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Comment by rtlfe | Hacker News Reader

Driving a car is not a requirement for any of those professions.

My comment had nothing to do with requirements. If I drive a car, and it causes pollution where I live, then aren't I, as part of society, paying the "true" cost? I say "where I live" because every car trip I take starts and ends at my front door.

I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming.

> I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming.

The point is that everybody pays the costs whether they drive or not. If the costs were more directly tied to how much each person drives, there would be a lot less driving overall.

What they mean is that the vehicle-specific costs they incur aren't sufficient to cover the true costs to society, from pollution cleanup to road maintenance. Instead, those funds must be drawn from general sources like income taxes. Once you account for social ills like pollution, the costs end up falling disproportionately on the people who can least afford them and contribute the least to the problem.

Road maintenance is paid for by property taxes. You have to be a home owner to pay property taxes. The costs don't disproportionately fall on those who are least able to afford them, but on those who have the most invested in a local, tangible asset (i.e. homeowners, business owners, landowners, etc.)

It is partially but not exclusively paid for by property taxes. It's actually a fairly small share of funding in some cases. The BATIC institute gives the numbers 5% and 1% for highways and transit funding respectively [1]. Moreover, funding is not evenly distributed here. Suburbs tend to have massive road networks and long commutes, but comparatively low property taxes. This creates a shortfall that generally gets made by with sales taxes and general funds.

[1] http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/fun...

> If I drive a car, and it causes pollution where I live, then aren't I, as part of society, paying the "true" cost?

No, because part of the cost is the fact that pollution in that area affects everyone -- including non-drivers. You're paying part of the cost, yes, but not the whole thing.

Imagine if there was some mechanism such that non-drivers inhaled as much pollution as there'd be if there were no cars*, and drivers inhaled as much pollution as is proportional to however much pollution they themselves create (this would vary not just based on a binary do/do not drive, but on how much you drive and how polluting your vehicle is). Then each person would be paying the true cost.

A true cost has to be proportional to the damage done, such that changing behavior results in changing cost paid.

* leaving aside the impracticality of zero non-electric cars for the moment

The conclusion is total bunk, and you can only reach it by selecting which externalities you want to measure, and which externalities you want to ignore. For instance the fact that a car owner can travel large distances to work or spend money any time they like is a massively beneficial externality. You also have to ignore the externalities that the non-car-owners benefit from. If somebody has managed to situate themselves in an ideal location for them specifically to live without a car, then they almost certainly only managed to do that by benefitting from the positive externalities created by car owners (unless they’re living in the woods or something).

> For instance the fact that a car owner can travel large distances to work or spend money any time they like is a massively beneficial externality.

You shouldn't have to travel long distances to do those things. This is only considered normal in the US because so much was built specifically for the convenience of drivers.

It takes 10 minutes to drive 5 miles at 30mph, walking that same distance would take a typical person about 90 minutes. 5 miles is a large distance and wanting to go somewhere that’s 5 miles away is normal for any place in the world.

> wanting to go somewhere that’s 5 miles away is normal for any place in the world

In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home, and if your job is farther you can ride a train.

Edit - For people familiar with the NYC region, here's a 5 miles radius from midtown. https://imgur.com/a/cfIqOvo This is an enormous area, and my rough guess is that 4 million people live in that circle.

As I said:

> If somebody has managed to situate themselves in an ideal location for them specifically to live without a car, then they almost certainly only managed to do that by benefitting from the positive externalities created by car owners

I can, and frequently do, walk to my nearest supermarket. But I know for a fact that if cars disappeared for a day then it would be unable to open its doors. These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.

I live 9 miles away from my office though, so that would be a lot more difficult.

> In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home

I’m sure if you wanted to undo 80+ years of economic development, we’d be able to recreate that society… that economic development is of course one of the positive externalities you’re choosing to ignore. So if this is your agenda, I’d suggest you try to figure out how catastrophically devastating that would be for the economy first.

> These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.

That's completely backward. Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

That’s really a completely different topic. I’m talking about the positive economic externalities of private vehicle ownership. Those massively beneficial externalities exist for cities whether rural areas exist or not. Any analysis of the externalities of vehicle ownership is simply agenda-driven nonsense if it doesn’t account for that.

It's the same thing. Private car ownership requires suburbs and suburbs require car ownership. In properly dense city areas (not single family zones that technically are within the limits of a city) car ownership is impractical and there's very little of it.

The agenda is not manufacturing more vehicles than we need. Those privately-owned vehicles are idle most of the time. In rural areas, if you need a ride, book it in advance and it will arrive 5 minutes before you need it. In the city, walk 2 minutes to the nearest vehicle, and drive it to your home if you need to pick something up.

Public transit should include automobiles.

This seems obviously falsifiable to me. There are many cities worldwide where private vehicle ownership (and use) is a fraction of what it is in common US cities (though of course, NYC would be an example that is actually within the US). Are you suggesting that London, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul or NYC are in some way suffering because less people there own and/or use private vehicles for transportation?

