What about the children? And the poor, and sick, and the aged? How dare you not want to provide money to the government to feed poor children, cure cancer. You are not paying 90% of your income to the government, so how can you say you are not underpaying?
I can say I'm not underpaying because I report all my income and pay what I'm legally required to. That's pretty easy, isn't it?
Sure, you're going for a +1 Funny mod. But unfortunately, your post highlights a crucial point: there's a difference between paying your fair share and the hyperbole that conservatives engage in when discussing taxes. Everyone benefits from government services that take care of the children, the poor, the sick, and the aged, even when they themselves don't have any dependents directly benefiting from those programs. And probably at least 60% of us will in our lifetimes have very personal reasons to want a cure for cancer.
Question: "Will you accept cuts in your favorite program in exchange for tax breaks?"
My answer: Yes.
Would you mind telling us what your favorite program is?
Here's my question: "Will you accept increases in your taxes to pay for your favorite program?" My answer to that is YES. Though I'd have trouble deciding between public education and transportation. Education seems more fundamental, but transportation is my career and passion./sigh... decisions, decisions.
The trick is to get them to cut the crap, not the important programs.
Here in California, we have a governor who got elected because he promised to do just that.
First, he would start off with a tremendous audit of the entire government, "throw the books open." Never mind that they've been available online for the past several years. Then he would cut all the massive waste and abuse, leaving us with a clean, efficient government, that spent less money and didn't lose any of our beloved services.
Well, guess what? His ultra-conservative auditor went over the books. She said, "Um... the Legislative Analyst's Office is right... the state has no money." He's cut funding to transportation, education, and health care already, and gotten us to bond out another $15 B when the state is already nearly at junk-bond status. And just now, after all that, the "waste" is starting to trickle in... $10k here, $100k there. If they keep it up, they'll find a few million by the end of 2004.
So that's what comes of a promise to "cut the crap, not the important programs." Me, I'm damn glad I'm graduating this year, because graduate student fees at the UC are going up another 40% next year, on top of the 30% increase this year. I'd think that the University of California's graduate programs are sort of important, but that's what's being cut... along with the Transportation Congestion Relief Program, eyeglasses for the elderly, and all sorts of stuff. In the meantime, we throw more people into prison, rather than using proven effective intervention programs that cost a LOT less.
I'm sick of "cutting the crap," because it seems that the programs that are important to me *are* crap in the eyes of the government. What "crap" do you want to see cut?
Giving money to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents.
Sure... if those adolescents use the whiskey as anesthesia and disinfectant to administer emergency services to the injured, and the car keys to drive poor people to work...
Just meditate for a moment on what your life would be like if there wasn't a government around spending money. Wave bye-bye to your paved streets, your sewer lines, your schools. Careful out there; when you're mugged, you can't call the police, and if your house catches fire, you better hope your neighbors have a really nice garden hose they're willing to lend you. And that's just for starters...
It would be nice if we could get more for the money the government spends, but unfortunately, it's way, way too easy for private contractors to rip off government agencies, who are far more restricted in how they do business than private companies are. Why is that? Because, for some reason, we believe that people who spend tax dollars should be far more accountable than private enterprise. You can't just fire a vendor and replace them on a major government contract; you have to send the entire project out to a public bidding process all over again. You'll also probably get sued, because there are laws about how the government can fire you, even if you're a company that managed to rack up $260k worth of invoices during a 75-day suspension period. (Oh, no, not speaking from experience here;-)
No, the fact is, they would simply spend it. Gone. Just like that.
Yep, money the government spends is just gone. Up in smoke.
And who knows where those fire departments, police officers, streets, sewer lines, and what-all come from? It must be MAGIC.
Wise up: we *want* the government to spend money. We want them to do it responsibly, in ways that help society. We all benefit from it... even childless single people benefit from other people's kids being in school all day, believe it or not (partly because then they're not vandalizing your front yard, and partly because you might need to hire people with basic literacy someday).
The idea that money the government spends just somehow vanishes never ceases to amaze me. Go through the day sometime and note everything you do that relies on government-funded infrastructure. Start with flushing your toilet and leaving your driveway.
It's not the parking structures that causes the sprawl, it's the living structures.
But the parking is part of what housing is available. Minimum parking requirements drive density down, by dramatically increasing the cost of building each unit. To build a 2-bedroom unit in Los Angeles, you have to build two parking spaces. Great, that unit that cost you about $120k to build now costs you another $60k on top of that, unless you have some spare land lying around to put parking on. An analysis of Oakland residential densities before and after minimum parking requirements were put in place found that density went down 18% and cost to build per unit went up 30%. Not only was the housing now lower-density, but it was also more expensive... therefore, it's rented or sold at higher prices.
It's my parents, my sister, and me. Try finding a 3 bedroom 1500 sq ft. apartment/condo/townhouse/house near downtown Fort Worth for under $1000 a month. It isn't gonna happen.
The choices you make:
1) You live with your sister and your parents. A lot of people (adults anyway) don't. Nothing wrong with the multi-generational household, but it's a choice. Now, if you're not an adult, it's a different matter. You don't have the legal right to move out until you're at least 18. But at some point, your parents chose (hopefully) to have two kids, knowing they'd have to put them somewhere.
2) You each want a separate bedroom. This is a typical facet of American households, but in most cultures where larger families live together, it's not. In fact, the Section 8 program has a lot of problems because the only places where people with vouchers can rent are "too small," because they're legally required to have separate bedrooms for kids of different genders and each married couple or single adult.
3) You want that three-bedroom home to be at least 1500 square feet. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, but there are smaller 3-bed apartments, at least in the part of the world I hail from.
