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Most of the Interstate is supported by fuel taxes. Fuel taxes are paid for by drivers. Who use the Interstate. So, I'd say that it's a pretty good case of 'user pays'.

Used to be more true, not so much today. The Highway Trust Fund - which is funded by a combination of federal fuel and vehicle taxes - has been bailed out before ($35 billion between 2008 and 2010) and is out of money again this year. And the federal government has turned over responsibility for the interstate highways to the individual states, so a big chunk of the construction, maintenance, and repair bills actually comes from the states.

Looking at 2010 numbers, total spending nationwide on highways was about $155 billion. The federal gas tax brought in $28 billion; state and local fuel taxes amounted to another $37 billion; plus state and local governments picked up another $12 billion from tolls and non-fuel taxes. All in all, that's about $77 billion in revenue for $155 billion in expenditures. Drivers are paying about...51% of the cost of the highway network.

For comparison, I note a comment below that shows in fiscal 2012 Amtrak spent $4.036 billion and had revenues of $2.877 billion. In other words, Amtrak riders paid 71% of their costs out of pocket--a much bigger share of the costs than highway users.

Not sure why dedicated lane posts are being marked troll, but that's the safest option considering the difference in speed and the relative fragility of bikes. As shown in this article, extra space (as opposed to the current 6 inches space) between bike and car lanes is crucial for safety.

An even better solution is a protected and dedicated bike lane where there are concrete barriers preventing cars from entering bike lanes. Of course, all this requires a lot of city planning.

There is absolutely no correlation real or hypothetical between property value and amount of property to the use of services.

A longer street frontage requires more asphalt and concrete and buried infrastructure than a shorter street frontage, and it requires police and fire response to travel a longer distance.

We have far fewer roads shared among a smaller amount of people but they are much lower quality.

And that's how it should be, because the usual alternative is for urban areas to heavily subsidize the less urbanized areas.

Cars actually generate revenue. They're taxed very heavily and generate more revenue from those taxes then is spent on cars.

A common misconception.

http://usa.streetsblog.org/201...

It's the same the world over. Where roads are paved and maintained, they are heavily subsidized. Rail transport is cheap compared with the subsidies given to private road transport.

It occurs to me that knowing where a parking space is available would reduce time spent driving around, itself reducing pollution, excess expenditure on additional fuel, the clogging of streets, and other issues associated with tons of traffic driving in circles throughout the city.

Ah, but you are being logical and not ecological. It has been official policy in SF for years to "get people out of their cars" by any means. This includes intentionally removing parking places (more, more), and even preventing new construction from having more than one parking space per unit.

Why should we give welfare to everybody when only a few people need it?

Anyway, if you're living below the poverty line, you probably bike or take mass transit, so the gas tax won't affect you directly. Yes, it will raise store prices slightly, but it will also reduce the need to make up the shortfall with transportation sales taxes such as Measure R in Los Angeles. For the poor, higher store prices in exchange for lower sales taxes is not such a bad tradeoff.

A person truly concerned for the welfare of the poor opposes minimum parking requirements, which raise housing prices, raise prices at the store, raise tax rates, and places a traffic burden on the nearby streets and freeways; and supports demand-responsive tolling which is less regressive than fuel taxes and makes the roads more efficient and therefore reduces or eliminates the need to widen them at taxpayer expense.

Many cities have erected barriers to affordable housing under the guise of maintaining property values. So when young families cannot afford to live in established neighborhoods, that's by design.

The law doesn't make bicycles safer than before. But it does make biking more optimized by reducing the energy a bike rider expends crossing an intersection. The old law required the bike to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and it requires more energy to get up to speed from a complete stop than a rolling stop.

If you want safer biking, build protected bike lanes in your city.

Cities ate not more efficient than suburbs by every measure; if they were, it would be cheaper, not more expensive, to live in cities.

Unless, of course, the cities massively subsidize the suburbs. Then all bets are off.

In a socialist country, you have a strong state sector in the economy, private ownership of companies, of resources and even of tools is frowned upon... Stop your clueless musings about how socialist the U.S. would be.

That's true. In the USA, we have strong government influence over the means of production. This type of government is dirigism, which is associated with fascism.

So you're right, the USA isn't socialist. It's closer to fascist. Thanks for the clarification!

Schools in (some) downtowns are bad because the poor and minorities are zoned out of the suburbs through zoning laws that raise the cost of suburban housing. Besides raising the cost of housing, laws such as minimum parking requirements and prohibitions against accessory dwelling units reduce property rights and restrict economic mobility, all in the name of keeping the riffraff (i.e. the poor and minorities) out.

