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No yank-tanks are required to accommodate people with disabilities - quite the opposite, car-oriented infrastructure limits their agency in society.
We also shouldn't force everybody to drive a car everywhere they need to go just because some tiny percentage of people may need a car to drive around. Frankly, we'd probably have fewer disabled people in the first place if they had to move around more.
Disabled people have lots of current issues with the current system. It's possible you're already working to address those but if not this doesn't seem like an honest concern.
Huh? If no one is driving who is paying gas taxes? Road tolls everywhere?
My issue is that the previous post said they would pay for public transportation and walkable carless cities through increase gas taxes and road tolls.
Or you raise the cost to ride public transportation or pay for those things from somewhere else (like property taxes).
The fewer miles people drive, the more money the government has available for other things.
Yes if everything else is kept the same. People's income. Business profits. Etc.
However you're overlooking the point spending on transportation infrastructure which is to get resources from one location to another.
People drive to work where their income is taxed. Businesses have things delivered to them to sell and have ways to get customers to them. So now the business is paying taxes. And people use that income they earned to pay for rent or own a home so there's property taxes.
Now let's just remove the way people get about to doing all those things because that would save the government money from spending money on transportation.
Oh great no one is going in to work. No one is going to business or shop. No one is paying taxes. But hey we saved a bunch of money by not building roads.
Please read that I am not opposed to changing our society to be less car dependent (obviously for the environment it is better)
I am objecting to the notion that you can pay for a carless society by just not paying for roads or by imposing taxes on cars more without raising taxes or fees elsewhere.
No, congestion pricing removes the obstacles slowing people down from doing all those things. Take for instance a plumber who still has to drive around. Yes, they have to pay the congestion charge, but they also spend way less time stuck in traffic and can probably bill an extra job or two that day. Same for UPS drivers, etc.
> No one is going to business or shop.
Actually, studies from all over the world consistently show that when you make driving less attractive, it's a net positive for merchants: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/every-stu...
Regardless what you're saying completely ignores my actual objection here. Which is paying for infrastructure through something that you just eliminated.
You've also effectively eliminated owning a car in the city. So now you're asking rural residents to pay for more expensive gas and more expensive toll roads while giving all that money to people living in the city.
I have a feeling politically that would be rather unpopular.
Very few people drive in the NYC area anyway. I think 30% of people? It's not a big deal.
But we're talking about New York city so you've already granted the port authority wide latitude and restricting your movements and controlling the population.
Public transit can easily be 1st class transit with freedom, as long as it's prioritized as such. When transit has to fight with vehicles, it's strictly worse, and discourages usage.... Unless you're in the poverty class and have to.
Roads are high speed infrastructure to get from 1 area to the next. We call them highways and interstates. WE NEED THOSE.
Streets are the downtown, slow speed where human scale stuff happens. It's also where transit should be. These are also needed.
Those 2 or 4 lane highish speed abominations where businesses are loosely connected by asphalt oceans are "stroads". They do both a street and a road terribly, induce sprawl, and are terrible for anyone not in a vehicle.
And sheesh, with your polemic, depriotizing motor vehicles doesn't cause you to lose freedom... AS LONG AS OTHER MODES OF TRANSIT ARE EASIER/BETTER.
I’m not allowed to drive my car on sidewalks or bike paths, but that doesn’t mean we live in some dystopian nightmare where the right to free travel is restricted and I have to show papers everywhere I go.
I'm pretty sure GP is responding to this, which while I appreciate the transparency, is atrocious. Creating negative incentives just makes people angry, and generally surfaces a lot of inequality.
I just went on a long haul train ride with my dad who is heavily disabled. The people on the train were nice but trains are very clearly built around the concept of able bodied people. There's a single bathroom for disabled people and it's inside one of the sleeper rooms. He basically had to sequester himself in his room for 24 hours. Meanwhile, my dad can drive a car.
Maybe before we go making hyperbolic statements that are sure to encourage decision making that results in gross inequality we should think about the basics of a problem first.
But a lot of folks in this thread came to defend someone who analogs cars to enslavement and championed making them so expensive people can't afford them.
Of course, like other infrastructure, its not necessarily meant to pay for itself directly, so long as economic growth makes up for it, but I think there's many cases where adding another lane to thr highway costs more than it enables. Frankly a lot of the road construction seems like a grift to me - how many hours can we take to resurface this section of the interstate ? Easy place to pour money - the roads always need repair, and yet, with all the bridges and tunnels failing with inadequate upkeep, one wonders if the money ever touches the ground.
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Loosely enforced speed limits
Arbitrary setting of speed limits
Free, off-street parking mandated in building codes
Low Housing density induced sprawl and car requirement
Exempting pickup trucks and SUVs from emissions laws
Lack of vehicle safety laws to protect pedestrians and cyclists
Aftermarket products exploit a lack of regulations
Mandatory Insurance law: payout requirements
A mortgage interest deduction drives suburban sprawl
Tax laws favor car ownership
Tax formulas favor car commuting over public transit, biking, and employer van pools
Pedestrians have limited ability to sue drivers
Pedestrians can’t sue car makers for defects
Hit and runs are rarely prosecuted
Out-of-pocket car expenses don’t cover the cost of roads
.... Is this a good start, wussboy?
I am free to move across borders, it's my car that requires paperwork and requires that I submit to detainment and harassment by any cop I happen to pass by.
Having a car is great for doing your own thing on your own schedule, but it's also an expensive liability. I'd rather live in a world where I'm not compelled to take on this liability just to get across town.
This is a bizarre argument. Cars are heavily policed: they must be registered and licensed. The state tells you where you can park it, and your ability to operate it is completely controlled by the state and can be taken away from you. In order for car infrastructure to function, there is a huge increase in police presence in people's lives to enforce traffic rules, parking, etc. None of this is true of, say, walking, biking, or taking transit, all of which are pretty unregulated, even in New York City.