4) You've set your housing budget at $1000/month. That implies a household income of about $36,000 a year, if you're the typical household that spends a third of your pre-tax income on housing. That's just slightly under the median household income (in 1999) in Ft. Worth (which is $37,074).
5) In many cases, people have made choices that have lowered their household incomes. For example, my husband could make a lot more money with his degree, but chooses to have as low-stress a job as possible. These are other choices you and your household may have made.
The point is, there's not necessarily a "right" choice, or even one that's "better" or "worse." But I'm sick and tired of people acting like they just are driven into one lifestyle or another, oblivious to the decisions they make that put them where they are.
I wonder how the mag blips work in the cold weather.
Well, given that the only place I know of (in the US) that they're being used on a regular basis is to guide snowplows, I'm guessing pretty well.
Frankly, I'm a fan of optical guidance systems. Those work by reading a dotted line on the pavement. The really nice thing is, you can scrape up the line and move it a couple inches every couple years, so that the vehicles (in the cases I'm mostly reading about, buses) don't wear grooves in the pavement. The downside is, you can't use that system anywhere that it snows.;-) (I'm in Los Angeles... it snowed in 1948, I've heard. If it ever does again, I'm sure that pretty much the entire city will shut down, and probably a lot of roofs will collapse.)
Also, that kind of "smart road" is actually realy dumb... imagine the mayhem if a malicious prankster dug up the magnets and moved them.
Um... this sounds like a Darwin Award winner: spend enough time on a highway with the right equipment to dig down through a couple inches of asphalt, pull out a hockey-puck sized metal disc, then dig *another* hole in the asphalt, plop the disc in there, and close up the holes...
And you do this without getting killed *how*? It would take many hours just to move one lane over, even if you had pretty good equipment. Maybe if you were able to hijack the machines that the DOT uses to embed the thingies in the first place you could get it done, but you'd need cones and safety vests, and someone would likely work out that you're up to something...
How much would it cost to equip the highways for self-driving cars?
What the article in question discusses is that the highways won't *need* to be equipped. Cars can be auto-guided by GPS, radar, and cameras.
Me, I'm not so sure about that... it seems like you'd have to have a hyper-accurate map, and heck, ours are often off by several feet currently. But it's an interesting idea, especially if the GPS component was more of a back-up and not really essential to the system.
But the cost of implanting magnetic guidance blips into the pavement is actually pretty minimal... it costs less than putting down Botts Dots (the white reflector thingies that mark the lines). So it wouldn't actually burden the highway budget that much, and given how much it would probably save in destroyed barriers from accidents, it might even be a zero-sum project.
Up on Highway 80 near Big Bear, they recently put in magnetic guidance blips and equipped snowplows with front-grille radar so that they can be driven safely in white-out conditions. This is *saving* them a whole lot of money... before, the snowplows would hug the rail to stay on the road, which meant $200k every year to replace the guardrail in the spring. After about two or three years, the system has paid for itself easily.
Its perfectly fine for 50,000 people to kill themselves/each other each year on US highways, but as soon as a computer can be blamed for 1 death, the company that built it will have major problems.
Hey now! It's down to 40,000 these days... thank you very much!
My Transportation Engineering instructor's theory is that "traffic's getting so bad, when we hit each other, we're not going fast enough to kill each other anymore!"
A highway full of automated cars could run with very short car-to-car distances and good safety.
And then you have the opposite problem from the parent poster: people are terrified to speed down the freeway only five feet from the car in front of them.
How do we know this? Because there's a stretch of Highway 8 in San Diego County where they're testing magnetic guidance for this exact purpose. They have a "platoon" of cars with sensors under them, and little hockey-puck sized magnetic guides embedded in the pavement. Sometimes early on Sunday mornings you can see them whipping by at 60 mph with five feet between them.
I think the idea is a person can be imprisoned, executed, whatever... whereas a computer is not motivated by punishment.
That's a point, but... a computer is not "motivated" by *anything*. This is the part I never get about people who freak out at the idea of speed cameras: you'd rather have a human being come up behind you, run your plate, and then based on the type of car you're driving, what you look like, and whether anything interesting comes up there, decide whether or not to give you a speeding ticket... than making sure that *everyone* who is speeding gets one? (Which, by the way, is the fastest way to ensure we get good speeding laws...)
Same goes here. A computer is not motivated to tailgate the blue-hair in front of it because she's going "too slow." A computer is not motivated to cut the asshole in the Lexus off. A computer is not going to get in an accident because it was distraught over breaking up with its girlfriend.
But you have a point. We like revenge in our society. When someone hurts you, you want them to *pay*. If a computer hurts you, there's no way to make it pay... it doesn't care if you turn it into scrap.
People wouldn't get road rage if the speed limits were higher.
Um... road rage is usually caused by the behavior of other drivers, i.e. getting cut off dangerously, etc. How does the speed limit have anything to do with that?
About the only way that I can see the speed limit affecting road rage is when someone gets in the number 1 lane and feels they have the right and responsibility to drive exactly the speed limit. But usually traffic is free-flow, and you can get around them, and the moment passes.
Get a restraining order, and then when she calls you in violation of said order you can have her arrested... no more problem.
Um... restraining orders typically don't restrain someone from *calling* you. They restrain someone from coming onto your property or within a certain distance of you. In other words, the cops can't do a damn thing with a restraining order until it's too late. "Hi, this guy who I have a restraining order against is on my front lawn, and coming up to my door... and banging it down... and *gurp*"
So the marginal cost of routine maintenance (oil, tires, etc) is neglible (in my case). Gas is the single largest expense, because the fuel economy really sucks on short trips.