Another factor that makes schools in poor areas perform poorly is the fact that often freeways are funded in part by regressive sales taxes such as Measure R in Los Angeles rather than 100% by user fees alone. Therefore, freeways tend to move wealth from the poor to the rich, further restricting economic mobility and trapping people into a cycle of poverty.

So the suburbs seem like a nice place to raise a family, but only because the cost is greater than what those who live there pay.

I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking...

Show me a city free of traffic congestion and parking shortages and I'll show you a city that achieves this by forcing property owners to overbuild their parking lots and by overbuilding freeways. "Free" parking comes at a very high cost.

Buffalo, NY is an exception, but only because it's a city in decline. Let's not try to emulate them.

City planners typically (ab)use the zoning code to require so many parking spaces that there's never a shortage when the price of parking is zero. But the economically optimal amount of parking is the amount where the marginal cost of adding another parking space equals the marginal revenue from adding it (MC=MR). This means if the price is always zero (so MR=0), either the cost of building and owning a parking space should be zero (so MC=0 which is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible) or it should create a parking shortage on a regular basis to be economically optimal.

Cities also tend to overbuild freeways to try to keep ahead of demand without charging a toll, but this usually doesn't work because transportation agencies are terrible at predicting traffic levels. So one nice thing about tolls, besides giving carless taxpayers a return on their sales tax investment (see Prop K in San Francisco, Measure R in Los Angeles, TransNet in San Diego, Prop 400 in Phoenix, etc.), is that variable congestion tolls make traffic levels predictable by keeping demand constant.

The result of these policies is that urban areas subsidize the suburbs. So areas away from urban areas may seem idyllic, but they come at a great cost.

I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking...

Show me a city free of traffic congestion and parking shortages and I'll show you a city that achieves this by forcing property owners to overbuild their parking lots and by overbuilding freeways. "Free" parking comes at a very high cost.

Buffalo, NY is an exception, but only because it's a city in decline. Let's not try to emulate them.

City planners typically (ab)use the zoning code to require so many parking spaces that there's never a shortage when the price of parking is zero. But the economically optimal amount of parking is the amount where the marginal cost of adding another parking space equals the marginal revenue from adding it (MC=MR). This means if the price is always zero (so MR=0), either the cost of building and owning a parking space should be zero (so MC=0 which is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible) or it should create a parking shortage on a regular basis to be economically optimal.

Cities also tend to overbuild freeways to try to keep ahead of demand without charging a toll, but this usually doesn't work because transportation agencies are terrible at predicting traffic levels. So one nice thing about tolls, besides giving carless taxpayers a return on their sales tax investment (see Prop K in San Francisco, Measure R in Los Angeles, TransNet in San Diego, Prop 400 in Phoenix, etc.), is that variable congestion tolls make traffic levels predictable by keeping demand constant.

The result of these policies is that urban areas subsidize the suburbs. So areas away from urban areas may seem idyllic, but they come at a great cost.

I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking...

Show me a city free of traffic congestion and parking shortages and I'll show you a city that achieves this by forcing property owners to overbuild their parking lots and by overbuilding freeways. "Free" parking comes at a very high cost.

Buffalo, NY is an exception, but only because it's a city in decline. Let's not try to emulate them.

City planners typically (ab)use the zoning code to require so many parking spaces that there's never a shortage when the price of parking is zero. But the economically optimal amount of parking is the amount where the marginal cost of adding another parking space equals the marginal revenue from adding it (MC=MR). This means if the price is always zero (so MR=0), either the cost of building and owning a parking space should be zero (so MC=0 which is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible) or it should create a parking shortage on a regular basis to be economically optimal.

Cities also tend to overbuild freeways to try to keep ahead of demand without charging a toll, but this usually doesn't work because transportation agencies are terrible at predicting traffic levels. So one nice thing about tolls, besides giving carless taxpayers a return on their sales tax investment (see Prop K in San Francisco, Measure R in Los Angeles, TransNet in San Diego, Prop 400 in Phoenix, etc.), is that variable congestion tolls make traffic levels predictable by keeping demand constant.

The result of these policies is that urban areas subsidize the suburbs. So areas away from urban areas may seem idyllic, but they come at a great cost.

London copied Singapore's electronic pay as you enter "congestion charge" town centers. It is more or less a positive outcome but it could be improved.

in nearly all states, collected gas tax doesn't actually get spent on roads

"[E]ven if [fuel tax] funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."

Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.

Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.

But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileage fee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.

And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).

So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.

Zoning laws are also fascism (or more accurately dirigism, which is closely associated with fascism) which we've tolerated for decades, despite their history of oppressing the poor and minorities.

That's one of my biggest pet peeves - I can maintain a stopped trackstand for only a few seconds before i've got to unclip and put my feet down - when a car has the right of way at a stop sign, I wish they would just take it because then I can get through the intersection faster. Encouraging cyclists to take the right of way when they don't have right of way just further encourages them to not respect right of way laws

I understand your frustration here, but I hope you understand that if a cyclist goes out of turn and a car hits them, the driver is at fault and will be fined, published (not a misspelling) and possibly end up in jail. Sorry if it's inconvenient for you to have to wait your turn, but it's most certainly better to err on the side of caution and not do anything until you're sure what the other person is doing. If I pull up to a stop sign at the same time as another car pulls up to one I don't go until I'm sure they other guy isn't going, doing the same with a cyclist is only prudent.

Where do you live that the car is always at fault? Around here, the motorist rarely gets any punishment even if they run over and kill a cyclist. In fact, the local police department will do a shoddy investigation and deliberately antagonize cyclists claiming that the cyclist is at fault even if it ultimate it's the driver that's at fault.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?id=9238300
http://sf.streetsblog.org/category/issues-campaigns/bicycle-safety/

Traffic related fatalities are on par with the amount of gun deaths in the U.S. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/09/guns-traffic-deaths-rates/1784595/. Plus traffic related fatalities is the leading cause of death among children 2 to 14 years old http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810803.PDF.

One can make the argument that it's not clear the current method of enforcing traffic laws is actually helping those statistics, but that's another point (although the following article says speeding is the leading cause of traffic deaths in NYC: http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/03/18/dot-speeding-the-leading-cause-of-nyc-traffic-deaths-in-2012/). I personally think it's barbaric how many of our deaths and injuries come from vehicles. If you ask me more autonomous ways of driving couldn't come soon enough, in whatever form that takes.

And I'll bet you that was a one-time incident after which they lost their commercial license. No more taxi driver.

you don't need to bet. he was suspended for 30 days.

"The Taxi and Limousine Commission is moving to suspend Himon’s hack license for 30 days".

http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/08/22/cabbie-blames-cyclist-he-hit-and-bike-lanes-for-midtown-curb-jump-crash/

The point is that taxi drivers, no matter how bad they might be, are regulated a whole lot more than the rest of us.

And I'm sure that means regulated and licensed taxi drivers are just safer than other drivers, right. They won't, for example, intentionally step on the gas before mounting the curb and hitting a 23-year-old tourist who lost part of her leg.

My point being, you can find extreme examples of everything. Including rogue drivers, regulated or not.

Yea, OK, so if you and your cyclists buddies want to get together and raise the money to pay for dedicated bike paths, I'll support using public land to build them.

However, if you're like many of the d-bags around these parts who want their private bike streets paid for with my road and fuel taxes... You can go piss up a rope.

You know that most cyclists have cars, and drive, too, so they're paying fuel taxes right alongside you, right? But when they're riding their bikes, they're using up a lot less space on the roads, reducing congestion and leaving more room for you to get around. Compared with cars, bikes contribute virtually no wear on roads, and areas paved for bike traffic cost a fraction of what regular rated roads cost, because of the dramatically reduced load requirements. When cyclists get where they're going, they will lock up to a bike rack that fits 20 vehicles in the area of a parking space, leaving more parking for you to put your car in. They're also reducing gasoline demand, which might slightly lower the price you pay at the pump. As a driver, you stand to gain in numerous ways from others' cycling.

And fuel taxes don't cover the cost of the roads, anyway, mainly because they've been essentially stagnant while the cost of fuel increased fivefold. Drivers' use of the roads is heavily subsidized now by general taxation, so you don't get to point at cyclists and say they're the freeloaders.

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/01/23/drivers-cover-just-51-percent-of-u-s-road-spending/
http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/do-roads-pay-themselves

Welcome to 2010 when cycling groups noticed a surge in anti-cyclist pages, advocating intentionally harassing or injuring cyclists. In some cases, posters proudly brag about harassing and striking cyclists.

Facebook has formally refused to remove the groups despite clearly violating their policies.

They've spent billions on mass transit, they've spend tens of millions on bike paths... The net result has been the same amount of traffic...

That's not surprising. Increasing transportation capacity does not reduce traffic congestion in the long term.

