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Federal gas taxes were net incomes for roads; transit was big drains. And President Clinton and Obama were both Democrats; of course President Kennedy was a huge tax cutter, cutting more as a percent of the budget than Reagan.

Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance?

Yes, it is part of the Federal tax on fuel ($0.184 gallon). Cars and trucks actually pay more in than they use, with transit (in particular, rail) being heavily subsidized in cost. In Seattle, fares cover about 40% of the cost of the Link light rail, and only 20% of commuter buses. Seems that roads were properly budgeted for, but transit was not.

So what you are saying is that the airlines arent losing enough money? There will be plenty of posts ignoring the fact that airlines lose money.

Except airlines aren't losing money. See: Airlines had second-most profitable year ever in 2017

  2017 Net Profit: 15.5 billion

  IATA - Another Strong Year for Airline Profits in 2017

The numbers are older, but at least at the Federal level, gas taxes cover costs of roads. It's just that lots of funds are also spent on rail and transit.

Given that there were between 750-800 million passengers per year during the past nine years without a fatality, I still like the odds.

Source: US DOT

It all depends on what you focus on. The US uses rails where they make the most sense (for cargo) and planes where they make sense (people).

The US handed all passenger rail traffic off to a government outfit called Amtrak many years ago, and then spun that off into a supposedly commercial company that gets huge subsidies. Unfortunately, that scheme gave Amtrak certain monopoly legal control over all passenger rail service in the US and like any monopoly Amtrak got fat, dumb, and happy blocking all innovation and competition.

For cargo, however, the US maintained its older commercial competative arrangements. As a result, the natural tendency of market economics and money flowing to where it's most-efficiently used did its job and the result is that the US moves an absolutely astonishing amount of goods with an extremely reliable delivery schedule over its immense rail system with an amazing safety record and a relatively tiny workforce - and does it so well and reliably and efficiently that most people are not even aware it is happening. People who are interested and have some spare time to burn should educate themselves on the matter. Here's a couple of starting points: the Bailey Yard, the Bailey Yard 'hump' in action, the ever-increasing freight 'ton-miles' in the US system, and in case you think the Bailey yard is an isolated thing, consult wikipedia's List of rail yards and note how much of that list is within the US compared to so many countries whose rail systems are presumed superior simply because of a few fast passenger trains.

Unless we see some truly shocking advances in module efficiency

It wouldn't work with 100% efficiency, so why would increase in efficiency matter as far as making it practical? What is happening to critical thinking skills?

Regarding critical thinking, why couldn't we just use solar panels on the ground to make jet fuel(*)?

Jet fuel in this instance is just an energy carrier, and has a much higher energy density than lithium. While Lithium batteries may be appropriate in some cases (portable devices, ground transportation), for air flight it's more appropriate to use something else.

(*) Or perhaps a biological method such as GM modified algae or a bio-yielding plant. The Wikipedia page of crop yields indicates that Algae can yield 80,000 kg/ha/yr, with "ha" being the area of a square 100 meters on a side.

A quick calculation shows that a 747 holds around 183,000 kg of fuel, so 3ha of open-pond algae could supply enough fuel for one tank each year.

Anyone who has driven across the "great basin" and other nearby sections of the US (western part of Utah, Nevada, parts of Arizona) knows that we have lots and lots of unused area that gets a lot of sunlight, and water is generally available from wells.

It seems reasonable that we could put up large solar and wind installations in these places, generate biodiesel and other organics, then ship them by tanker truck to where they are needed.

About 11 million gallons of fuel used in the US for aviation annually, that's 31 million kg, which requires 387 of those 10m x 10m algae pools(*).

At roughly $5 per gallon, the output of such an installation would be worth $55 million per year.

This seems like a futuristic prediction, but it makes sense.

Once the price of fuel goes up, this sort of installation may not be far in our future.

(*) This seems low. Have I dropped a digit somewhere?

to increase efficiency of solar cells - Sun radiation is not increasing, pretty much constant, I would say. Probably need a football-field size surface constant to generate enough oompf to compare to kerosene-propelled turbines.

