Originally Posted by
bragi
...It doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that maybe the reason we can't build and repair the car infrastructure in the Evergreen State, or anywhere else, is because large-scale car infrastructure is, by its very nature, simply too expensive to sustain in the long run. It's the proverbial elephant in the room that everyone is pretending not to see.
With gas taxes and other user fees only paying for about 40% of the costs of maintaining the roads, and with gasoline costs being less than half the operating costs of cars, I'd say that the problem is not so much that roads are too expensive to maintain, but that the motoring public isn't willing to pay their fair share of the costs directly.
If the gas taxes were raised to reasonable levels, relative to maintenance needs, then many people would likely respond by driving less, as they did in response to the rise in fuel costs in 2008. That reduction in traffic would then beget another reduction in traffic as the lowered perceived risk of cycling took some people off the cusp and onto their bikes. Wash, rinse repeat.
Of course people with money on the line realize this and thus fight tooth and nail to prevent any increases in the gas tax. Pay as you go encourages people to rationally assess the best means of transportation. Large fixed costs relative to trip costs encourage more driving since int drives down the cost per mile.