All of that planning, and they still need to build a $3B bridge to deal with the 5+ hours of traffic jam going over the Columbia River to Vancouver, WA.

If they think the only way to eliminate the shortage of road space for all the motorists who want to use it is to add capacity by building a new bridge, they don't understand the Hamburger Analogy.

I had never heard that story. It's such a miscarriage of justice - I don't have any idea how the prosecutor can possibly go to sleep at night. The story doesn't mention the race or color of either the victims or the driver - but in Georgia, I might make an educated guess.

Well, half the guessing is right at least - http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/07/26/raquel-nelson-granted-option-of-new-trial/ That story is an update, two weeks later. I'm curious, gonna look some more . . .

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/04/17/raquel-nelson-back-in-court-with-high-profile-lawyer-at-her-defense/ That story almost makes it look like the prosecution had a change of heart.

In September, the prosecutor is still going though: http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/09/11/georgia-prosecutor-continues-case-against-raquel-nelson/

The way I learned it, the pedestrian always has the right of way. I was 19 years old the first time I ever heard the term "jay walking". Unless the mother physically picked the child up, and threw him in front of the car, blaming the kid's death on her is grossly wrong. And, obviously nothing like that happened here. They're railroading her on a technicality.

I had never heard that story. It's such a miscarriage of justice - I don't have any idea how the prosecutor can possibly go to sleep at night. The story doesn't mention the race or color of either the victims or the driver - but in Georgia, I might make an educated guess.

Well, half the guessing is right at least - http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/07/26/raquel-nelson-granted-option-of-new-trial/ That story is an update, two weeks later. I'm curious, gonna look some more . . .

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/04/17/raquel-nelson-back-in-court-with-high-profile-lawyer-at-her-defense/ That story almost makes it look like the prosecution had a change of heart.

In September, the prosecutor is still going though: http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/09/11/georgia-prosecutor-continues-case-against-raquel-nelson/

The way I learned it, the pedestrian always has the right of way. I was 19 years old the first time I ever heard the term "jay walking". Unless the mother physically picked the child up, and threw him in front of the car, blaming the kid's death on her is grossly wrong. And, obviously nothing like that happened here. They're railroading her on a technicality.

I had never heard that story. It's such a miscarriage of justice - I don't have any idea how the prosecutor can possibly go to sleep at night. The story doesn't mention the race or color of either the victims or the driver - but in Georgia, I might make an educated guess.

Well, half the guessing is right at least - http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/07/26/raquel-nelson-granted-option-of-new-trial/ That story is an update, two weeks later. I'm curious, gonna look some more . . .

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/04/17/raquel-nelson-back-in-court-with-high-profile-lawyer-at-her-defense/ That story almost makes it look like the prosecution had a change of heart.

In September, the prosecutor is still going though: http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/09/11/georgia-prosecutor-continues-case-against-raquel-nelson/

The way I learned it, the pedestrian always has the right of way. I was 19 years old the first time I ever heard the term "jay walking". Unless the mother physically picked the child up, and threw him in front of the car, blaming the kid's death on her is grossly wrong. And, obviously nothing like that happened here. They're railroading her on a technicality.

That's an excellent point.

Although the punishment for murder ranges from nothing to death, while the punishment for offending a corporation ranges from a few years in jail (here) to a lifetime to many lifetimes in wages to getting lauded as a hero and receiving millions of dollars (pick your favorite trumped-up corporate scandal).

Too bad prosecutors often fail to live up to the vast responsibility they've been given via prosecutorial discretion. (my favorite of late is a Georgia woman who was convicted of vehicular homicide when her 5 year old kid was hit and killed by a drunk driver as she and her family crossed the street from the bus stop - not only was she not driving, she doesn't even own a car. Nice work, Ms. Prosecutor... more irony - She gets 6 times the prison time of the drunk driver who plowed into her and her family. Double-good nice work, Ms. Prosecutor)

Actually, there's a simpler explanation than that (I'm in Houston where we have perpetual construction and nothing ever gets better).

The people who design the roads can't decide if they are there for people to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, or if they're there to subsidize all the developments. (Built on land that just happened to have been bought by friends and family members in the middle of nowhere dirt cheap just months before a major throughfare was announced, when it's not directly owned by the people building it already).

