>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
Sure but it's rarely free parking, and when it is, it's generally because the property owners are essentially paying for it.
I don't believe that's true.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.
When the cost is being borne by every single tax payer, then it's functionally equivalent.
Cars are easily one of the most subsidies goods in America. It's absolutely absurd how many trillions of dollars we dump into making automobiles work, even if they make no sense.
And parking minimums are constantly criticized for being higher than necessary. How could they possibly not be higher than necessary in a significant percentage of use cases, when they don’t allow anyone to say “we don’t serve people who arrive at my locavore socialist workers co-op by car so we don’t need parking” - instead they get the same amount of parking as any other restaurant, which is too much.
Which city is more natural — New York or Houston — and why?
Urban sprawl, and it's fucking awful.
Having driven around Houston trust me, nobody wants a city like that. Cities should be centrally planned, because otherwise you just expand out forever in pursuit of cheaper and cheaper land. Until you have to drive 2 hours to get from one side of town to the other.