Generating fuel from solar/wind/water and propel airplane traffic will probably show the discrepancy between necessity and actual use - no one will even touch restricting air traffic, so....

Compared fuel efficiency/use per person from airplanes to cars, airplanes are winners, hands down, but looking at the distances traveled, it looks bad.

Interesting though, how the consumption has gone down and the difference between domestic and international, but that's US carriers only, whole world would be interesting...

http://www.transtats.bts.gov/f...

This study from 1993 (mentioned earlier probably) shows that this was already known to federal authorities, but was probably swept under the rug or willingly ignored by legislators for obvious reasons.

http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/25000/2...

Price-sensitivity to cabs is not actually a big reason people drink and drive.

[citation needed]

In fact, people with transportation-related reasons for drinking and driving are generally low-income or even in poverty. I don't think your claim holds up.

http://wwwcf.fhwa.dot.gov/exit... http://wwwcf.fhwa.dot.gov/exit... http://www.polytrauma.va.gov/d... http://www.wdtb.noaa.gov/scrip... http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.e... http://www.nestlegoodfoodgoodl... http://www.gd.gov.cn/jump.htm?... http://sasisa.ru/go_title.php?... http://4ygeca.com/index.php?na... http://www.stereohead.ru/?name... http://www.transtats.bts.gov/e... http://www.roc.noaa.gov/script...

"A priority classification, including, for example, national security, newspaper distribution, rental vehicles, agriculture and for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery, is established to assure adequate gasoline supplies for designated essential services."
http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/12000/1...

Newpapers and mail aren't what they used to be, if you need gas you rent a car(?); this need to be updated.

(California 1973 sit in line every other day for gas veteran)

User "Todd Knarr" posted numbers above. Apparently you're no only too lazy to do your own research, you're also too biased to believe numbers given to you...

To expand on those numbers (there's a bit of a fudge factor because the timelines don't line up. Deal with it):
Tesla Model S cars in the USA and Canada: about 17200, as of Sep 2013 (source: http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2...)
Tesla Model S fires in the USA and Canada: 4, ever (new enough model that we'll say "per year" if you want).
Tesla Model S fires per year (percentage): about 0.023%

Personal cars in the USA in 2007: about 254,400,000 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... citing http://www.bts.gov/publication...)
Vehicle fires in the USA in 2007: about 258,000 (sources: http://www.chandlerlawgroup.co..., http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downl...)
Total car fires per year (percentage): about 0.101%

Ratio of Tesla Model S fires per Model S to all car fires per total cars: about 4.4 to 1

Have yourself a nice big helping of crow, you intellectually dishonest piece of shit.

If someone causes an accident

That's the only relevant fact. If you cause an accident you're at fault and you should be punished. Whether you were distracted because you were stoned, tired, had kids in the car, were trying to eat, were jamming out to tunes, or are just a shitty driver is irrelevant.

let's say the laws have reasonably defined which drugs cause dangerous impairment and what is a dangerous amount

That is factually impossible in the case of Cannabis, and has been known for 20 years. A 1993 study by the DOT determined that:

One of the program's objectives was to determine whether it. is possible to predict driving
impairment by plasma concentrations of THC and/or its metabolite, THC-COOH, in single
samples. The answer is very clear: it is not. Plasma of drivers showing substantial impairment
in these studies contained both high and low THC concentrations; and, drivers with high plasma
concentrations showed substantial, but also no impairment, or even some improvement

Marijuana impairs attention.

Which to be honest, only affects navigation.

So if there was a car crash, the police have no real way to prove it was even a factor.

Why should it matter? What matters is what actually happened during a crash, and who did it. If I pull into traffic without looking, it doesn't matter whether I'm drunk, stoned, or sober. I'm at fault.

Punish people for what they actually do, not what's in their bloodstream.

University of Washington cited an Australian study showing that the research is a total mess in this area.

