Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
TO,
Dude people that are getting their salaries cut often give up driving because they cannot afford it. That is also why they often lose their house. Transportation projects do not make up the lions share of how people make their money and the most people you are talking about do not feel they are over paid.
Housing prices are inflated, along with rents and everything else, by generally high levels of spending that circulate through the economy. You talk about people 'feeling' that they are overpaid or underpaid, but that feeling is based on normative assumptions with an economy that budgets personal automotive expenses into wages.
If the average transportation budget was, say, $500/year for transit plus another hundred or so for riding a bike/scooter/etc. then people would have the same real income in terms of what they could afford to buy outside their transportation budget. Their housing costs would be lower, because landlords wouldn't all need to afford cars and driving. The prices and other expenses they pay would be lower because government wouldn't be taxing them as much for infrastructure with so much less traffic using roads/lanes.
You just don't seem to grasp the idea of system-wide savings resulting in savings for individuals at every level.
This is is the only plan I have ever heard to get people back on buses, to cut their pay till a bus is their only choice is almost cruel. Re-read your post and imagine looking into someone’s face and telling them they are over paid and they would be better off making less to support their family and pay their bills.
I know people that make a lot more than I ever have. But I don’t begrudge their success and your solution sounds like a perfect formula for a failing society.
I don't want to be in anyone's face. I am just saying that public investments in transit and infrastructure pay people salaries that afford them car payments and driving expenses. Without those public investments hiring people at those wage levels, most people wouldn't be able to afford to drive.
So that is the reason 'America' gives up on transit. It's because the cost of transit is high due to wage-levels being set at high levels so everyone can afford to drive. If those wage-levels and infrastructure-investments were cut to levels that don't afford everyone's driving expenses, the people would cry that too much was being spent on alternative transit/infrastructure and the money would be shifted back to over-funding the driving infrastructure.
For some reason, they never reach the point of cutting the automotive infrastructure investments down to levels that only fund a fraction of the driving population, probably because of all the automotive interests lobbying to keep everyone driving for economic reasons.
So there you have it: for the people to broadly embrace transit, they would have to be too poor to afford driving; but to be too poor to afford driving, they would have to stop investing in transit and infrastructure at levels that fund everyone driving.