Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident.
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
As someone that lived in Switzerland, that is great as long as one doesn't live in small towns outside train lines, with buses that only go up to 9PM during the week, or hardly run during weekends.
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Not for all the other people around you, no.
Their loss. But that's simply yet another reason to move towards a market-based approach; people can choose whatever works best for them as an individual even if others think it's a terrible choice.
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.
That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.
I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.
The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
[1] https://carsbibles.com/what-percentage-of-oil-is-used-for-ca...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics.
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
> for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly
Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).
As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases,
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
>I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position.
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
This isn't my experience, but I understand some countries have overloaded public transit systems. When I've been in those countries, it's been simple enough to just let an overloaded train pass and grab the next one.
Ok but you let that train pass you might lose the connection to the bus at the other end. Or the next train or bus might not be for half an hour. Now you're late to wherever you were going.
Right, so, again, it sounds like your public transit is underfunded or something. Where I live I can depend on there being another train within 8 minutes no matter where I'm going, or a bus, or I can just hop on a ubike and I can be confident there'll be a space and station within a couple hundred meters.
I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.
During the rush hour, the next train is going to be just as packed. And if you wait long enough for things to quiet down, you're not going to be at work on time.
This doesn't happen to me where I live. It's time to increase your city's transportation budget!
In many S and RE trains in Germany you do get to strecht a lot, assuming you manage to get into the wagon.