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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Taxpayers (and residents in general) of the USA pay out the nose for streets and roads, parking, car-centric planning requirements, massive subsidies to suburban sprawl, fossil fuel industry subsidies, lives lost and healthcare costs due to automobile pollution and traffic injuries/deaths, and the follow-on high cost of everything else in the society. (And let’s not even get started on global climate change.)

Paying for rail infrastructure is not fundamentally different, except insofar as it is generally cheaper, more efficient, and long-term much healthier for the society.

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Probably the right solution is charging for all public roads, not making trains free.

And after that, make sure everyone pays for using public air

If there's some externality in the way that someone is using public air, like burning garbage in their backyard, then they should be expected to pay for it

Not opposed to the idea. Implementation, on the other hand, would be tricky.

That's unironically a good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax

I was talking about individuals but thanks for pointing about one of the biggest scams regarding climate change.

It had to be said that I am not at all opposed to the idea of accepting one's responsibility. It's just that how would we implement something like that in a non-dystopian way?

As American housing is mostly sprawling and low density, it isn’t terribly well suited to mass transport like rail in most places. Perhaps light rail or even (eventually) self driving cars might work better. Alternatively, change planning rules to encourage higher density although it is probably already too late for any meaningful change.

Might not be too late. Car culture has heavily influenced planning in the States. If the focus shifted to public transportation maybe the planning would follow, though it'd take a lot of time to change

There’s little point putting in transit if dense development isn’t also allowed to follow. I concur though that it’s not too late.

Especially if you consider, car-centric development is bankrupting many smaller US cities. There’s a strong economic case for promoting dense, mid-rise, mixed-use development: it brings in much more in property taxes relative to the cost of city services required.

Simply put, every foot of road or pipe or power cable serves far more people (and economic activity) with dense development.

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