A lot of the wear and tear on your car is in the first few minutes after you start it up, in addition to the fuel economy sucking then. Lots of little trips are going to add up to more maintenance than a few big ones of the same mileage. Especially in stop-and-go conditions... a long freeway drive where you don't change gears or brake is a lot easier on your car than the same amount of surface-street driving.
And I totally agree gas is far too cheap - unfortunately, if gas went up then mass transit (buses here in Madison) would become more expensive as well, so I'm not sure that helps the cause.
Depends... Los Angeles has the world's largest "clean air" bus fleet, with over 1800 CNG buses. So raising gasoline or even diesel taxes would have negligible impact on operating expenses for LACMTA. Also, diesel is taxed differently, so raising just gasoline taxes would not affect most transit properties at all.
This TEA-21 - is that a CA law, or federal? Because that's a GREAT idea, IMHO - give people the choice!
TEA-21 is the Congressional reauthorization of ISTEA (yes, they pronounce it "ice tea"), which was a big bill in 1996 or so that authorized a lot of federal funds to go into transit capital projects. Some of the major features have been that (1) money that used to be only applicable to highway projects can now be used for transit instead; (2) things like ridesharing and pedestrian and bike improvements are eligible for funding; (3) some of the laws that make it more advantageous to drive (like the one about parking being tax-exempt *only* if the employer gives no other option) have been cleaned up. Congress has just sent the next incarnation, TEA-3, to the President, who is threatening a veto.
The Parking-Cash Out Law is a California-specific thing. It went into effect before TEA-21, but was never employed or enforced because of the tax idiocy. Now it can be (though I don't know if anyone really is yet). A few companies that have voluntarily done cash-out have dramatically reduced the drive-alone contingent among their employees.
And what if you are married and both of you have jobs, one in the city, and one in the 'burbs? Depending on the geography, it may not be possible to live somewhere where both can get to work by public transit.
Very true. My husband can't get to work on transit easily from here. (He can get there, but it takes three times as long.)
On the other hand, I'm 20 minutes from school by bus, and about 50 minutes from work (which is in the opposite direction). If I drove to school, it would take the same amount of time. If I drove to work, it would take about 10 minutes less.
So we have *one* car, and he drives it to work most days. If I really, really need it for some reason, he has co-workers he can rideshare with.
How about this we make it more atractive for business to move out into the burbs so people in the country can find good work.
How on earth could we possibly make it any more attractive? Businesses are moving to the 'burbs at a breakneck pace. Office vacancy rates in downtowns are sky-high. (9/11 would have claimed a lot more lives if it weren't for an average 20% vacancy rate in office towers.)
The problem is, *which* suburbs? Most commutes (at least in the Los Angeles area) are now suburb-to-suburb. But if you live in Burbank and work at Warner Center in Woodland Hills (a mecca of insurance companies, for some reason) you're still getting on the overcrowded 101 freeway and adding your 20 miles to the traffic.
I'm all for more rail, though you have an uphill battle convincing anyone that it's worth the enormous capital costs. Right now, there's a demonstration project that has removed street parking during rush hour on a mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, so that the buses can run in an exclusive lane (yay no pulling out in front of you). If we could get that the whole length of the route, wow... Downtown to Santa Monica in half an hour during rush hour, and you can thumb your nose at Rodeo Drive as you speed by. But the politics are ridiculous. They seem to think that by dedicating a lane to vehicles that are each carrying, on average, 50 people, we'll somehow *reduce* people-carrying capacity.
The highway budget is largely paid for through gas taxes, so as long as you're paying them, you're already paying real costs.
In California, less than a third of the highway and road maintenance budget comes from gas taxes, car registration, and truck fees. The rest is subsidized from general funds.
Which isn't much better than transit... overall, California's transit agencies get about 27% of operating expenses from the farebox. That includes your dial-a-ride services for the disabled, your free municipal shuttles, and your pricey commuter-rail systems.
Granted, this $10 an hour isn't revenue you can actually get if you forego public transport. But if you have some project you're doing in your spare time, and it enables you to actually have spare time, clearly it's well worth it.
I'm currently a student. That means a lot of reading.
When I'm driving, that time is completely absorbed by, well, driving. When I take the bus, though, I can use that time to catch up on my reading for school (or just to read the paper or a book for fun, if I think I can get away with it).
Depending on your situation, you can end up getting a lot more out of the time you spend on transit than you can in your car.
The problem is, unless you are willing to forgo the car completely, you can't factor in the price of the car, repairs, depreciation, etc (any more than the amount of miles used for commuting).
Sure, you can factor it in.
Last year, I sold my 1997 Honda del Sol for $10,000. It only had 55,000 miles on it. That's about 17,000 less than the average US driver would have put on it. So I was able to sell it for *more than half* what I paid to drive it off the lot six years earlier.
We get a hefty discount on our car insurance if we drive less than 7,500 miles a year. You probably would too.
Routine maintenance is per miles *or* per months. So, if you drive less, you get a couple oil changes a year and a tune up every year or so, rather than going in every few months.
Tires last about 50,000 miles. Can you say "wear and tear"?
The fact is, there are a lot of *per mile* costs that you simply don't notice when you're driving. The base costs of insurance and the car itself are prorated out over the miles, lowering those costs per-mile the more you drive. But you pay significantly less for a car you *don't* use than a car you do. (On the other hand, if you don't use it, might as well get rid of it... which is what I did last year. We're a one-car family now, which knocked our insurance down by $100/month.)