"the research is a total mess in this area" is government funded researcher code for "we don't have the data to support what the government wants to say, so give us more money and we'll see what we can do". It's been known since 1993, that cannabis at typical levels is less impairing than legally permissible levels of alcohol, and those who are impaired *overestimate* their impairment.

Also, any attempt to set blood THC limits is misguided. From the same 1993 DOT study:

One of the program's objectives was to determine whether it. is possible to predict driving
impairment by plasma concentrations of THC and/or its metabolite, THC-COOH, in single
samples. The answer is very clear: it is not. Plasma of drivers showing substantial impairment
in these studies contained both high and low THC concentrations; and, drivers with high plasma
concentrations showed substantial, but also no impairment, or even some improvement.

How does it detect the wind at 100, 200, 300, and 400 yards? How does it detect the change in wind speed over that full distance? It is impossible.

While, in this implementation the wind speed is not automatically detected, it is not impossible to do it... and neither new (at least as old as 1977).

You are correct.. but the average driver drives 29 miles per day:
http://www.bts.gov/programs/national_household_travel_survey/daily_travel.html

Every time I take my car out, though, I drive a couple of hundred miles at least.

You are an outlier

Every time I take my car out, though, I drive a couple of hundred miles at least.

You are an outlier

Every time I take my car out, though, I drive a couple of hundred miles at least.

You are an outlier

One is a direct measurement and the other is a rate set by bureaucrats. FYI, the GSA reimbursement is about four cents lower than the BTS's estimate of ownership costs per mile.

As you might notice if you were more thorough in your reading, a naive cost estimate does not include many externalities and ignores economies of scale. You cannot simply assume that transportation costs scale linearly -- it's not as if there were a uniform distribution of persons.

It is entirely disingenuous to cherry-pick a single statistic out of a 129-page report and claim it as a disproof. I'd suggest you do more homework on this issue, but frankly the math is against you. The rest of the world understands this, they just didn't allow their transportation infrastructure to be held hostage by private interests.

The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]

There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.

I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?

I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).

In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.

For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.

The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]

There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.

I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?

I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).

In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.

For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.

The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]

There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.

I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?

I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).

In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.

For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.

The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]

There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.

I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?

I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).

In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.

For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.

$1.2 million / 635 million enplaned passengers

Is your peace of mind worth that much?

The rich get indirect benefits from the public service. It is, after all, the system of roads, railroads and ports that allow them to ship goods and move workers about... But someone's gotta pay for it, and it seems to me that those who got rich off this peaceful, regulated, protected and educated country ought to pay for it.

Have you ever shipped something? You pay for those roads, and railroads, and ports - there are significant costs, fees, taxes and duties applied when you ship something. It's NOT free, it is a net money-maker for the various Governmental entities (the last study I can find shows that roads are a net-earner for the Federal Government, not a cost). The cost of shipping a pallet from Ningbo, China to the port of Los Angeles is somewhere around $90 - then you get somewhere around $500 in port and inspection fees (and that's if your shipment is NOT selected for extra inspection/CBP investigation). It's a huge lie that "the wealthy/businesses" get that infrastructure for free - it's paid for with taxes and fees.

25-50 miles on electric and starting at $40k is a long, long ways off from his spec.

For my part, they're going to have to be much closer to gas car prices, get more like 100 miles on electric, gas-extended so they have some utility beyond just work-and-back, and I need some way to charge one. Right now an electric vehicle wouldn't be an option for me if I had an unlimited car budget.

The Volt costs around $31k after the tax rebate.

So maybe you have a 50 mile (or longer) one-way commute that's longer than 92% of USA commuters , but 68% of commuters have a one way distance of 15 miles or less, 78% have a commute of 20 miles or less.

So for most commuters, they can already buy a car that will get them to work and back on a single charge.

My commute is only 8 miles each way, I rarely travel more than 20 miles from home on weekends, and when I do, it's often more than 100 miles, so even a 200 mile range car wouldn't get me there and home again without recharging.

