Hacker News Reader

Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

It really is an unreal subsidy.

Imagine if you had a product that you really wanted to sell, but were having trouble because every sale required 110 square feet of earth to be set aside.

And then, miraculously, the government, with an insanely heavy hand about it, terraforms the fucking planet to achieve compatibility for hundreds of millions of your devices.

I'm not sure any class of corporate operation has ever gotten a more exacting and widespread easement for its business model.

In 2020, there was a newly houseless guy (unemployed in the early pandemic panic) on my block who a few of us knew. He set up a tent in a street parking spot. And when the cops came and forced him to move on (with, I will point out, what seemed like empathetic body language), I remember pantomiming their position as, "You can't live here - this is where the person who lives <there> (points to nearby house) puts their car when they aren't using it."

View on HN

Now compute how much government receives in taxes and fees. Driver's license, sales taxes on new and used cars, fuel taxes, tolls, etc.

Car sold new @ $40,000 (Pennsylvania taxes at 6%) = $2400 in tax; same car sold used @$12,000 = $720 in tax; car sold again @$3000 = $180 in tax. Total taxes on 1x $40K car = $3300.

Cars kept to 200K miles, 25mpg = 8000 gallons of fuel used;according to EIA https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10 average state and federal taxes on fuel are about 50 cents per gallon, thus, $4000.

So just there you have (for a typical PA car) over $7300 per vehicle in taxes over the car's lifetime.

Which, last time I checked, still does not come close to paying for the roads and road-maintenance outside of dense urban areas. And obviously pales in comparison to the value of the land taken up by the car (and the supporting road infrastructure) in dense urban areas.

Show your math, as I did... remember that the typical 18-wheeler easily pays over $25k/year in fuel taxes as well.

Damage to roads scales by weight to the 4th power. So a normal 2000lb car does .00004 percent as much damage as an 18 wheeler.

A 2000lbs car is far below normal. A 2022 Camry weighs 3,340 lbs. SUVS are significantly more. The electric F150 is 8,250 lbs gross (!)

That's fair. The electric F150 at 8250lbs, which is obnoxiously heavy, does .011% as much damage as an 18 wheeler.

The point is the same, an 18 wheeler does >99.9 percent of all the damage on the roads. Trucks absolutely do not come anywhere even remotely close to paying for the damage they create. The entire transportation system in the US is a trillion dollar subsidy to the trucking industry.

That being said, I'm fine with that. I also don't want tomatoes to cost $11.

Agreed— I think a lot of people's perceptions of 1) the size of vehicles, and 2) the sheer amount of resources to them are woefully uncalibrated.

Last I looked into this, those 18-wheelers are among the worst as far as not paying for the damage their vehicles do, despite what they do pay. They do a lot of damage. We effectively provide a huge subsidy to trucking.

> Imagine if you had a product that you really wanted to sell, but were having trouble because every sale required 110 square feet of earth to be set aside.

Isn't that only like 1% of the average house's lot size? You make it sound like most houses wouldn't require any space if not for parking.

You aren't even capturing the tiniest fraction of the scale. For one, it's not just street parking... it's the roads/streets themselves.

Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.

In defense of Ford, GM and Chrysler; it is also a subsidy to BMW, Toyota and Tesla.

Sure, today. They weren't around for the larger part of that time period though, at least not on this continent.

Oh of course. Of course!

I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!"

Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.

Please leave a 4-ft-wide path for bikes though.

Well, and the people who use cars...

Infrastructure is a subsidy for everyone. With roads you can build a building anywhere and get stuff delivered to it, you can get customers from a wide area to come to your location, you can access a variety of suppliers, you can hire workers from a wide area, you can live anywhere and still get things like emergency services. It's a subsidy for construction, it's a subsidy for retail, its a subsidy for manufacturing, it's a subsidy for agriculture. We were building roads for millenia before the invention of the car, and for good reason. That's the whole point of infrastructure - it helps everyone, often indirectly, and thus it makes sense to share the burden of its construction and maintenance.

if it was one lane it would be a reasonable public good for everyone, as public transit and delivery doesn't use that much, but it's a lot more than that.

The reason we have 8 lane highways etc is because of private automobile use, and the enormous space inefficiency of automobiles, of private vehicles being driven back and forth with single travellers in them.

We've gone too deep into fundamentally inefficient private automobile use and are having to spend a fortune on the infrastructure to keep that paradigm functional.

Except there are tons of people who derive massive benefits from private vehicles that can be driven between arbitrary locations at arbitrary times by single travelers. And for the most part it is single lane roads - no one is building an 8 lane superhighway to a farmhouse. You only see such large infrastructure near hubs where all those smaller roads are coming together. Yeah, maybe the people who live and work within a city don't benefit much from the infrastructure directly, but the people who commute to or from it do.

Screaming truth into the void. The only explanation for the downvotes and asinine arguments against what you're saying throughout this thread is denial.

Didn't roads exist for millennia before cars did? Were they a subsidy for nothing and basically just burning money before?

I could take a picture of some roads around me if you like, and you can compare them to the goat path that existed between any two ancient cities that you like.

I think I remember reading that when the Matrix sequel came out, they spent something like $10 million building a 1-mile length of highway. I assume that this was neither much cheaper nor much more expensive than building the real would have been.

Which fallacy is it when you make a false equivalence between some gigantic construction product in the modern world, and someone having cleared some brush in the pre-modern world, all because we happen to use the same word to label both things?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com