[MENTION=60260]Allez3[/MENTION], how do you figure buses make traffic worse? Maybe they do where you are, but if those passengers moved into cars, there would be more space on the road occupied by vehicles. Sometimes when I drive a car, I get stuck behind a slow bus, and it feels like it's causing a problem, but then the rest of the time, I'm not stuck behind a slow bus, and part of that time is time when I would be potentially behind private vehicles occupied by people who might instead be on a bus. It's the same with bicycles. Car drivers sometimes resent their presence when they should be thanking cyclists for reducing congestion.

I think there are a lot of hidden costs to private cars. (1) A huge fraction of police and EMS calls are for car collisions, the likes of which don't happen on nearly the same scale with mass transit and bicycle and foot traffic. (2) Workplaces in the suburbs invest in parking for employees, and the cost for that is rolled into everything else. The value of that real estate is huge when viewed in the aggregate. (3) Too many cities offer free parking in at least parts of the cities. That's a huge opportunity cost that could go to buildings or pedestrian malls or reduced congestion. To my thinking, private motor traffic gets the biggest subsidies by a gigantic factor when I consider the things I wrote in this paragraph, and I only came up with three off the top of my head. There are more, and they are also big.

I read on the internet (so it must be true) that road wear is roughly proportional to the FOURTH POWER of axle weight. I can imagine that SUVs cause about the same amount of wear as sedans. Trucks and busses are huge. Still, even though there is a big difference in cost of bearing trucks and private cars, there is also a huge difference between private cars and bicycles and other lightweight things (wheelchairs, feet, etc.). There are places where we would be OK without cars, and cost of roads would be significantly reduced, significantly enough that it makes a difference to a city or county's budget.