As so many have pointed out in this sub-thread, and so many other places, the pattern of US urban and suburban development for the last 80 years has essentially assumed the predominance of private vehicle ownership and use. It's not a surprise, therefore, that within these patterns of developments, car ownership and use brings significant benefits (even if it also causes significant negative externalities). However, what is also true is that these patterns of development severely penalize lack of car ownership in a way that not even old world cities do. My sister who lives in London leaves her car parked for roughly 95% of the time and moves around by mass transit. If she had no vehicle (like her daughter, also in London), her life would change very little. By contrast, the resident of most US cities and essentially all suburbs who attempts to live without a car will be hamstrung in most areas of their life.

The entire topic of this sub-thread is that the supposed “true cost” of driving a car is imposed upon society via negative externalities. It is true that those negative externalities exist, however if you want to quantify the “true cost” of vehicle ownership, then you need to account for all externalities, not only the ones that support your point of view. The OP in this sub-thread makes no mention of those confounding externalities at all, and therefore their entire premise is without merit. Making reference to any of the small number of cities around the world where the economy is somewhat less reliant on private vehicle ownership doesn’t falsify that at all.

It falsifies to the extent that it demonstrates that you can build successful communities at scale, where people want to live, businesses want to operate, and things fundamentally work, without designing them around the positive externalities of widely owned and used private vehicles. More pertinently, in cities that meet the above concept (i.e. most cities in the world outside of N. America), there are few or no positive externalities associated with widely owned and used private vehicles, so "balancing" all the externalities essentially falls back to the negatives.

> small number of cities

Hilarious. The cities for which this is most obviously true contain a huge proportion of worldwide human population. And most cities in most of the world outside of N. America have this as a fundamental truth because of their history (in many of them, residents are coming to recognize the enormous downsides of superimposing private vehicles on a city infrastructure designed around other means of moving around).

So yes, it's true that if you design a contemporary N. American city around widespread ownership and use of private vehicles, there are some positive externalities associated with said vehicles, and they should be taken into account when quantifying the "true cost" of those vehicles in that context.

But if you for any reason do not want that to be a guiding force in the design, and maybe even worse, if you accidentally screw up the design, not only do the positive externalities vanish, but the negative externalities grow in scale and scope.

> Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas

Rural, perhaps, but not suburbs. Most of those studies play fast-and-loose with the term 'metropolitan area'. Most metros include inner-ring suburbs, outer-ring, and generally the exurbs as well. It's only once you start talking about 1.5-2 hours out from a major city does it become 'rural'.

At least with the metro I'm familiar with (Philly), the surrounding counties (suburbs) vastly subsidize the city itself. The wealthy taxpayers live in those 'burbs and commute in to work. The explosion of remote working, and the commiserate loss of city-wage-tax from those that used to commute, is already straining the system. If remote work continues at this level, many downtown areas could implode.

https://vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-metropolitan-areas/

You're most definitely American. It's not like that where I live.

I don't know how to drive a car. I have lived in Canada, India, and now The Netherlands.

Structures giving preference to personal automobiles are a civic failure, pure and simple.

> You're most definitely American. It's not like that where I live.

I currently live in Auckland, New Zealand. Other cities that I have lived in for at least 1 year include Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seattle, Ft Lauderdale, Wellington, Berlin, London and Nairobi.

Your comment is an ad hominem, which is a logical fallacy, and you should be ashamed of using it. But in addition to that, it’s an ad hominem based on and assumption you made, and that assumption is incorrect. I would honestly recommend that you set your standards for yourself much higher than this.

To be fair, Auckland is a massively car-centric city and I would imagine it’s on a par with most US cities in that sense.

To your later point: automobile availability could certainly have benefits. Park 8 pick-up cars and 2 pick-up minivans in a neighbourhood of 100 households and nobody needs to own a car.

Need to travel further? Public transit or your country is embarassing.

You ignore bikes and usable public transport, which a lot of places in the world have.

In addition to the point already made about people who do not drive paying those costs too, you're also missing the externalities that affect others for health related reasons, and not yourself (and others with your good fortune).

Many things are not a requirement for survival, but we still like to do them.

Yes, driving a car to get from A to B in (usually) the fastest and most comfortable way wastes some energy and generates some pollution... but so does reading a book (wood for paper, ink, energy for lighting), eating any non-local food, eating meat, sex not for procreation, etc.

> some energy and generates some pollution... but so does .... sex not for procreation

I think sex for procreation is likely the one thing you could possibly do with the highest resulting pollution.

Yeah those were terrible examples. But more proper ones would be: truck and van drivers for mail, food and other delivery to stores, bus drivers, taxi drivers, farmers, police, EMT, etc.

Those could all be less reliant on cars than they currently are too. For example:

* UPS is trying "equad" bikes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ups-tries-out-equad-elect...

* London has bike paramedics: https://www.londonambulance.nhs.uk/calling-us/who-will-treat...

* Most taxi rides in urban areas could easily be replaced with e-pedicabs

That's not how bike paramedics work. From your link:

> They are able to reach patients quickly and start to give life-saving treatment while an ambulance is on the way.

You still need an ambulance, because that person is going to need to go to hospital in nearly all cases except the most trivial "fell over while drunk" cases, and backies are impractical for the average person in need of a paramedic.

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