I am skeptical that a 180% tax on fuel-powered cars is good policy, however I can see the point given that Denmark is extremely concerned about the environment.
That said, I think that the same bracket on electric cars is a truly draconian measure.
That said, I think that the same bracket on electric cars is a truly draconian measure.
It must be so nice to have the wisdom needed to prescribe everyone else's lifestyle.
With all due respect, there are about 5,999,999,998 people on Earth who didn't ask you or the grandparent poster.
[1] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt...
Then we don't need to conduct a poll to determine what lifestyle everyone else is going to be forced into.
You're entitled to your opinions, and maybe you're even entitled to your own facts in this remarkable age in which we find ourselves living. But either way, when you presume to speak for others, you should expect to be called out for it. "Quality of life" is a pretty subjective thing
It absolutely is, but that doesn't mean you can't know anything about it. You can research subjective things by asking people how they feel about their quality of life. How happy they are. It turns out that in general, people with long commutes in areas dominated by cars are less happy than people who bicycle to work.
Hmm. Maybe you're right. That sounds entirely free from the possible influence of any additional factors.
Sure, I would like my own single family home, as long as I have access to all the other people and activities that make life worthwhile. Even better, I would like to have a castle in the wilderness, permitting no entrance without permission, with a teleporter so I can instantly commute to civilization.
In the real world, we balance the things that we desire with what we need and what we can pay. Would you want to live in a single-family home if you had to pay what it really costs? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/2/a-thousand-hidd...
In California, some of us recognize that castles are sprawl that destroys the wilderness. http://www.sfhac.org
Just as one example, the light rail lines in my metro does not even make enough in fares to cover operating expenses (which is actually a stated goal of out MetroTransit authority), much less their initial construction or ongoing maintenance costs.
In particular, mass transit works if the average number passengers per mile is pretty high. The most obvious way to do that is to have a lot of homes and destinations close to each other, so the cars have a lot of passenger trips per vehicle trip. And then to take care of crowding, they can have higher frequency service and longer hours, which make mass transit more attractive, allowing more people to take transit instead of cars. Transit and housing are interconnected.
If you start from a sprawled, low-density city, then light rail doesn't work economically.
Bummer.
Again, corruption covered by unlimited debt financing. It’s like the US has the worst version imaginable of all sorts of common things. Of course the LRT is not going to make back its costs if it’s not even designed to make back its costs. The best it can do is to be more efficient at getting people to their destinations than spending that amount on roads and parking garages.
Passenger rail used to be a profitable privately financed business, but they all went bankrupt because car infrastructure was massively subsidized, surface rail was missing its schedules due to congestion from cars, and operators were forbidden by law from charging enough to cover their expenses. Now, the existing public transit systems are subsidized by the government, with a few profitable routes that require a lot of unprofitable routes to make them viable; and a farebox recovery ratio of 35% is considered pretty high.
Also, I have learned not to trust Americans when they use words like “very dense.” Looking at ZipAtlas.com, the densest zip code in the Minneapolis-St Paul area has a bit less than 16,000 people per square mile. I think of San Francisco as being not very dense, and it averages over 18,000 people per square mile; over 53,000 in the densest zip code.
Also, the world isn't my problem, just my neighborhood, and there we're making a lot of progress.
It looks to me a lot about the story that if you run, you'll sweat. If you sweat, you'll take a cold. If you take a cold, you'll sneeze. If you sneeze, you'll catch pneumonia. And if you catch pneumonia you'll die. So don't run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_density
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2011/06/fun-with-urban-trans...
I think most western states are struggling with how to transcend from living off income and environmental taxes to living off something else though, as automation and green tech frees us from former burdens.