Don’t Pause the Gas Tax, Redirect It | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Pause the Gas Tax, Redirect It

strongtowns.org

23 pointschmaynard8 comments

This appears to be a brutally cynical attempt to stop giving rural states subsidies they waste on pointless roads by wrapping it in language they've been trained to have positive associations with.

Well, maybe it’s time for rural states to pull themselves up as they’re often fond of saying.

Interesting to see this with states autonomy in mind, and the callout to the perverse incentives.

The gas tax and fuel exploration subsidies should be redirected for the future.

Imagine a country where these funded Amtrak (or local train - inclusive of passenger and freight initiatives). Where economic mobility is maximized, and traffic at city interconnections is more limited.

If Amtrak were more efficient, why would it need to become a parasite of gas users? It would thrive on its own.

Amtrak is in the position it’s in because they don’t own most of the rails they use, and the freight railroads which do run very carefully optimized operations because they’re competing against the heavily-subsidized road system, not to mention how the lack of something like a carbon tax means that more polluting trucks don’t pay for the damage they do.

Putting taxes on the things we don’t want encourages use of alternatives. If we want to tackle climate change we should be taxing everything related to CO2 emissions, and using those proceeds to fund far less polluting transportation systems - especially trains which can easily be electrified & run on renewable power – is an important long-term step to reducing the CO2 footprint of things like manufacturing vehicles.

Road/car dominance wasn’t exactly established in a free market either.

There’s a whole host of subsidies for building/maintaining roads paid for by everyone [1]. There’s the regulatory advantages driving has (ex: the common zoning requirement that new construction ensure enough parking space [2]). There’s the negative externalities of highways/roadways. (Ex: the health impacts of pollution[3], and the health impacts of sitting in a car rather than walking/biking (part of the way) to their destination [4])

[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51... [2] https://www.planning.org/planning/2018/oct/peopleoverparking... [3] https://theicct.org/new-study-quantifies-the-global-health-i... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8744747/

Amtrak has positive externalities on gas users. More accessible public transit usage means less traffic and more efficient travel. [0] "Would you pay $X/month to have less traffic?" likely is a resounding "Yes" for some value of X greater than zero.

Subsidizing public transit is a good idea, and benefits those who don't use it.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/near-free-public-transp...

You can just do this directly with a congestion tax, but those are extraordinary unpopular.

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