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If by private you mean publicly funded infrastructure such as roads, bridges, highways, traffic systems and policing then you are correct. The only thing private are the cars.

And cars are a huge component to "only" about. Consider this report. It claims just under $0.05 per mile of road travel in costs on the road, including maintenance and interest payments on road-related debt. In contrast, one has to pay quite a bit for the car or other vehicle, gas, maintenance, and insurance. I figure a bit less than ten times as much (based on reimbursement rates which probably overstate the average cost by a set fraction).

That's a common misconception. According to this study, tax rates for fuel-based vehicles are lower than required due to people who bike and pay property taxes.

www.vtpi.org/whoserd.pdf PDF link

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.

Tax the fuel.

Doesn't work

Well, except that many many studies have established that it does work. This is called "fuel price elasticity," and it is well known. People drive less when the fuel price is higher. The short-term elasticity is relatively low (because it takes a while for people to change their plans), and a long term elasticity, which is much higher.

http://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf

In that time, traffic on it grew at about the rate you give for increased capacity when there was no increase in capacity.

I'm pretty sure that they study is only looking at the induced traffic, thus if they had expanded your road by 10%, the traffic volume would have increased at double the rate it did.

But it makes a good sound bite, so rather than examining the whole situation, the anti-road nuts use it as ammunition to start asserting that destroying roads will improve traffic.

Actually that's not really what that quote says, it says that destroying roads makes traffic marginally worse. 7% of the traffic was diverted to other roads.

Well, lets look at public transport too, since that's often billed as the replacement. When you spend $1 on public transport, what level of traffic reduction do you get from it?

According to this pdf from Victoria, BC rail systems return an average of $5 in savings for every $1 spent on them (only a small portion of that saving is specifically congestion but based on the chart in the pdf it looks like it's a fair bit more than $0.11). Other studies seem to suggest you get an additional $4-$9 in economic benefits from rail system per $1 spent on them. The linked study doesn't account for economic benefits, only direct cost reductions.

The users of the road are already paying for it in the form of very high state and federal taxes on gasoline.

Fuel taxes, which are not high, have not kept pace with inflation. You want to talk about high fuel tax, try Canada. Though it's been years since I've been there the last tyme I bought gas in Canada it cost significantly more there than in the US. And you can't blamed that on the cost of oil. The US imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. Europe has significantly higher fuel taxes than the US too. Because of low fuel taxes the US has one of the lowest fuel prices.

Falcon

Or, you know, being hit by cars who couldn't care less about walkers or cyclists.

Exactly, I submitted this as a slashdot story a while ago, but some random diatribe about the RIAA was more important I guess. But anyway, Americans are 8x as likely(pdf warning and beefy academic paper warning, though there are graphs) to die per bicycle trip than their European counterparts.

First and foremost, Americans seem to have this opinion that if you aren't driving then you are defective and your life isn't worth their inconvenience anyhow.

Secondly is the SUV. It needs to be banned tomorrow. Those things pose more of a risk to the safety and well being of the United States than any terrorist has, ever.

One site I check every few months is the Victoria Transit Policy Institure . They have a lot of resources on sustainable transportation policy. When I watched my previous employer start paying for additional parking spots for new employees, I looked to VTPI for information on parking cash out. Cash out is an incentive program to not drive - if it costs the company $30/month for a parking spot, cash out programs pay employees the savings from not providing a parking spot. This encourages people to bus and bike to work. In my case, the employer wasn't interested, one of many reasons I no longer work there, but that's another story.

When I read the title of this article, I immediately though of VTPI. There is actually a PDF cowritten by Lawrence Frank which is listed on the VTPI main page, which is available from Smart Growth BC. Lawrence Frank is mentioned in TFA, and several of his studies are linked at the bottom. The Smart Growth BC PDF did not appear to be in the list of links at the bottom of the TFA at Science News Online. The PDF is 52 pages long, and is titled Promoting Public Health Through Smart Growth (also an HTML version from Google cache to avoid melting down Smart Growth BC's server). It's more about how to design your cities properly, to avoid the health issues cited in TFA. From the preface to the PDF:

This report explains how our built environment shapes our transportation choices, and in turn, human health. It reviews the existing research for a range of transportation-related health impacts on seven public health outcomes: Physical Activity and Obesity, Air Quality, Traffic Safety, Noise, Water Quality, Mental Health, and Social Capital.

> Another poster pointed out that per mile America is the safest in the world

That was me, a lowly AC. I've seen multiple references for this but the only one I can immediately locate is here - check page 4, table 5.3-4. The US is the safest per passenger-mile of all the listed countries (UK is a close 2nd), but most definitely *not* the safest per capita - not even close. The difference is explained by how much more Americans drive than people in most other places. I've seen other data listing more nations, but I cannot immediately find it, sorry :(

http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0503.pdf

So "safest in the world" depends on how you look at it :D. If we have to drive further to go about our business, is it really safer?

The US is also the safest per passenger-mile for aviation fatalities.

There is (unsurprisingly) a high correlation between total miles driven and number of accidents. Right now, your insurance premiums don't account for this at all. The BBC article focuses on the GPS effects of pay-as-you-drive (PAYD), such as charging for types of motorway, time of day, etc., but the really big deal is just knowing the total number of miles driven.

So how does this help students, or the poor? Well, those two groups typically meet two criteria: high risk, and low financial resources. For these people, there are real benefits to being able to reduce their premiums which they can do by reducing the miles they drive. Right now, if you're a high risk driver, you're SOL - you pay the high premiums and suck it up. With PAYD, you can at least drive less, and still gain the benefits of having a car without breaking the bank.

(As a side effect, PAYD could help to encourage more sustainable modes of transportation, by making transit/walking/etc. more attractive relative to driving.)

If you're interested in these issues, check out this article: Pay-as-you-drive pricing for insurance affordability by Todd Litman.

One interesting note from the article: the reason poor drivers pay more as "higher risk" drivers is geographic. Insurance companies rank poorer neighbourhoods as "high risk", but not because poor drivers are more risky in their behaviour. No, it's because rich neighbourhoods tend to have more underused (second or third) cars, which are very low risk, lowering the risk of the entire neighbourhood.

And I do agree with the many posts here complaining about the ripoff world of automobile insurance... it's insane how expensive it is, and how cruel those companies are!

They also wish to use nets like these to charge people for each mile driven. And the price will vary depending on the time of day

Yes! An example is this proposed one. And car insurance by the mile exists right now. I, too, have heard of car insurance schemes that would charge different rates for driving at different times of day(but this is the only link I found on it.)

"...electric vehicles produce 33% of the air pollution costs of an aveage gasoline car if electricity is generated by natural gas and 80% if by coal."

For a comprehensive critical evaluation of Electric Vehicles from a green perspective, try the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's A Critical Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Benefits , which points out other hidden costs of electric vehicles, such as their limited ability to fund roadway costs (they generate no fuel taxes) and their motivation of increased automobile dependence.

Drivers of cars and motorcycles also have to eat to drive. Comparisons of bicyclists vs. motor powered vehicles need to include only the incremental food fuel costs of a bicyclist as compared to that of the driver of a car or motorcycle. Ever looked at a bicycle commuter? The ones I know are much skinnier, for a given height, than non-cyclists. Which means they have fewer pounds to maintain than that of a non-cyclist, in terms of required energy consumption. Since a physically-fit person's metabolism burns foods more efficiently than that of a less-fit person, a fit bicyclist is likely to waste less food in the form of turning it into body fat, than the non-cyclist.