Yes, people can adapt to having less mobility. That doesn’t mean mobility is useless or that removing it is without harm.
People deciding to stay home because getting around is too much hassle isn’t a victory condition.
People deciding to stay home because getting around is too much hassle isn’t a victory condition.
We throw a bunch of other people's money at K12. I suspect most families would buy fewer years of schooling if they paid the true cost.
We throw a bunch of other people's money at the military. If people had to pay the true cost of America's autonomy, they'd suck it up and learn Russian.
The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer more mobility at the same price point.
Education is fundamentally (mostly) a positional good - what it buys is the right to be considered for white-collar jobs ahead of competitors who haven't spent as much time getting educated. Families already spend as much as they can afford in education to win this tournament, the only thing that would reduce education spending is if everyone else stopped buying as much education.
In the context of schools, literally everybody benefits from population wide literacy and education. The benefits are diffuse enough that it is worth subsidizing...although we're probably hitting diminishing returns on the amount that we do spend. And the idea that we need to learn russian if we don't have a military 10x bigger than the rest of the world is a cold war rhetorical relic. Of course we could do with less military funding.
Cars though, are mostly a benefit to the occupant, and either a detriment to everybody around them, or entirely capable of being priced into the benefit of the goods they buy. Yes, I can afford paying $0.0025 more for a pound of apples if it means the trucking company pays their true costs. And why should we subsidize your drive in a BMW to your office when you can easily pay for the whole cost yourself, or take transit? Why should we be subsidizing cars over the much more efficient alternatives?
Cars and transit are competing forms of transportation...a vehicle mile not traveled is very often a fare paid. Car costs scale linearly with the number of people-miles driven, until congestion and space constraints hit and then costs scale exponentially. Transit costs are step fixed costs, and therefore the more riders the less they cost per person. When we subsidize car travel, it forces us to subsidize transit travel even more, because taking away riders makes transit less efficient. It should be remembered that before we started price capping transit companies and subsidizing roads, transit was one of the most profitable industries in the world. That's the power of the cost efficiency of transit.
So yes, mobility is important and roads shouldn't just go away, but the amount of roads and car infrastructure that we fund through general taxes is absolutely obscene and should be scaled back dramatically. Mobility can be much more efficiently provisioned to the public with transit.
Education is more of a private good than you seem to realize. It is definitely excludable and in traditional settings it is quickly becomes rival past small groups of similarly motivated people.
Self learning is not rival, i.e. my learning of something does not prevent you from being able to learn it, but then that cannot be used to justify government provision of education.
Once one learns something, it becomes part of one's human capital and one cannot be separated from it. Hence the difference between loans for college versus mortgages.
Now, in this case, people are finding out that roads are not very public goods either (even though government entities have take over provision). First, roads are excludable. Second, they tend to also be very rival when they are most needed. The reduction in capacity highlighted their nature of quickly becoming rival.
Finally, if it people actually benefited from all the time-shifting, taking ferries instead of driving, leaving home at 5 am and sleeping in the parking lot waiting for the office to open, they all had that option before the construction began. Ergo, people are made worse off by the change no matter how they are adapting.
Do you think the voters of any major city would agree that it is too easy to get from place to place?
>Mobility can be much more efficiently provisioned to the public with transit.
I think this is at least sometimes true, depending on factors like geography, density, labor costs, etc. But it's orthogonal to whether there is too much or too little mobility. You could take the efficiencies of public transport and deliver better overall mobility with the same budget. That's an easier sell for the public than "that extra hour with your kids after work is unsustainable and you don't really need it" or "having your own house in the suburbs is wasteful, share an apartment with 3 other families in the center instead."
I want the roads to be built ahead of and shaping demand. But I also want emission costs to be fully internalized be the drivers. I expect this would cut down demand for excess commuting quite sharply.
I don't mind people traveling in general, as long as we can sustainably afford it. Right now, we can't sustainably afford current levels of fossil-fueled transport.
What's to say we can sustainably afford current levels of public transport? Should construction costs and associated disruptions to the city be fully internalized by riders?
Add a full carbon tax to price of fuels, and the answer should quickly become apparent.
>The compelling cost argument, IMO, is that a subway system could offer more mobility at the same price point.
So, yes and yes?
The entire economy benefits from roads. You can’t reduce your dependence on roads for your own personal travel needs and then claim some sort of moral high ground.
Imagine the price of groceries rises to 100% of your wages, so you stop running the furnace. "If being warm were so valuable, you would still do it even when it means skipping a few meals."
Welfare is still harmed by austerity and boosted by growth.
A better line of argument, IMO: a denser environment would offer more value for less travel. Or, driving to a faraway discount store is only profitable because you pay 100% for manufactured goods and X < 100% for highway mileage.