You point to a couple of important policy issues, though, in your post. First of all, gas is too cheap. We need to inflation-index all our gas taxes so that they can keep up with rising road maintenance costs, and then add to them every couple years to account for increasing fuel efficiency. As it now stands, with a particular number of cents per gallon charged, every single year gas taxes go *down*.
The other is parking. A few years ago (with TEA-21 [Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century] reauthorization), the tax code was changed slightly to make parking cash-out a lot more of an option. Basically, before, if an employer offered free parking, they could claim that as tax-exempt... *provided* they didn't offer anyone anything in lieu of that benefit. TEA-21 changed it so that you could offer parking cash-out (or other benefits in lieu of parking, such as transit passes) without losing the tax-exempt status of the parking benefit. So now, with California's parking cash-out law, employers over a certain size who offer free parking (and who pay a third party for it) are *required* to give their employees the option of taking the money instead, as a taxable cash benefit. (It's also now possible for people to "cash in" to parking... if you pay for parking at work, but your company can take that money right out of your paycheck, you don't have to pay taxes on it.)
If more companies were required to and did this, people would better understand the amount they're "really" paying for parking. When I was living a mile from work and walking most days, I would have loved to pocket that $135/month they were paying for a parking card I almost never used. It would have paid for a bus pass plus several taxi rides a month. But, since I didn't have that choice, I actually *drove* to work occasionally, especially if I had to go somewhere right afterward. Because it was cheaper.
They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
Um... what on earth are you talking about? First of all, almost no post-WWII transit system in the US was ever planned out to be profitable. It's not possible. Given routes might be, sure; but the need to provide transit *everywhere*, regardless of profitability, pretty much precludes self-sufficiency.
You seem to understand the peaking problem without understanding the underlying issues. Increased ridership *decreases* losses to run systems. The 22 highest-ridership lines in the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority system run at a decent profit. It's the other couple hundred that leave the agency at a 29% farebox recovery ratio overall.
Unfortunately, systems that run with substantial peak hours and very low ridership in between have a lot more trouble making ends meet. The Wilshire Metro Rapid line in Los Angeles is packed *all day long*, so it runs at a considerable profit. (It may be the only bus line in the country that has a ridership of 50k boardings/day.) If you have to buy extra vehicles so that they can sit in the yard 18 hours a day, yes, it costs you a lot more to run your system.
These systems become huge bureaucratic sinkholes, with nobody really claiming responsibility for anything that happens. In the end, taxpayers anywhere in the vicinity of these systems end up footing the bill for all the waste, and politicians who get chauffeured to work utter platitudes about increasing ridership to solve all problems.
And how much do you pay for your highways?
I don't know what it's like in DC, but in California, only 1/3 of the budget for highway and road maintenance is covered by gas taxes and other user fees (car registration and truck fees). The rest comes from general revenues.
As mentioned before, 29% of LACMTA's operating expenses come out of the farebox. That's pitifully low. On the other hand, the San Diego Trolley gets 59.3% of its operating expenses from fares. Overall, for all California transit services (including dial-a-ride for the disabled and expensive commuter rail systems), the recovery ratio is 27%.
Now, let's look at this: Highways and roads -- 33.3%. Transit: 27%. Not a huge difference, really, is there? Oh, except for volume. The *amount* spent on highways and roads drastically exceeds the amount spent on transit, simply because California tends to have about a 2-4% mode split for transit. Also, low-income, elderly, students, and disabled are massively overrepresented in the transit-riding population, so there's a definite argument that governments *should* be more willing to subsidize transit than roads.
*All* of transportation is "wasting" taxpayers' money, not just the transportation you don't personally use.
Okay, and for those of us that have to pay for housing, what do you suggest? People live in the suburbs because it's cheap housing. Go price some houses or apartments in a downtown area.
Ok, let's see. What are your options?
- Buy a smaller house or a condo closer to downtown
- Buy a bigger house farther away, and drive a lot
The problem here is, transportation costs are part of the trade-off, and currently transportation is *too cheap*. So generally speaking it's no contest.
Of course, it depends on what you value. My husband and I probably could have bought a nice house over a year ago somewhere in the outer San Fernando Valley. But, we'd absolutely despise living in a place so devoid of culture or... well, anything much. We'd love to buy somewhere near where we live now, in West Hollywood, but it's very expensive (to buy, though rentals aren't bad). We'll probably end up with a fairly small place somewhere in a nicer part of Hollywood when the market calms down enough that there's some inventory to choose from.
The fact is, you made a choice. That choice, in your case, was largely based on price, according to your post. But it doesn't mean that you're not operating within a market economy where you have different options and opportunity costs to consider, just because something is "too expensive." You probably could afford something near your downtown if you gave up a lot of other things you value. That's not what you want to do, and that's fine. But you CHOOSE. Suburbian life isn't thrust upon you. (In Soviet Russia, the suburbs move to YOU!)
From the article: Because of the cost of the machinery and maintenance, each space in an automated garage costs $25,000, several thousand dollars more than a spot in a conventional lot.
If by "conventional" you mean a surface lot, or even an above-grade parking structure, then this is more costly. But the round number usually used for calculating the cost to construct a below-grade parking structure is $30,000 per space. So this system would *save* money at $25k. It wouldn't even be that bad compared to structured parking, which often runs $15k/space. Those numbers exclude land costs, too... and the robot garage would need less land.
Of course, they may have just not been very specific... perhaps that's $25k *in addition* to the costs to construct the lot itself. We'll never know. (Well, we could find out, but -- Oooh shiny! What was I saying?)
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What about the children? And the poor, and sick, and the aged? How dare you not want to provide money to the government to feed poor children, cure cancer. You are not paying 90% of your income to the government, so how can you say you are not underpaying?