But that's not really the problem, freeway design is. On one freeway intersection (southbound 59 and 610 on the west side) we have a two lane exit going away from one of the city's major destinations that nobody takes (except as a shortcut to pull ahead of the 1/2 mile line of cars sitting to wait to get into...) and a one-lane exit getting onto 610 towards The Galleria. This lane exit-onlys at some pointless road nobody uses before you reach any of the exits that gets you to The Galleria, leading to everyone slamming on their breaks and trying to get out of the exit-only lane nobody wanted. All over the place you can see exits placed so close to stop lights that people are stopping on freeways for the red light. They didn't do a thing about this for 610's Galleria exits when it was widened (I regularly see entrance ramps blocked by people waiting in line to exit on my morning commute). Here's hoping that when 290 is finished, they will have moved some of these exits back from the lights (here's lookin' at you, W 43rd... yet another entrance ramp to an exit only that regularly backed up past the entrance ramp, trapping everyone trying to get on in the exit only lane. They expanded the exit to TWO lanes, which did speed things up but now people getting on have to fight that much harder to stay on)

But even that's not really the problem. Really, the fundamental problem is that once three million people use the freeway to get where they're going at 60MPH, they're going to sit there and wait while everyone in front of them gets stuck in 30MPH zones, poorly timed lights (because "having the light turn yellow as you approach slows down traffic") and narrow surface streets where granny gets a shitfit and screams for larger traffic humps if someone strange drives by her house.

Roads DO pay for themselves through fuel taxes levied on the fuels that people use to power the cars that run on the roads.

No, they don't -- not by a long shot. According to SubsidyScope, use taxes cover only 51% of the costs of highways -- whereas city streets are paid out of the city's general fund, not by gas taxes at all (so cyclists pay as much for the streets they use as everyone else).

Reduced congestion of existing highways and airspace?

Sorry, but high speed rail won't reduce congestion. Two University of Toronto professors have added to the body of evidence showing that highway and road expansion increases traffic by increasing demand. On the flip side, they show that transit expansion doesn't help cure congestion either.

When you understand that traffic congestion is a type of shortage (too many cars, too little road space), and that a shortage is defined as the situation when supply is greater than demand, two solutions immediately become obvious: increase supply, or reduce demand. The least expensive of these two is to reduce demand, and here's proof: the SR-91 express lanes in Orange County, California generate net social benefits of at least $12 million per year, compared with a scenario in which the lanes had been built but drivers did not pay to use them.

http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/05/31/hollywood-lapd-misses-the-memo-caught-on-tape-brutalizing-cyclists/

It just happened, and not the way you described. Jim Bunning is currently reviled by lots of people for trying to enforce the Paygo system. The bill did not have a way to pay for continued unemployment benefits, and he held it up until someone came up with a way to pay for it. His explanation was legit, or seemed to be, but all of the coverage is "Bunning is a dickhead."

Bunning's explanation:
http://bunning.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=NewsCenter.NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=21648539-d0e8-4c3b-6078-362af45228d7&Region_id=&Issue_id=

News coverage:
House Moves to Repay U.S. DOT Workers Furloughed by Bunning Filibuster
Crazy Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning throws a curveball at helping poor, struggling Americans
Seven states hit hard by Jim Bunning's delay on unemployment benefits

Installing parking meters in residential areas is on SF's mind:

Cashing in with more parking meters:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/City-could-cash-in-with-more-parking-meters-51363987.html

"Residential areas are packing in more people The City is projected to take in more than 150,000 new residents in the next three decades and the need to manage traffic and parking availability is becoming a key concern for transportation planners, according to a new study by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority."

---------------
Exhaustive Parking Study
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/07/21/sfcta-completes-exhaustive-parking-study-supervisors-delay-action/

"The study estimated there are more than 600,000 parking spaces in San Francisco, of which 320,000 are on-street and only 24,000 are regulated with parking meters. Residential parking permits (RPPs), as evidenced by the map above, have been added throughout the city in an ad-hoc fashion and in many areas are not synthesized with metered parking."

--------------
Bilkable Meters:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Electronic-city-parking-meters-are-easy-to-bilk-52402397.html

"The so-called e-parking meters installed in 2003 for around $25 million include features that are supposed to deter theft, according to manufacturer J.J. MacKay Canada.

But a trio of programmers and engineers say it took them only three days to create imposter cards that can offer free metered parking in The City.

Through computer code, the security researchers said they discovered how value is stored on the prepaid cards and were able to create fake cards valued at $999.99. They also found out how to create cards that wont deplete in value after being used."

I am already going pretty slow at 25-30mph. However, if I come around the corner and there is a boulder, well, that is just shit luck. That's just it though, it's not reasonable to expect stationary objects or moving objects at less than half the speed of traffic under normal conditions.