My commute isn't a good fit for an electric car (or even a hybrid) because it's too short -- I usually bike it. I drive too little to make it work buying a new car just to get a hybrid or electric car. My 10 year old car only gets 19/28 mpg, but it's hard to justify replacing it. But if I had a longer commute, I'd seriously consider the Chevy Volt since even a 200 mile range electric car means I can't take it everywhere I want to go. Even though the payback period for the Volt is 10 years or more, I expect gas prices to rise in the future, which will probably make the Volt pay itself back in under 10 years.

I don't think anyone here is a luddite. We just don't glibly assume into existence all of the infrastructure improvements you mention as if they were easy.

With over 4,067,000 miles of road in the US, how is any of this stuff supposed to be brought up to a standard that you can trust a machine to navigate? And who pays that bill?

Asserting on slashdot that road markings need to be fixed ASAP is easy. Paying for it year after year is hard. After all we have just signed up our kids for a 14 trillion dollar debt load. There won't be money to pay for any extensive infrastructure upgrades. We can't afford to keep our potholes filled as it is, and nobody is going to pay for LIDAR in every car, and even if we did, real-time guesswork as to where the road really goes

What ever system is built is going to be a collection of individual sub-systems, adaptive cruise control, anti-collision radars, turn by turn GPS guidance. All separately proven, then much later integrated. But none of this comes without infrastructure changes, and making the cars emulate people is just silly and overly complex.

To me its a toss up whether you improve the cars or improve the roads. And chances are it will take a combination. You can never keep your maps up to date with every little detour for road repair, but two guys on a truck can lay glue-down RFID tags to guide vehicles thru ever-changing construction zones almost as quickly as they can lay down the traffic cones and move the jersey barriers. All road can have location and information devices embedded in each lane on the next repaving. And you can add these to every back road in the country over time. Most roads get paved every 30 to 40 years even in the most benign of climates.

I call B.S. on that logic. If we assume that all 631,939,829 passengers who flew in 2010 is a fair average for how many people fly per year (and according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics it seems to be accurate for 2011 and the projected 2012 stats), then that's over 7,000,000,000 passengers since 9/11. On 9/11, there were what, fifteen hijackers? We've seen two underwear bombers and one shoe bomber since then. Am I missing any other would-be terrorists? If not, that makes a grand total of...


Wait for it...


18 out of over seven billion passengers who are (were) terrorists. In other words, stopping and searching every airline passenger gives you a one in 388 million chance of actually catching a terrorist. Pick any other crime and tell the public that you'll have a one in 388 million chance of catching a bad guy if they would just allow the cops to stop and search people at random, and there would be torches and pitchforks marching towards D.C. Yet we think that's "reasonable" when we want to get on an airplane?!?!

About 50% of all roads in the US were unpaved in 1975. That amount dropped to 1/3 as of 2008.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_04.html

As sales shifted from instate storefronts, to out of state internet, sales tax revenue declined. Granted, inflation increased sales tax revenue proportionately, but the outflow from the internet was far greater than the inflation increase causing real sales tax revenues to decline. Likewise as businesses moved overseas, property tax and corporate income tax decreased, too. States are forced to increase the tax rates to just maintain the status quo from the lost tax revenues.

Also swiss here, I spend roughly $5-10K a year on holidays. I like the USA but, unfortunately, it is also on my no fly list for some years.

As an interesting fact, domestic flights in the US have been increasing up until 2006-2007, since then they are decreasing (per person and per number of flights).

http://www.bts.gov/xml/air_traffic/src/index.xml#CustomizeTable

Cheers,
-S

Canada welcomes your Swiss Francs :-)

Also swiss here, I spend roughly $5-10K a year on holidays. I like the USA but, unfortunately, it is also on my no fly list for some years.