I can say I'm not underpaying because I report all my income and pay what I'm legally required to. That's pretty easy, isn't it?
Sure, you're going for a +1 Funny mod. But unfortunately, your post highlights a crucial point: there's a difference between paying your fair share and the hyperbole that conservatives engage in when discussing taxes. Everyone benefits from government services that take care of the children, the poor, the sick, and the aged, even when they themselves don't have any dependents directly benefiting from those programs. And probably at least 60% of us will in our lifetimes have very personal reasons to want a cure for cancer.
Question: "Will you accept cuts in your favorite program in exchange for tax breaks?"
/sigh... decisions, decisions.
My answer: Yes.
Would you mind telling us what your favorite program is?
Here's my question: "Will you accept increases in your taxes to pay for your favorite program?" My answer to that is YES. Though I'd have trouble deciding between public education and transportation. Education seems more fundamental, but transportation is my career and passion.
The trick is to get them to cut the crap, not the important programs.
Here in California, we have a governor who got elected because he promised to do just that.
First, he would start off with a tremendous audit of the entire government, "throw the books open." Never mind that they've been available online for the past several years. Then he would cut all the massive waste and abuse, leaving us with a clean, efficient government, that spent less money and didn't lose any of our beloved services.
Well, guess what? His ultra-conservative auditor went over the books. She said, "Um... the Legislative Analyst's Office is right... the state has no money." He's cut funding to transportation, education, and health care already, and gotten us to bond out another $15 B when the state is already nearly at junk-bond status. And just now, after all that, the "waste" is starting to trickle in... $10k here, $100k there. If they keep it up, they'll find a few million by the end of 2004.
So that's what comes of a promise to "cut the crap, not the important programs." Me, I'm damn glad I'm graduating this year, because graduate student fees at the UC are going up another 40% next year, on top of the 30% increase this year. I'd think that the University of California's graduate programs are sort of important, but that's what's being cut... along with the Transportation Congestion Relief Program, eyeglasses for the elderly, and all sorts of stuff. In the meantime, we throw more people into prison, rather than using proven effective intervention programs that cost a LOT less.
I'm sick of "cutting the crap," because it seems that the programs that are important to me *are* crap in the eyes of the government. What "crap" do you want to see cut?
Giving money to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents.
;-)
Sure... if those adolescents use the whiskey as anesthesia and disinfectant to administer emergency services to the injured, and the car keys to drive poor people to work...
Just meditate for a moment on what your life would be like if there wasn't a government around spending money. Wave bye-bye to your paved streets, your sewer lines, your schools. Careful out there; when you're mugged, you can't call the police, and if your house catches fire, you better hope your neighbors have a really nice garden hose they're willing to lend you. And that's just for starters...
It would be nice if we could get more for the money the government spends, but unfortunately, it's way, way too easy for private contractors to rip off government agencies, who are far more restricted in how they do business than private companies are. Why is that? Because, for some reason, we believe that people who spend tax dollars should be far more accountable than private enterprise. You can't just fire a vendor and replace them on a major government contract; you have to send the entire project out to a public bidding process all over again. You'll also probably get sued, because there are laws about how the government can fire you, even if you're a company that managed to rack up $260k worth of invoices during a 75-day suspension period. (Oh, no, not speaking from experience here
No, the fact is, they would simply spend it. Gone. Just like that.
Yep, money the government spends is just gone. Up in smoke.
And who knows where those fire departments, police officers, streets, sewer lines, and what-all come from? It must be MAGIC.
Wise up: we *want* the government to spend money. We want them to do it responsibly, in ways that help society. We all benefit from it... even childless single people benefit from other people's kids being in school all day, believe it or not (partly because then they're not vandalizing your front yard, and partly because you might need to hire people with basic literacy someday).
The idea that money the government spends just somehow vanishes never ceases to amaze me. Go through the day sometime and note everything you do that relies on government-funded infrastructure. Start with flushing your toilet and leaving your driveway.
It's not the parking structures that causes the sprawl, it's the living structures.
But the parking is part of what housing is available. Minimum parking requirements drive density down, by dramatically increasing the cost of building each unit. To build a 2-bedroom unit in Los Angeles, you have to build two parking spaces. Great, that unit that cost you about $120k to build now costs you another $60k on top of that, unless you have some spare land lying around to put parking on. An analysis of Oakland residential densities before and after minimum parking requirements were put in place found that density went down 18% and cost to build per unit went up 30%. Not only was the housing now lower-density, but it was also more expensive... therefore, it's rented or sold at higher prices.
It's my parents, my sister, and me. Try finding a 3 bedroom 1500 sq ft. apartment/condo/townhouse/house near downtown Fort Worth for under $1000 a month. It isn't gonna happen.
The choices you make:
1) You live with your sister and your parents. A lot of people (adults anyway) don't. Nothing wrong with the multi-generational household, but it's a choice. Now, if you're not an adult, it's a different matter. You don't have the legal right to move out until you're at least 18. But at some point, your parents chose (hopefully) to have two kids, knowing they'd have to put them somewhere.
2) You each want a separate bedroom. This is a typical facet of American households, but in most cultures where larger families live together, it's not. In fact, the Section 8 program has a lot of problems because the only places where people with vouchers can rent are "too small," because they're legally required to have separate bedrooms for kids of different genders and each married couple or single adult.
3) You want that three-bedroom home to be at least 1500 square feet. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, but there are smaller 3-bed apartments, at least in the part of the world I hail from.
