Originally Posted by
Roody
They pay the same rent, but the car owner is getting parking spaces included in the rent. They pay the same taxes, but the car owner is using and causing wear on the roads far beyond the non-car-owners. They pay the same health insurance premiums, but the car owner is contributing to accidents and health damaging pollution without paying for it. The car owner can deal easily with the distances caused by sprawl--which he contributed to--while the non-owner must deal with distances too far for bike or walking. And the sprawled out land use patterns--caused by cars--make bus and rail transit both more expensive and less convenient.
This chart gives FL DOT per-mile costs for all types of road projects, including sidewalks and multi-use paths:
http://www.dot.state.fl.us/planning/...s/costs-D7.pdf
Motor-vehicle roads are in the millions, with multilane roads more than double the cost of single-lane roads, which cost around six million per-mile.
12-foot multi-use paths cost about $333,000 per mile, by contrast. That means you can pave around 20 miles of 12-foot multi-use paths for the cost of one mile of two-lane motor-vehicle road, and twice as many miles of multi-use paths per multi-lane road eliminated or pre-empted.
What does that say about the cost-savings that would come from reducing sprawl by shifting more traffic from driving to biking and reducing the number of motor-vehicle lanes by more people taking transit instead of driving?
LCFers are paying A LOT more for road infrastructure because of sprawl and multi-lane roads, and that's just the economic cost.