudy West Michigan, the payback on a solar array is still "maybe never")
The university's position is absolutely ridiculous and has everything to do with what's wrong with higher education at large. I think the only reason that other frats/sororities/organizations with a similar rule weren't dinged is because nobody probably pushed it like the girl who got this sorority in trouble.
I taught in a college setting for a few years, and the pressure to kowtow to students, pass almost everyone, and hand out a's and b's is intense. Giving assignments that resulted in 4-6 hours of homework per week was frowned upon in a 3 credit class. Absurd.
It was actually released by the FilesLocker developers ... how magnanimous, releasing the master key before discontinuing support for the project to enable the community to continue development & provide decryption services. A lot of commercial software vendors could learn from them (I'm actually half serious here).
Generally not. We prefer to have our child in a center, where there are more children, more support staff, and more teachers, and in our state such institutions are not allowed to operate without a license (the state will shut them down).
> So do you want to increase the child to minder ratio, cut benefits, or cut opening hours?
All of the above, if the market will bear it (and I think in the case of reduced benefits, it will not - see my last paragraph).
The point is that these decisions shouldn't be made by the government for the center and the parents who use it.
Where I live the ratio is 4:1. Who's to say that 5:1 couldn't work, aside from the fact that the government doesn't allow it? What about something like 9:2, which would enable a single person to handle tasks that crop up (changing diapers, dealing with a fussy child, etc.) while the other handles the happy kids? what about 3 rooms at 6:1 with 2 floating caregivers who go where they're needed?
Under a heavily regulated environment, none of these options can be explored.
As far as benefits, as you said, I think at this point they are probably already getting above mandatory minimums, so regulation probably isn't having a huge effect there.
True, this could be used as a sort of indicator for that, but I think a more clear-cut set of metrics to see such an effect would be participation rate and unemployment rate among low-skilled workers ... but I have no idea where one would find such data.