4) You've set your housing budget at $1000/month. That implies a household income of about $36,000 a year, if you're the typical household that spends a third of your pre-tax income on housing. That's just slightly under the median household income (in 1999) in Ft. Worth (which is $37,074).
5) In many cases, people have made choices that have lowered their household incomes. For example, my husband could make a lot more money with his degree, but chooses to have as low-stress a job as possible. These are other choices you and your household may have made.
The point is, there's not necessarily a "right" choice, or even one that's "better" or "worse." But I'm sick and tired of people acting like they just are driven into one lifestyle or another, oblivious to the decisions they make that put them where they are.
I wonder how the mag blips work in the cold weather.
;-) (I'm in Los Angeles... it snowed in 1948, I've heard. If it ever does again, I'm sure that pretty much the entire city will shut down, and probably a lot of roofs will collapse.)
Well, given that the only place I know of (in the US) that they're being used on a regular basis is to guide snowplows, I'm guessing pretty well.
Frankly, I'm a fan of optical guidance systems. Those work by reading a dotted line on the pavement. The really nice thing is, you can scrape up the line and move it a couple inches every couple years, so that the vehicles (in the cases I'm mostly reading about, buses) don't wear grooves in the pavement. The downside is, you can't use that system anywhere that it snows.
Also, that kind of "smart road" is actually realy dumb... imagine the mayhem if a malicious prankster dug up the magnets and moved them.
Um... this sounds like a Darwin Award winner: spend enough time on a highway with the right equipment to dig down through a couple inches of asphalt, pull out a hockey-puck sized metal disc, then dig *another* hole in the asphalt, plop the disc in there, and close up the holes...
And you do this without getting killed *how*? It would take many hours just to move one lane over, even if you had pretty good equipment. Maybe if you were able to hijack the machines that the DOT uses to embed the thingies in the first place you could get it done, but you'd need cones and safety vests, and someone would likely work out that you're up to something...
How much would it cost to equip the highways for self-driving cars?
What the article in question discusses is that the highways won't *need* to be equipped. Cars can be auto-guided by GPS, radar, and cameras.
Me, I'm not so sure about that... it seems like you'd have to have a hyper-accurate map, and heck, ours are often off by several feet currently. But it's an interesting idea, especially if the GPS component was more of a back-up and not really essential to the system.
But the cost of implanting magnetic guidance blips into the pavement is actually pretty minimal... it costs less than putting down Botts Dots (the white reflector thingies that mark the lines). So it wouldn't actually burden the highway budget that much, and given how much it would probably save in destroyed barriers from accidents, it might even be a zero-sum project.
Up on Highway 80 near Big Bear, they recently put in magnetic guidance blips and equipped snowplows with front-grille radar so that they can be driven safely in white-out conditions. This is *saving* them a whole lot of money... before, the snowplows would hug the rail to stay on the road, which meant $200k every year to replace the guardrail in the spring. After about two or three years, the system has paid for itself easily.
Its perfectly fine for 50,000 people to kill themselves/each other each year on US highways, but as soon as a computer can be blamed for 1 death, the company that built it will have major problems.
Hey now! It's down to 40,000 these days... thank you very much!
My Transportation Engineering instructor's theory is that "traffic's getting so bad, when we hit each other, we're not going fast enough to kill each other anymore!"
A highway full of automated cars could run with very short car-to-car distances and good safety.
And then you have the opposite problem from the parent poster: people are terrified to speed down the freeway only five feet from the car in front of them.
How do we know this? Because there's a stretch of Highway 8 in San Diego County where they're testing magnetic guidance for this exact purpose. They have a "platoon" of cars with sensors under them, and little hockey-puck sized magnetic guides embedded in the pavement. Sometimes early on Sunday mornings you can see them whipping by at 60 mph with five feet between them.
But when they put humans in the cars, they panic.
I think the idea is a person can be imprisoned, executed, whatever... whereas a computer is not motivated by punishment.
That's a point, but... a computer is not "motivated" by *anything*. This is the part I never get about people who freak out at the idea of speed cameras: you'd rather have a human being come up behind you, run your plate, and then based on the type of car you're driving, what you look like, and whether anything interesting comes up there, decide whether or not to give you a speeding ticket... than making sure that *everyone* who is speeding gets one? (Which, by the way, is the fastest way to ensure we get good speeding laws...)
Same goes here. A computer is not motivated to tailgate the blue-hair in front of it because she's going "too slow." A computer is not motivated to cut the asshole in the Lexus off. A computer is not going to get in an accident because it was distraught over breaking up with its girlfriend.
But you have a point. We like revenge in our society. When someone hurts you, you want them to *pay*. If a computer hurts you, there's no way to make it pay... it doesn't care if you turn it into scrap.
People wouldn't get road rage if the speed limits were higher.
Um... road rage is usually caused by the behavior of other drivers, i.e. getting cut off dangerously, etc. How does the speed limit have anything to do with that?
About the only way that I can see the speed limit affecting road rage is when someone gets in the number 1 lane and feels they have the right and responsibility to drive exactly the speed limit. But usually traffic is free-flow, and you can get around them, and the moment passes.
Get a restraining order, and then when she calls you in violation of said order you can have her arrested... no more problem.
Um... restraining orders typically don't restrain someone from *calling* you. They restrain someone from coming onto your property or within a certain distance of you. In other words, the cops can't do a damn thing with a restraining order until it's too late. "Hi, this guy who I have a restraining order against is on my front lawn, and coming up to my door... and banging it down... and *gurp*"
So the marginal cost of routine maintenance (oil, tires, etc) is neglible (in my case). Gas is the single largest expense, because the fuel economy really sucks on short trips.
