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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Anyone in that boat will see much greater benefit from alternatives which don't cost a significant fraction of their annual income. Investing in transit and bike infrastructure saves many thousands of dollars a year and improves health outcomes for everyone.

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There’s a lot of things wrong with the electoral college in the US, but when I read comments like this I can’t say I’m entirely mad it still exists.

That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for. But if you’re going to squeeze people out of cars, you should probably have a solid plan to deal with the outcome.

When you burn a gallon of gas, do you have a solid plan to deal with the outcome?

Reality has a liberal bias, it seems.

>That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for.

My point is direct economic recovery of those externalities is going to be largely regressive, and that the idea of that investing in bicycles and buses is a suitable replacement is incomplete...particularly in non-metro regions.

You might want to reconsider my comment and ask how much of your reaction is due to whatever baggage you’re bringing rather than what I wrote. Note, for example, that I didn’t say anything about forcing people out of their cars but was instead talking about how expensive cars are – we built most of the country around having them but that means the second most expensive property purchases in the average American’s life is a big purchase which requires regular expenditures and is idle more than 90% of their life. If you’re going to use terms like “squeeze”, think about the politics behind the assumption that this is the natural order of things.

It seemed like you were positing public transit and bike infrastructure as an alternative to cars...particularly as a money saving and healthy alternative to those 'who are barely scraping by after the pandemic who have no leeway in their budget for an auto tax increas'

This may be true in some areas, but not most.

My point was that the shear inefficiency of low-use single passenger vehicles is expensive but it’s baked into the system so we tend not to notice it. Cars are a significant expense, along with the cost of insurance, maintenance, fuel, parking, taxes to pay for roads & subsidized parking, etc. but it’s so normalized that even if they’re just scraping by most people think of it as an unavoidable necessity.

The problem is that we spent most of the 20th century designing the country around cars, and especially discouraging transit as something generally for poor/brown people. Even in cities which have things like subways, urban design almost always massively prioritized suburban commuters over transit users. People make horrible financial decisions because having a big, late model vehicle is such a social status signal.

The problem is changing that puts us in a prisoner’s dilemma: on an individual level in much of the country it’s best to keep piling your money into a depreciating mostly-idle asset because you need a critical mass of riders for transit to be cost effective. Using things like higher gas taxes to pay for things like road maintenance and pollution remediation can work well but people who are used to being subsidized will complain bitterly as soon as you ask them to pay the true cost for what they use.

How do rural folk benefit from either? Distances are too great for biking and the lack of density precludes mass-transit.

"Rural folk" are going to need to come to grips with their exorbitantly subsidized lifestyle choices sooner or later. Probably sooner, since their guy is sabotaging one of their most important subsidies (near-free rural mail service) as we speak.

My understanding of a common rural view is that 'city people' restrict them unnecessarily with a lot of environmental restrictions (which may be partly true). But they don't believe they are subsidized.

In Washington state they have a report from the legislature that has spending in each county compared to tax revenues. This is very sensitive because of course Seattle money goes out to the whole state. There's a second version of that report that tries to compute the economic benefit of the rural areas, separately from the actual tax revenues, I'm sure this was created to lessen the sting.

I want to keep our economy and the people in it living. But we need to have a shared reality.

An interesting manifestation of this belief is the California separatist movement "State of Jefferson". These are people who believe that the economy of far northern California would be far stronger if they were simply allowed to clearcut every forest in the state.

One county, Lake County, had the good manners to cancel a planned vote of secession in late 2015 after the rest of the state paid to put out an enormous wildfire there.

up until 1900, 98% of people worked on farms in rural areas. IMHO it's a bit pretencious to force rural folk to move to the big cities and become Urbanite Consumers. and it is reckless to think changing the way most people have lived for 100,000 years wont trigger an even worse catastrophe.

rural folk think the same way of Urbanites as you think of them. they think everyone should get out of the cities and stop being a polluting leech who is detached from the natural state of humans living in equillibrium with nature.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, lived in a fully dispersed car-based rural landscape prior to 1900. They lived in small towns and villages, like sensible people.

Flip that question the other way: what happens if we continue ignoring externalities? They’ve been subsidized for a century but it’s also hurting people – many of the least healthy lifestyles involve regular long drives (night, lack of exercise, etc.), and climate change is going to be brutal for agriculture and forestry.

Now, also look back a century. Rural life existed - not exactly the same but also with improvements like healthier communities because people bought locally rather than driving 2 hours to Walmart or Costco. Raising the price of gas would benefit all of businesses which have been out priced by companies who don’t have to pay for externalities. Sharing a ride might seem like a good trade in comparison to learning that your staple crop no longer grows in your region or that the hundred year flood/fire is now a decadal experience.

Also, remember that this isn’t a ban on cars. It’s a financial cue pushing people to drive less, combine trips, buy the vehicle with the specs they actually need rather than the heavily-marketed guzzler, etc. People like having way more horsepower than they need but nobody is really inconvenienced without it.

You act like european rural folk and concentrate into small villages surrounded by your farms. Instead of driving to walmart for an hour, you shop at your local village.

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