Hacker News Reader

Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

How would the economy function without infrastructure and affordable transportation?

We should have infrasteucture, but uts about who is paying for it.

As a non-user of cars, I still pay for highways. But a non-user of trains doesn't pay for railways.

Buyers of electric cars get more cash subsidy than my ebike costs to build! Why don't we give out same subsidy to people who want yo buy a bike or to spend on railway tickets?

I am a user of Cycles, and I don't get shit - I dont even get space to ride - there are almost no dedicated roads for bikes.

For the ampunt we spend on fixing roads, we could give everyone a new ebike every two years.

Airplabes are even worse. Ebikes, Cars and trains pay taxes on fuel and electricity, but airplanes don't.

So why are subsidies distributed so unfairly? At least make them equal

Everyone uses transport. Theoretically if you owned your own land and lived like a stone age person, making everything from scratch, using nothing in a modern economy then I guess yes the argument could be made you shouldn’t pay as much, but it’s such an unlikely situation it’s not worth legislating for. Actually even then, you need to be defended by your State from people who would take your land by force. So everyone uses transport whether they realize it or not.

This statement does nothing to address the unevenness of how transportation is funded. Train service in America is a joke and at the same time we've decided this[1] highway was somehow worth building. America has been investing immense amounts of capital into highway construction for decades and that investment has come at the expense of mass transit that could actually handle the transportation of millions of people up and down the eastern seaboard. Cars are an extremely space and energy inefficient method of transportation, we definitely need them for some purposes - but the fact that they're the default option for people's daily commute is bonkers.

Everyone may use transport, and everyone may benefit from transport - but that does very little to address the extreme imbalance in transport funding we've seen in America.

1. (The Katy Freeway) https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/b856accd-c3e3-4d97-8365-327...

Agree with your general sentiment but want to point out that is not the Katy Freeway. This is: https://s.hdnux.com/photos/30/10/14/6325030/32/450x0.jpg

Holy shit.

We don’t fund lots of potential transport modes, like canals, blimps, or horse carriage ways. Dollar per dollar, region specific studies in the US show that we get more out of roads, which is why the money goes there. It’s just about basic economics.

I don't accept the assumption that the US gets more potential value out of roads than trains and buses - I do accept that currently the train infrastructure is so insanely poor that nobody wants to ride it.

I think if we take a look at the world at large we'd see that the eastern seaboard and southern california could look a lot more like the Rhine valley and the lowlands while improving quality of life for residents.

Roads need to exist and I am not trying to say they don't - but they shouldn't be the primary transit option for most people on most of their routes.

Isn't this circular reasoning? Rails are terrible, so nobody uses them, hence nobody invests, hence poor ROI. Roads are heavily invested, so are usable to the point it is uneconomical to use any alternative, so roads get more investment, etc.

Plenty of people use rail in the US just for carrying goods instead of people. It turns out trains are most efficient at hauling large loads with high tolerances for latency, which humans are not and do not have.

I would like to direct your attention to Europe where they can do both and the passenger train service is extremely well run and used widely.

Except busses and airplane flights tend to be much cheaper than train tickets there (excluding subways/local trains). If trains were so efficient that would likely be shown in the pricing.

While in Spain for several months it was only economical for me to take a train a single time. It was several times more expensive than the alternatives in every other case. This left me either flying or bussing.

In Stockholm it's actually cheaper to take a bus to the airport than the train, and that's just local travel.

because trains pylay for railways but busses dont pay for the road

That's not necessarily true. Fuel taxes and registration pay for road construction and most railway construction is heavily subsidized by governments.

denser residential (or godforbid! mixed use) areas would require less capex and opex, so they would require less public funding

Indeed, basically the entire built environment is one giant fossil fuel subsidy. Almost all construction in the past ~200 years, certainly since WW2, has been malinvestment based on artificially cheap fossil energy.

Really, you can say that the industrial revolution is defined by energy getting exponentially and artificially cheaper as we got better at digging up burnable stuff, burning it, and using the resulting energy to do stuff, including digging up more burnable stuff even faster.

There wouldn't be no infrastructure, it would just have to be scaled back to a level where it could be paid for with real surpluses rather than the fake surplus created by pretending that only digging up oil and coal have a cost, while burning it is free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com