A lot of the wear and tear on your car is in the first few minutes after you start it up, in addition to the fuel economy sucking then. Lots of little trips are going to add up to more maintenance than a few big ones of the same mileage. Especially in stop-and-go conditions... a long freeway drive where you don't change gears or brake is a lot easier on your car than the same amount of surface-street driving.
And I totally agree gas is far too cheap - unfortunately, if gas went up then mass transit (buses here in Madison) would become more expensive as well, so I'm not sure that helps the cause.
Depends... Los Angeles has the world's largest "clean air" bus fleet, with over 1800 CNG buses. So raising gasoline or even diesel taxes would have negligible impact on operating expenses for LACMTA. Also, diesel is taxed differently, so raising just gasoline taxes would not affect most transit properties at all.
This TEA-21 - is that a CA law, or federal? Because that's a GREAT idea, IMHO - give people the choice!
TEA-21 is the Congressional reauthorization of ISTEA (yes, they pronounce it "ice tea"), which was a big bill in 1996 or so that authorized a lot of federal funds to go into transit capital projects. Some of the major features have been that (1) money that used to be only applicable to highway projects can now be used for transit instead; (2) things like ridesharing and pedestrian and bike improvements are eligible for funding; (3) some of the laws that make it more advantageous to drive (like the one about parking being tax-exempt *only* if the employer gives no other option) have been cleaned up. Congress has just sent the next incarnation, TEA-3, to the President, who is threatening a veto.
The Parking-Cash Out Law is a California-specific thing. It went into effect before TEA-21, but was never employed or enforced because of the tax idiocy. Now it can be (though I don't know if anyone really is yet). A few companies that have voluntarily done cash-out have dramatically reduced the drive-alone contingent among their employees.
And what if you are married and both of you have jobs, one in the city, and one in the 'burbs? Depending on the geography, it may not be possible to live somewhere where both can get to work by public transit.
Very true. My husband can't get to work on transit easily from here. (He can get there, but it takes three times as long.)
On the other hand, I'm 20 minutes from school by bus, and about 50 minutes from work (which is in the opposite direction). If I drove to school, it would take the same amount of time. If I drove to work, it would take about 10 minutes less.
So we have *one* car, and he drives it to work most days. If I really, really need it for some reason, he has co-workers he can rideshare with.
Sound like a reasonable solution? Works for us.
How about this we make it more atractive for business to move out into the burbs so people in the country can find good work.
How on earth could we possibly make it any more attractive? Businesses are moving to the 'burbs at a breakneck pace. Office vacancy rates in downtowns are sky-high. (9/11 would have claimed a lot more lives if it weren't for an average 20% vacancy rate in office towers.)
The problem is, *which* suburbs? Most commutes (at least in the Los Angeles area) are now suburb-to-suburb. But if you live in Burbank and work at Warner Center in Woodland Hills (a mecca of insurance companies, for some reason) you're still getting on the overcrowded 101 freeway and adding your 20 miles to the traffic.
I'm all for more rail, though you have an uphill battle convincing anyone that it's worth the enormous capital costs. Right now, there's a demonstration project that has removed street parking during rush hour on a mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, so that the buses can run in an exclusive lane (yay no pulling out in front of you). If we could get that the whole length of the route, wow... Downtown to Santa Monica in half an hour during rush hour, and you can thumb your nose at Rodeo Drive as you speed by. But the politics are ridiculous. They seem to think that by dedicating a lane to vehicles that are each carrying, on average, 50 people, we'll somehow *reduce* people-carrying capacity.
The highway budget is largely paid for through gas taxes, so as long as you're paying them, you're already paying real costs.
In California, less than a third of the highway and road maintenance budget comes from gas taxes, car registration, and truck fees. The rest is subsidized from general funds.
Which isn't much better than transit... overall, California's transit agencies get about 27% of operating expenses from the farebox. That includes your dial-a-ride services for the disabled, your free municipal shuttles, and your pricey commuter-rail systems.
Granted, this $10 an hour isn't revenue you can actually get if you forego public transport. But if you have some project you're doing in your spare time, and it enables you to actually have spare time, clearly it's well worth it.
I'm currently a student. That means a lot of reading.
When I'm driving, that time is completely absorbed by, well, driving. When I take the bus, though, I can use that time to catch up on my reading for school (or just to read the paper or a book for fun, if I think I can get away with it).
Depending on your situation, you can end up getting a lot more out of the time you spend on transit than you can in your car.
The problem is, unless you are willing to forgo the car completely, you can't factor in the price of the car, repairs, depreciation, etc (any more than the amount of miles used for commuting).
Sure, you can factor it in.
Last year, I sold my 1997 Honda del Sol for $10,000. It only had 55,000 miles on it. That's about 17,000 less than the average US driver would have put on it. So I was able to sell it for *more than half* what I paid to drive it off the lot six years earlier.
We get a hefty discount on our car insurance if we drive less than 7,500 miles a year. You probably would too.
Routine maintenance is per miles *or* per months. So, if you drive less, you get a couple oil changes a year and a tune up every year or so, rather than going in every few months.
Tires last about 50,000 miles. Can you say "wear and tear"?
The fact is, there are a lot of *per mile* costs that you simply don't notice when you're driving. The base costs of insurance and the car itself are prorated out over the miles, lowering those costs per-mile the more you drive. But you pay significantly less for a car you *don't* use than a car you do. (On the other hand, if you don't use it, might as well get rid of it... which is what I did last year. We're a one-car family now, which knocked our insurance down by $100/month.)
