Marcus_Ti

Changing population growth doesn't necessarily mean anything WRT traffic. Currently for example the USA has 0.7 cars per capita on the roads...which is actually down nearly half from the 1.5+ cars per capita of a few decades ago.

Our problem is when most kids turns 16 they get a car....and the way our infrastructure is, there really isn't much you can expect the parents not to do that. Parent's work is too far away and public transit is non-existent for anything but a car most of the time, and Johnny needs to get to school and they don't have time to drive him everywhere.

Also by cutting population growth you lessen the tax-base...which means empty state coffers that can't afford to maintain infrastructure are even more empty.

CliffordK

I agree we need to encourage families to explore alternative transportation means, and there are many college students who choose to go car-free.

However, the growth from 2 lane roads ==> 4 lanes ==> 6 lanes ==> 8 lanes is largely driven by population growth.

Likewise, suburbs that extend for miles from the city centers... gobbling up prime farmland, and making bike commuting less convenient is also driven to a large extent by population growth.

And, you could consider our use of fossil fuels as an energy deficit. We use more power now than ever before, but say with 1/10 the global population, we might even be able to have sustainable power, and there would be no talk about global warming.

Marcus_Ti

Being a college student and car free/light can be pretty easy. Actually it is a good thing as most colleges/universities never have enough parking even for faculty/staff. It is Real Life that is the problem. Many large universities either run or subsidize tons of extra bus service around campus...of course some campuses like U of M are so huge you have to use the bus service. They also tend to provide bus passes gratis. Around here, you can rod around the University of Nebraska Lincoln on bike or by bus easily and quickly. But the second you leave the University property line, the bus service basically evaporates and it takes forever to get anywhere-if there is any service at all (only Monday-Saturday 6AM-6PM, so 55% of every week there's no public transit at all)

Around here, the I-80 corridor has been under construction to widen it for all my life I can remember...they're not done...and they're probably never going to be. Traffic is still a problem. Will continue to be. They're enlarged many of the arterials but they still clog at rush hour.


We in the USA are in energy hotwater. 20% of our energy comes from nuclear plants that are all at or beyond their core's rated operational lifespans...meaning 20% of our electricity generation is going to go bye-bye any day now.

tandempower

Regardless of where the funding comes from, the point is to tie funding to quality and inversely to quantity. The key is to create a metric that is a ratio of human traffic to road area. Areas with higher ratios of total human traffic to road area would get more funding and this would stimulate other areas to reduce lanes and promote alternatives to driving so that they would need less total road-area. Ultimately this would mean more funding for non-motorized transportation infrastructure AS WELL AS better quality motorways because the areas that have more human traffic per square mile of pavement would get more money to improve both motorways AND non-motorized infrastructure. It would also create an incentive for planning that makes car-free and car-light living a more convenient choice.

1) more car-free living lowers interstate highway costs if more people travel long distance without driving. 2) are you suggesting that local economies are paying for local roads without the help of government stimulus? Really, it would be helpful if they would just let the economy crash when it begins to and then let everyone adapt by going car-free but they don't do that. Economic growth and local taxes are all subsidized by artificial growth.

The economy has been kept artificially inflated for years. Without stock market inflation, corporate revenues, taxes, and spending dry up and there is no money for roads without corporate business. If you think local economies are self-sustaining, I think you should take a serious look at where the big money is changing hands in any area.

tandempower

Driving a car doesn't mean that people want high ratios of road-area to human traffic. People drive happier on shorter trips with less bustle. Reducing motortraffic and making the car-free option more viable with lower ratios of motorways to human traffic is a win-win for drivers, whether they want to live more car-light or not.

The way politicians drum up resistance to car-free infrastructure reforms is by characterizing them as an attack on driving or as a first-step toward taking away the right to drive completely. Both tactics are scare-tactics and are similar to the kind of scare tactics used to provoke hate and terrorism.

CliffordK

Since Oregon is in the topic title, you should note that Oregon closed down our only nuke plant years ago, and receives very little of our energy from nuclear power.

