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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

IMO, if you wanted to change things, you'd have to penalize driving by eliminating subsidies and/or introduce taxes on non-commercial vehicles and fuel. Then pair that with policies that discourage urban sprawl and encourage investment in public transportation.

We know this can work because the run up on crude caused miles driven to decline.

But that requires some serious political will, and that ain't gonna happen.

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Taxes are also a problematic solution because they tend to be regressive. Poor people often can't afford efficient cars and living in a place with good public transportation is a luxury in many places. Poor people's jobs are not typically the ones that allow telecommuting.

In general I'm a fan of taxing pollutants to account for their true costs, but it's not as straightforward as it might appear.

A corresponding increase in income transfers or income tax progression can be used to offset this effect. Then the low pressure ncome person can choose to use the increased income to pay for gas price increase or use it for something else.

The problem is that it's too late. Urban sprawl already grew so much that it's out of hand, it looks next to impossible to make a public transportation network that would rival the ones we have on our side of the pond. It's not just lack of political (and voter) will, it's simply the sheer impracticality of implementing it.

Then why are there discussions on gentrification. There are reasons why individuals are moving back into the city, especially the up and coming class of individuals. The new comers to the city are fighting urban sprawl by making the move.

It's a small minority. Even more interesting, while gentrification is arguably the solution/balancing phenomena to this problem, it's generally speaking a term with a negative connotation associated with it.

Only because most US cities do a piss poor job of providing housing support for the poor. That's a failure of policy, not gentrification itself.

I don't see how these problems are insurmountable with a gradually increasing carbon tax. (Setting aside the issue of political will.)

Wouldn't that be tantamount to making it too expensive to live in the country?

The problem here is that discouraging people from driving is going to cause serious problems, because they aren't going to move closer: the housing is too expensive. Just look at all the problems with housing prices in California in the news lately.

Seriously, who really wants to spend so much time sitting in traffic? But in many places, it simply isn't affordable to live close to work, and the design of our cities makes dense living infeasible or impossible. This is a failure of government, and I don't see how it's possible to fix it because we aren't electing people who will, we're electing people who perpetuate the status quo at best.

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