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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

> I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those.

No, you aren't.

- Suburbanites are being subsidized by city-dwellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s

- The gas for your car is heavily subsidized.

- You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads.

- Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year.

I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.

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There's more to this world than cities and suburbs. Ever visited actual countryside? Most of the the larger roads out there are necessary to deliver food and other goods to cities. When they have to exist anyway, it would seem incredibly stupid to tax private car ownership outside of cities more than necessary.

The amount of people living in the countryside compared to the rest of the population is so small that it is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

A lot of those roads could be train tracks instead, FWIW. "Most of the larger roads are necessary to deliver food to cities?" Not at all. The smaller roads leading to a hub? Absolutely. But roads have terrible throughput.

And as others have mentioned, just because something is necessary, doesn't mean we should subsidise it. Especially when rail and (contextually) river shipping exist and are often cheaper.

> The gas for your car is heavily subsidized

Maybe in US. In Europe this is not the case. On the contrary gas is heavily taxed.

I would love to see a study that explores whether those taxes cover the negative externalities compared to other forms of transit, because that seems incredibly unlikely.

I've seen several different takes on that. They vary on how they value the externalities, and which components of the transit infrastructure they consider subsidies. For example, you could consider all infrastructure subsidies, or you could claim that basic 1+1 lane roads are essential infrastructure, while everything beyond that is subsidized.

The conclusions vary, except that they generally agree that driving in dense urban areas is heavily subsidized. And if you accept the roads as essential infrastructure claim, driving in rural areas is too heavily taxed.

Gas is the worst example of a subsidy - a better example would be the mandatory parking built everywhere, which is usually free.

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