As an interesting fact, domestic flights in the US have been increasing up until 2006-2007, since then they are decreasing (per person and per number of flights).

http://www.bts.gov/xml/air_traffic/src/index.xml#CustomizeTable

Cheers,
-S

It's a bit difficult to find the information on how many flights there are in the US per year, but this article states that in 2004 there were 6,830,000 airplane flights in the US. I'm going to use an even smaller number - 5,000,000 - as a baseline.

In 7 years - 35,000,000 flights - we have had something go wrong due to said devices 75 times, or around 0.000214% of the time. Is it really worth inconveniencing everyone when the number is that remote?

Yeah, I did 25 miles one way for 13 years. I hated myself at the end and was miserable.

Socialist trends, boy you don't even know.

W/re to refineries ... we had too much capacity due to our decreased demand for refined petroleum products.
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_03.html
You just trolling.

Wrong you are over 3x above average. The average American drives less than 30 miles per day:

http://www.bts.gov/programs/national_household_travel_survey/daily_travel.html

If you're going to play the statistics game, then why scan everybody? After all, worldwide, there's only been, what, a thousand or two actual terrorist issues on airplanes in all of history. How many people fly each year? One million? Two? 800 million+?. So why not just scan half a dozen people and be done with it? Or better yet, just put a serious lock on the door to the flight deck.

Cars and trucks pay for themselves (See the Goverment report here). It's trains and transit that do not. Don't worry, your grocery delivery isn't subsidized by your income taxes, but your local bus and passenger train are subsidized by those same delivery trucks...

The result is that my, non-car-using, ass has to pay income taxes to subsidize all these people who love their cars so much, but if I dare to ask them to pay for a train or another bus I'm breezily told "nobody will use that."

Nice rant, too bad it's based on false information. Car-based taxes are a net income to the Federal Government, and end up financing the losses for transit options. Cars more than pay "their fair share", it's trains and buses that are laggards (and that's not factoring in the capital costs required for those two modes).

The reality in the US is that it's the transit users - bus and train riders - who are being subsidized by car drivers. If bus and train riders would pay their fair share, maybe income taxes could be reduced.

And very, very, few people don't fly because of the TSA. serious, it MIGHT be 500 hundred people per year, maybe.

That sounds like a hard statistic.

Also, more people flew this year then last year.

That's probably true, but the statistics aren't available yet from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, so you can't prove it.

I can, however, prove that the population is larger this year than last year, by about 2 million. I can also demonstrate that the population has increased from 281.5 million in 2000 to about 311 million this year, over a 10% increase. There has been no commensurate increase in airline passengers. So your entire point is demonstrably false.

While this is true, it misses the larger issue. There are a number of factors that change driving performance. Eating while driving has a similar effect to talking on a cell phone, much like applying makeup, shaving, etc. In contrast, having a second person (or more) seems to improve driving performance. A young child who is sleeping in the back seat can greatly improve performance, while a small child who is screaming and crying has a negative effect.

If we want to use the logic "it hurts performance", we should ban all electronic devices, and have the radios in cars have 1 big button that can turn on or off road information messages. We should ban all eating while driving. We should require any children that are in cars to be drugged and remain unconscious, and it should be illegal to drive without a second person in the car. That would, statistically, increase driving performance across the board.

Banning cell phones simply because they can be shown to have a negative performance is singling out a single cause because we don't like it. Instead, as usual, the problem is larger and more problematic to fix. Personally, it comes down to how much risk we, as a society, are willing to accept. The current rates of traffic accidents and fatalities are lower than they have been in previous years[*]. Personally, I am comfortable with the current level of risk when I step into a vehicle, either to drive or to ride as a passenger. If society, in general, would like to make changes to improve those numbers, we should have a realistic discussion about what would changes would help, how much each change would help, and what cost would be associated with each change. Simply pointing out one cause, and removing it, without addressing any other issues, is simply punishing a behavior based on personal bias.

Here's an even more fun fact: passenger rail subsidies are 40 TIMES that of commercial aviation subsidies, on a per-passenger-mile basis. We pay a LOT of money to move people by train, compared to moving people via airplanes...