But, in general, the USA desperately needs to invest in nuclear fuel reprocessing. No sense in using about 10% of the fuel, then burying the remainder for thousands of years.

Have there been any new plants since the Whoops Project?

Anyway, after fuel is sorted out, I have no problem with augmenting power sources with nuclear power, assuming that local renewable sources are insufficient for energy needs.

Car Free living is only independent from interstate highways as long as you don't purchase products that require interstate highways for delivery. I.E. after you return to commune living and make 99.9% of your products locally.

Yes, the interstate highways get a lot of local traffic, but they are huge for interstate commerce. Of course, there are also planes and trains. But, who would want to try to drive across the country, only to require periodic legs of the trip in ox cart?

It hasn't been too long since there were gaps in our interstate freeway system (are most of the gaps filled in yet?)

Wanderer

In Illinois, we pay about a buck in motor fuel taxes, supposedly for roads, then 8-10% sales tax to boot! Plus Income tax, state and fed. It sucks to be taxed in IL. We have a separate tax on sales of bikes, supposedly for bike infrastructure, but they took that already!

CourtJester

WTF??? That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard since Obama got reelected.

Roody

The reason for the two types of diesel is taxation. The red diesel has lower taxes and is for agricultural use only. (Good farm lobby in a lot of the rural states.) So this was tax evasion and a criminal act, even if you didn't realize it.

Roody

I would love to hear more about your views on gas tax and especially how it affects carfree transportation. But please refrain from comments about partisan politics. If you are interested in partisan or ideological discussions, you might want to consider a visit to BF's Politics & Religion subforum. But please, not here.

chewybrian 

Can you elaborate?

The current system of paying for car use (and many other items) is to give preferred status to industries with the strongest lobbies. Car manufacturers buy off politicians to torque the system to allow driving to seem cheaper than it is, encouraging greater use of their product. Of course, all the costs of driving must be paid. So, we all pay through higher taxes, reduced government services in other areas, inflation, debt, etc.

People who don't drive (or don't drive much) are forced to bear some costs for those who do. We are building homes, businesses, whole towns based on the false economy of artificially cheap driving, thus locking in higher transportation costs for a long time to come. The marginal cost of driving more is very low, encouraging wasteful driving and offering little incentive for carpooling or shaving miles in any way. We are wasting finite fuel resources and polluting more than we should.

This proposed system is a step in the direction of having drivers pay for what they are actually using. If the true costs of driving had to be paid by the mile, miles driven would presumably fall to what the real market would actually bear. If you are used to heavy driving, you might not like the outcome of pay-as-you-go, but it is not inherently unfair, and miles from the dumbest idea I've seen from a politician.

Walter S

It's criminal even when used in farm equipment?

I-Like-To-Bike

It was probably illegal to use untaxed diesel for personal transportation purposes. It is usually specifically for industrial, construction, heating, agricultural equipment purposes and and is dyed so that its use can be visually detected when its unauthorized use is suspected. Pulling the family boat or RV on vacation (or commuting) with a pickup filled with untaxed diesel would be an example of such an illegal act.

Walter S

I didn't use it for personal transportation. I used it in equipment such as a kubota tractor operating a bush hog or rock rake usually.

fietsbob

The destruction of Public transportation by the collusion to make Car and Bus sales Mandatory. privatizing getting around,

... is coming back to bite people in the Arse.

Walter S

How is it coming back? Collusion by whom specifically? People say GM bought the street cars to destroy them but that's not clear at all. They were in trouble financially long before any action by GM.

fietsbob

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera...car_conspiracy..

After WW2 Europe rebuilt their public transit with the US Marshall plan money

the US destroyed theirs .. you are sucked into the 'privatize everything' mindset of the ruling elites.

they dont mind using the public's money for their private benefit at all .

seen any Rich Pro sports teams paying for their own Stadiums?

tandempower

Not only should you have no problem with it, you should insist that spent fuel be managed and maintain in a useful way, even if this increases the cost of building new plants. Ultimately, nuclear power should be phased out but already-mined fuels have to be dealt with, which requires refurbishing them into new plants. We need to stop mining radioactive materials, though. They are better left where they have been since the inception of the planet.

