Originally Posted by
wphamilton
@
tandempower It's true that driving costs are heavily subsidized through taxes, higher prices and other more labyrinthine mechanisms, and that doesn't even include the external costs of parking. And it should include those costs, because both direct and external costs of just providing space to park our cars is astonishing.
As individuals, we don't really consider those costs in our decision making. We look at the individual impact - out of pocket for example, or convenience.
Anyone who's looked into paving a home driveway knows the cost of pavement, but when the numbers for public infrastructure and businesses dissolve into figures that round to 10 and up, most people aren't equipped to consider how much those costs break down to per person, or per purchase, because budgets don't usually break it down to that level. Even if they would though, projecting large numbers of sales/traffic makes such expenditures seem more cost-efficient. Unlike a private driveway that only gets used by a couple people, a public parking lot, road, or highway gets used by many more, so the per capita cost seems to go down.
I've never seen any quantitative breakdowns of how many square miles of pavement there are per person in any area or region, but there is an irony in the prospect of making them more cost-efficient by using them more. The irony is that the more people drive on them and engage in economic activities and spending, the more they're robbing themselves of time to spend on other things that would be better for their health and the environment.
The question is what it takes to get an economic analysis that supports narrower (single-lane) roads, with more transit and bicycle usage, albeit with potentially lower consumption/shopping density per trip; which still functions as cost-efficient and sufficiently supportive of popular economic needs.
Even with your Subway example. Their vegie sub is an abnormality if they don't charge more for the addition of meat, which is the almost universal practice. When demand drops for that sandwich, the price will be lowered. People do choose options which they perceive to provide the most value.
The ugly logic of demand-driven pricing can indeed mean that less efficient products get sold at a lower price, resulting in them being subsidized by more efficient products of lower demand. This is a real failure of the free market, though, because it undermines the freedom to enter markets when no one wants to produce and sell a more efficient product at a lower price because they'd rather focus on less efficient products that make them more money.
In other words, it impedes the free market's ability to allow the invisible hand to reward efficiency and discourage inefficiency. E.g. if some other sandwich maker would make sandwiches of the same perceived quality as Subway for a lower price, then Subway would lose market share to that competitor. However, even though a veggie/cheese sub is technically an adequate substitute for subs with meat, the perception that its not could cause people to ignore a competing sandwich chain that lowered its costs by selling only veggie/cheese subs and no meat. So no matter how cheap a vegetarian sandwich shop would be, unless they win over public taste, they won't be able to compete. The only chance of them beating out Subway would be for the economy to get so tight that people could ONLY afford subs if they were priced at levels that exclude the cost of meat, and then Subway would probably lower the price of the veggie/cheese sub to get more business anyway.
If we extend this same logic to auto markets, we'd have to be dealing with an economy so tight that people would choose cycling and/or transit
instead of driving because they simply can't afford to drive anymore. Interestingly, I watched a documentary recently about how there are people in poor rural towns who are going to jail because they can't afford the fees and fines for their traffic tickets. This would be the ideal conditions for driving to lose popularity in favor of biking, transit, ride-sharing, etc. yet I'm guessing that such poor people always manage to find an old junk car to nurse along; though some would probably ride a bike if they could manage to get where they needed to go that way. Probably the distances in such rural towns are so big, though, that they will move somewhere more bikeable (if they can afford it) before going car-free where they are, though they probably don't want to move because of family, etc. They're caught between a rock and a hard place.
Idk what happens to people when they can't afford to drive where they are but they also can't afford to move to an area where they can LCF. Presumably there are drug dealers and other illicit lenders who will give them money to live in exchange for exploiting themselves and others in various ways.
What you've done is describe the case for the State's interest in maximizing mass transit use. Logically that makes an even stronger argument that bus fares should be lower than the immediate cost of driving. Even zero, as someone mentioned earlier, may be a net positive for the community when you consider the various subsidies.
Yes, the logical thing to do would be to subsidize transit and fund the subsidy by selling permits to drive during peak times. That kills two birds with one stone: 1) thins traffic to speed up travel times for cars and buses 2) makes transit use more cost-efficient relative to driving.