Which is easy to understand as you don't really have train passengers. Quick googling gives me 30 million train passengers a year, against 750 million airline passengers. After a bit more googling, I got the train passengers for Finland: Around 60 million train passengers a year. When you don't have an infrastructure you won't have users either and it will be more expensive. Considering the energy cost of moving stuff through air, I'm pretty sure that you are paying a LOT of money by moving people via airplanes.. (And yes, I realize that United States is huge. But apparently you somehow manage to create roads between the cities, the rails aren't all that much more difficult)

"When critics of passenger-rail subsidies, such as Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, suggest that the highway costs are mostly covered by the gas tax, Lind counters with figures from a 2008 Federal Highway Administration paper: the FHA reports that highway user fees, including gas taxes, only cover 51 percent of costs. By contrast, Amtrak in 2010 covered 67 percent of its operating costs from ticket fares and other revenue."

That's BS. First, Amtrak's "Operating costs" are all inclusive, while the FHA's, or indeed all government highway spending, represent only a small fraction of the operational cost of the highway system. Add in a large part of the US auto industry (sales, parts and service, insurance, fuel, etc) and you will get a more accurate picture of the "operational costs" of the highway system.

Or simply compare the federal costs vs revenue by mode of transportation per passenger. Which is something the Bureau of Transportation Statistics did in 2004: http://www.bts.gov/publications/federal_subsidies_to_passenger_transportation/pdf/entire.pdf

They found:

"On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002"

"Passenger rail received the largest subsidy per thousand passenger-miles, averaging $186.35 per thousand passenger-miles during."

In other words, if a highway user and a rail user both travel 1000 miles, the feds earn $2 from the highway user while they spend $186 on the rail user.

Per passenger mile, we spend 40 times the money on passenger rail as we do on passenger aviation.

Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.

Here's an even more fun fact: passenger rail subsidies are 40 TIMES that of commercial aviation subsidies, on a per-passenger-mile basis. We pay a LOT of money to move people by train, compared to moving people via airplanes...

Really? You mean the structure where trains get 40X the subsidies of airplanes? And cars are a net INCOME for transit (not subsidized)? How much more should we subsidize trains?

We already have Federal subsidies orders of magnitude larger for trains as compared to air. If trains can't compete with literally 40 times the subsidies to air travel, then the solution isn't to tax air travel more - it's to made train travel much more efficient.

This survey says that 51% of people have a 10 mile or less commute:

http://www.bts.gov/publications/omnistats/volume_03_issue_04/html/figure_02.html

In Washington State (where I was born and raised and mainly lived when in the US) we paid by blue-book value of the car, and by weight/vehicle class. I do know that fuel taxes on road vehicles tend to be a net money earner for the Federal Government. Perhaps we need to look at where those dollars are spent in the first place - use it to maintain the infrastructure that generated the dollars first, and IF there's anything left, look at expanding other alternatives second.

As for cancer risk, 1 million people flying 10 times a week will have 4 additional cases of cancer (using current models of radiation-cancer association).

OK, I'm not sure I buy that radiation comparison being as how it's a completely different type of radiation as well as method of delivery.... but, let's just pretend those are realistic numbers and that only 1 million people are flying 10 times a week.

Using that logic, that means these machines are killing more people than they are saving. If 4 additional people are getting cancer because of these machines per week for each 1 million people flying 10 times a week, that amounts to 208 per year. How many people are they saving using these machines? The underwear bomber under the worst case scenario would have killed about that many? It's not like we get these attacks all that often, and I highly doubt these machines are stopping that many more terrorists than the old methods. By comparison, 1,115 people were killed in 2010 in aircraft accidents, so maybe it'd be a lot more effective to put scanner machine money into more R&D on how to make flying safer.

Considering that roughly 12.17 million people are flying per week in the U.S. alone (most are probably rare flyers though), I think I'm safe to assume that at least twice that many people are getting cancer from these machines every week, so they're killing 2 good-sized aircraft full of people per year just for PR and security theater.

Yeah, sounds like a sweet deal to me.