Either-or thinking is unproductive. Car-free living doesn't have to be independent from interstate highways to make them smaller and cheaper to maintain. Less highway lanes require less maintenance and renovation. Shipping traffic is a fraction of the traffic on these highways. If long-distance travel occurred largely in busses and trains instead of personal automobiles, the interstate highway would cost less.

Yes, the automobilist culture loves to claim the highways are for shipping and private traffic doesn't drive demand for additional lanes and maintenance. This is an unexamined position, though, and the truth is the highways could be narrower and would have less wear and tear if only shipping traffic used them and most people travelled by other modes than personal automobile.

CliffordK

When you get out on the open highways, a large portion of the traffic is truck traffic. And, probably accounts for more wear on the road than all the other vehicles together. Of course, many places would accommodate 2 lanes of trucks.

We just got a new bridge over the Willamette river in Eugene. As I understand it, the primary reason is that the engineers deemed that the old bridge wasn't strong enough to carry the overweight trucks (normal weight trucks were fine). But, the special permitted overweight trucks had to take a long detour.

It is a good point that freight trains could be utilized more effectively. And, now with computer tracking, and cell phone and GPS tracking, I could imagine a big push for more efficient logistics with faster car switching, and loading and offloading containers and even semi-trailers.

One advantage of Europe is that being very compact, it is easy to get main rail lines to almost all major cities, and even quite a few small towns. Here, distances make track routing more complex, especially to smaller communities. But, the rails are an underutilized resource.

I've heard that passenger trains in the USA get low priority, whereas they get high priority in Europe. Perhaps not catering to passengers is a problem.

EastCoastDHer

So we're one step closer to 1984.
Good guys can't have guns (Because criminals obviously follow laws)
Chemical companies can pour toxins in our food (Government is literally poisoning us and somehow we are OK with Monsanto, especially since half it's executives are also part of the USDA)
Then there's this: Tell the feds how much you drive so they can charge you even more money. (Great idea since we've bailed out all these criminal bankers who have already stolen our money once)

Meanwhile the majority of Americans are spending 30% or more of their income on just rent alone. Pure, flipping Genius.

I'll tell you what, one thing is for certain: When my ancestor William Brewster sailed here and helped establish this country at Plymouth Rock he didn't do it so the government could steal more of our money and rights.

CliffordK

Something is wrong if housing goes up by 6% or so a year, while income goes up by less than 3%.

Part of the problem is the economic growth model. And, an ever increasing population.

If the population was stable, and everybody didn't need a McMansion, then kids could inherit their grandparent's or great grandparent's property, and live mortgage free.

It doesn't work if that parcel has to be divided up amount a dozen kids.

When I was growing up, we had a farmer neighbor with 2 generations living in 2 houses on the same property. As I understand it, the property was eventually sold and split up.

As far as chemicals, there is a demand of consumers for flawless produce. And, that requires pesticides.

I've had plenty of wormy apples, and they taste just fine

TinyL

OK me figure this out.

I use 35 gallons a month to drive 525 miles.

525 x .015 cent Milage Tax = $7.87
35 gallons x .0184 Fed Tax = $0.64

Yep that would definetly bring in more cash!

My only concern would be the financial hardship to the trucking industry...like them or hate them...they are the life blood of America for the near future.

Roody

More freight is carried by train in the US, more passengers in Europe. Which is "better" is pretty much up for grabs.

Unfortunately, American train buffs are so gung-ho about passenger service that they fail to understand what a great freight system we have in the US. They would gladly dismantle it to benefit passenger service--but is that really a good thing to do?

Ideally you would have two rail systems so both passenger and freight could have priority.

Roody

I'll tell you what I told the other person. This is not a partisan or ideological discussion. Please refer only to the topic of the thread, which is the gas tax and how it relates to carfree transportation. I don't want to get another thread locked down because somebody can't find their way to the Politics and Religion subforum.

EastCoastDHer

Don't worry, I don't plan to get any more political than I already have here.