If you cannot stop in time for a stationary object, you are speeding, regardless of the actual speed limit. There are many reasons why there could be a stationary object behind the corner: a traffic jam, accident, fallen boulder, someone with car trouble, etc. It's not 'shit luck' when you hit that object. It is the consequence of your decision to drive faster than is safe. That decision also happens to put cyclists in danger, the people who get in an accident in that spot, the cars in a traffic jam, etc. Essentially, you are gambling with the lives of others.

You are not entitled to go 25-30mph. You are allowed to drive up to the speed limit, if the conditions allow.

That is what the bike represents. It slows us all down to a point where somebody might not reasonably expect an car to be moving that slow.

Sometimes, the reasonable speed for a car is 0 mph. At a traffic light or in a traffic jam for example. Do you run the red light or drive on the shoulder along the congestion, since you are seemingly entitled to keep moving? If you don't, then why can't you accept that there are situations where you have to slow down because your fellow road users cannot go as fast. This can mean cyclists, trucks, tractors, horse and buggy (Amish), a herd of sheep being moved to greener pastures, etc.

That, along with frustrated drivers, is the real danger I speak of. If bikes should be on that road, then the only sane decision is to make the speed limit that of a bicycle, or warn cyclists to achieve higher speeds for the duration of the road.

Or perhaps drivers should just learn to obey the law. If there is something in your lane that is moving slowly or not at all, you are obligated not to pass until it is safe to do so. Regardless of whether that obstruction is someone who is breaking the law or who you think is inconsiderate. Drivers who get frustrated and perform dangerous maneuvers are breaking the law themselves. They are the real issue, not the cyclists. If the cyclists are banned, the agressive drivers will do the same thing to trucks, tractors and other slow traffic.

In the U.S, there are so many many roads that never took bicycle traffic into consideration for one second when designing them. ... I have only been in Europe a few times in my life, and never Copenhagen. However, from what I remember, most places in the cities did not support very fast traffic anyways and the newer faster roads like our interstates were not designed for bicycle traffic exactly, but have more than enough space for it to be done quite safely. Most of your roads near your cities in Europe don't seem to have been designed for cars anyways. Not the older cities, from what I remember.

Just because the roads in Europe weren't designed for cars, doesn't mean that they are safe for cyclists. Since their introduction, cars have simply taken over these roads and forced alternative forms of transport off the road (it is simply not safe for 30+mph cars to mix with 15mph cyclists). In bicycle friendly parts of Europe, there have been a lot of investments in seperate bike lanes to allow cyclists to travel safely:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/10/04/notes-on-bicycling-in-copenhagen/

The USA could do the same. More cycling means less congestion, fewer parking problems, less obesity, less gas consumption and less pollution.

To be fair, the congestion pricing bill includes $354 million of dollars in transit improvements to make up for the increase in demand (which is generally estimated as an increase of less than 3%). Most of this is going to bus improvements, including Bus Rapid Transit, but also including less pipe-dreamy stuff like a bunch of new lines, and bus lanes over the East River bridges. Subway congestion isn't as big of a problem as you think; I'm guessing that, like me, you live on one of the handful of truly awful lines (L, 4, 5, 6) -- most lines have plenty of extra capacity and can run more trains if faced with increased demand. And if you are on the L, they're adding more rush hour service. The 4, 5, and 6 are getting the First and Second avenue BRT lanes, which ought to free up a little elbow room too. The weird magic of congestion charging is that you only have to take a few people off the road to see improvements. We won't be facing every driver in the city suddenly shoving their way onto subway cars.

What belongs in the trash is the automobile, along with federal policies that encourage sprawl along highways and single-family homeownership—sprawl can be pleasant if controlled, but dispersal economies, not to mention long-established social patterns of human settlement, make it almost impossible to plan for efficient growth if current suburban automobile habits are to be retained.

London's rocketing ahead of New York as the financial metropole of the West; the congestion charge is supposed to be a major factor in having made London more attractive to talent and less expensive in which to commute. Imagining Manhattan with the streets given back to pedestrians is almost as appealing, to me, as imagining this fucktard being sent to Gitmo for sabotaging the party line on energy independence.

I know you didn't really ask, but right here. Scroll down to "Weekly Carnage."

What we really need is fewer roads, fewer cars, more restrictions on driving, and more public transit. It looks likely that Bloomberg's administration will spend its last years following London's example, perhaps even going so far as to turn whole sections of Manhattan into pedestrian-only zones. Making it easier to get around the city can only be good for the regional economy, and personally, I'm all for it.