You point to a couple of important policy issues, though, in your post. First of all, gas is too cheap. We need to inflation-index all our gas taxes so that they can keep up with rising road maintenance costs, and then add to them every couple years to account for increasing fuel efficiency. As it now stands, with a particular number of cents per gallon charged, every single year gas taxes go *down*.
The other is parking. A few years ago (with TEA-21 [Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century] reauthorization), the tax code was changed slightly to make parking cash-out a lot more of an option. Basically, before, if an employer offered free parking, they could claim that as tax-exempt... *provided* they didn't offer anyone anything in lieu of that benefit. TEA-21 changed it so that you could offer parking cash-out (or other benefits in lieu of parking, such as transit passes) without losing the tax-exempt status of the parking benefit. So now, with California's parking cash-out law, employers over a certain size who offer free parking (and who pay a third party for it) are *required* to give their employees the option of taking the money instead, as a taxable cash benefit. (It's also now possible for people to "cash in" to parking... if you pay for parking at work, but your company can take that money right out of your paycheck, you don't have to pay taxes on it.)
If more companies were required to and did this, people would better understand the amount they're "really" paying for parking. When I was living a mile from work and walking most days, I would have loved to pocket that $135/month they were paying for a parking card I almost never used. It would have paid for a bus pass plus several taxi rides a month. But, since I didn't have that choice, I actually *drove* to work occasionally, especially if I had to go somewhere right afterward. Because it was cheaper.
Most of these systems run at a loss.
Well, basically all of them, really.
They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
Um... what on earth are you talking about? First of all, almost no post-WWII transit system in the US was ever planned out to be profitable. It's not possible. Given routes might be, sure; but the need to provide transit *everywhere*, regardless of profitability, pretty much precludes self-sufficiency.
You seem to understand the peaking problem without understanding the underlying issues. Increased ridership *decreases* losses to run systems. The 22 highest-ridership lines in the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority system run at a decent profit. It's the other couple hundred that leave the agency at a 29% farebox recovery ratio overall.
Unfortunately, systems that run with substantial peak hours and very low ridership in between have a lot more trouble making ends meet. The Wilshire Metro Rapid line in Los Angeles is packed *all day long*, so it runs at a considerable profit. (It may be the only bus line in the country that has a ridership of 50k boardings/day.) If you have to buy extra vehicles so that they can sit in the yard 18 hours a day, yes, it costs you a lot more to run your system.
These systems become huge bureaucratic sinkholes, with nobody really claiming responsibility for anything that happens. In the end, taxpayers anywhere in the vicinity of these systems end up footing the bill for all the waste, and politicians who get chauffeured to work utter platitudes about increasing ridership to solve all problems.
And how much do you pay for your highways?
I don't know what it's like in DC, but in California, only 1/3 of the budget for highway and road maintenance is covered by gas taxes and other user fees (car registration and truck fees). The rest comes from general revenues.
As mentioned before, 29% of LACMTA's operating expenses come out of the farebox. That's pitifully low. On the other hand, the San Diego Trolley gets 59.3% of its operating expenses from fares. Overall, for all California transit services (including dial-a-ride for the disabled and expensive commuter rail systems), the recovery ratio is 27%.
Now, let's look at this: Highways and roads -- 33.3%. Transit: 27%. Not a huge difference, really, is there? Oh, except for volume. The *amount* spent on highways and roads drastically exceeds the amount spent on transit, simply because California tends to have about a 2-4% mode split for transit. Also, low-income, elderly, students, and disabled are massively overrepresented in the transit-riding population, so there's a definite argument that governments *should* be more willing to subsidize transit than roads.
*All* of transportation is "wasting" taxpayers' money, not just the transportation you don't personally use.
Okay, and for those of us that have to pay for housing, what do you suggest? People live in the suburbs because it's cheap housing. Go price some houses or apartments in a downtown area.
Ok, let's see. What are your options?
- Buy a smaller house or a condo closer to downtown
- Buy a bigger house farther away, and drive a lot
The problem here is, transportation costs are part of the trade-off, and currently transportation is *too cheap*. So generally speaking it's no contest.
Of course, it depends on what you value. My husband and I probably could have bought a nice house over a year ago somewhere in the outer San Fernando Valley. But, we'd absolutely despise living in a place so devoid of culture or... well, anything much. We'd love to buy somewhere near where we live now, in West Hollywood, but it's very expensive (to buy, though rentals aren't bad). We'll probably end up with a fairly small place somewhere in a nicer part of Hollywood when the market calms down enough that there's some inventory to choose from.
The fact is, you made a choice. That choice, in your case, was largely based on price, according to your post. But it doesn't mean that you're not operating within a market economy where you have different options and opportunity costs to consider, just because something is "too expensive." You probably could afford something near your downtown if you gave up a lot of other things you value. That's not what you want to do, and that's fine. But you CHOOSE. Suburbian life isn't thrust upon you. (In Soviet Russia, the suburbs move to YOU!)
From the article: Because of the cost of the machinery and maintenance, each space in an automated garage costs $25,000, several thousand dollars more than a spot in a conventional lot.
If by "conventional" you mean a surface lot, or even an above-grade parking structure, then this is more costly. But the round number usually used for calculating the cost to construct a below-grade parking structure is $30,000 per space. So this system would *save* money at $25k. It wouldn't even be that bad compared to structured parking, which often runs $15k/space. Those numbers exclude land costs, too... and the robot garage would need less land.
Of course, they may have just not been very specific... perhaps that's $25k *in addition* to the costs to construct the lot itself. We'll never know. (Well, we could find out, but -- Oooh shiny! What was I saying?)
Anyway, I suspect that entire graduate theses can be written on such a topic.
;-)
Heck, one professor at UCLA has made a career out of it...