I agree... it should be provided by people like you carrying me around in a palanquin while your sister feeds me peeled grapes.
Of course it should be free... everything should be free... food, housing, education, healthcare, clothing, internet access, movies, games, sex change operations, penis enlargements, and why not just speed boats.
I await your sturdy back to carry my ostentatious litter of glory. My feet shall never touch the ground again.
If you're going to bill the wars to the cars then you're really digging for a point.
I might as well bill race riots and the tendency to spawn plagues on cities.
The wars are no more the result of wars then they were absent before the car existed.
Did we have wars before the automobile? Yes? Then you have no case. Utterly silly.
You think if we go all green suddenly 100 thousand years of hominid rivalry will turn into hands across the world kumbayah nirvana?
I'm sorry... I'm suppressing lots of flames right here... Its hard... you're saying really really stupid things... and I need to remember that you could be hung over or concussed or something... please try harder in the future... or I'll likely have a brain aneurysm from the strain.
I actually do... There are thousands of years of historical record on cities and what happens when the money runs out.
If they were more efficient then everyone in third world countries would live on top of each other in highrises made out of mud.
They don't because it isn't.
I further base my point empirically on the differing costs of living.
If packing people in were more efficient then you'd save money and that money would wind up in the pockets of the people that live in cities.
it doesn't... I can lots of easily obtainable empirical evidence. It requires a bit of inference of course but that is because I don't have legions of statisticians doing my bidding. I have to find correlative data points and cross reference them. Its pretty easy really and I'd love to hear your attempt to discredit it.
No captain strawman, I acknowledge that these systems are poorly conceived and outmoded... and disagree with sustaining them indefinitely out of logistical momentum and intellectual laziness.
Do you know what it would cost to fix a pot hole if you just let people fix it rather then farming it out to the god damn transit unions every single fucking time?
We're talking about splashing some asphalt into a hole every so often. Total cost of that is just north of zero.
We have a mix of private and public roads in California. The private roads are pretty much without exception better cared for... for some reason. While the funding for them is nothing extraordinary.
We even have some private highways. They're toll highways. For 10 dollars you can skip hours of traffic. A lot of people buy passes on those highways and commute on them every day.
Not only does that fee pay for the road's maintenance it also pays for it initial construction.
You want to see which of us is willing and able to pay his fair share? You'll blink first... then choke.
You're just saying that your system is inflexible and resistant to adaptation.
I agree... I think my whole thesis here is that its bad. So... I don't see where your point contradicts that.
Remember turbine engined cars? I think Chrysler made some in the 60s or 70s. They were pretty cool. They sounded like vacuum cleaners. They had all sorts of benefits. I think they were more fuel efficient on highways. And they were just a generally interesting piece of technology.
But they died because they had one overriding problem... they were trash at stop and go traffic or surface street traffic. They were great on open highways but they didn't rev up and down easily. They took a couple minutes to rev up to full power and once they got there they had to stay there or you'd lose power.
That's okay for an airplane... but it doesn't work for cars which is why we went back to the internal combustion engine which for all its sins revs up and down very quickly.
What you're saying about the city is that its the jet engine...
Well that's too bad. Painting yourself into a corner is not an argument for staying in the corner forever. By all means, taper the subsidization off over a period of decades so that there isn't chaos and people literally dying due to horrific inefficiency of it all slamming down on people all at once.
I'm not unreasonable. But neither is this an excuse to do business as usual forever.
As to subsidizing things you want more of... then why do you subsidize unemployment?...
just curious if you've thought that one through or if the logical connections are a surprise to you here.
Look.. you want to subsidize stuff?... I don't really care. Just keep the population subsidizing it to the population that actually uses it and keep the accounting honest such that you're not playing an accounting version of "where's the marble"... too much of that is a shell game and I have very little patience for it. So long as the people that benefit are the people that pay and the accounting books properly reflect what things cost and who paid for it... I'm fine with it.
Try to force people that live a thousand miles away to pay for your bus system or play games with the accounting books and I see no reason why I should treat it as anything but graft and fraud.
Not an issue unless you live in an area with unreasonable congestion... and those areas only get that way because of subsidized housing, food, healthcare, transport, etc that make living in unsustainable places marginally affordable.
It would save a lot of money and be much more sustainable if people would just live in places that they could afford without subsidies. Does that mean the mega cities empty? Yep... they're dinosaurs. They're only viable with subsidies and will only survive so long as the money flows.
What happens historically when that money is cut off? The cities empty. Rome had wild goats roaming the streets after the fall of the empire because everyone left what was previously one of the densest population centers in the world. Why? The subsidies ran out. Rome used to have free food and subsidized housing during the Empire... but when that came crashing down the grain ships stopped... and people very quickly dispersed.
Don't get me wrong. There are pros to population density. However, most of them were rendered irrelevant after the invention of the airplane and the internet.
I can be anywhere in the world in a day. One day and I can be anywhere. And with the internet and a little 21st century savvy you can telepresence anywhere on earth in about 5 seconds.
That renders most of the practical benefits of packing that many people into such a small space utterly irrelevant.
That we continue to do this is largely due to logistical momentum. It made sense in the 1960s and so we just keep doing it.
How often when you hear about some public works program do you hear the politicians referencing the 1930s or something? Its retrograde. They're thinking politically... and politics is a poor guide of what is and is not reasonable.
Why should I pay for your mass transit in your city when I don't even live in your state?
Why is gas tax money diverted to after school programs when we have roads that need repair... and then why does the same government that did that feel it is reasonable to turn around say they need more money for roads after they just emptied the fund to pay for something totally unrelated?
Cars are not subsidized especially. I don't know what you're talking about.
And regardless... I'd love to see you try and run anything without roads. We can get by without your mass transit projects. We cannot survive without roads. You'd starve in your city like trapped rats.
As to liking farmers and being a conservative... I really find it amusing that people tip their hands so easily. Here you're basically admitting to being a thoughtless political hack that distills all discussions down to some preprocessed political talking point incapable of actually thinking for yourself or processing things individually.
That's really too bad... I wish you were human.. but you're apparently a tape recorder made out of meat... a parrot that someone taught to wear clothes... pick one and have a cracker.
Even if they are it is a zero sum game because you can have a city without mass transit but you can't have a city without roads.
The Romans had roads... I don't think they had mass transit.
So with or without mass transit you're going to have roads.
Roads and cars are also more flexible, offer more direct access, can be used at any time to get nearly anywhere, and the cost of building a road is nothing compared to the cost of building a road/rail AND then sustaining a regular bus/train route on that road.
They're just better for all the reasons peer to peer networking is better then running everything through some massive fucking server farm.
Is the server farm good for providing ONE thing... sorta... its certainly easier to manage. But in terms of raw file transfer bandwidth you can't compete with 100 million people all passing a file to the left or right. No server farm can compete with that. Could all of them do it collectively? Sure... and while I'm not making an argument against server farms, the point is that a decentralized ad hoc transfer system has qualitative and quantitative advantages.
as to places being more pleasant with such things... fine... give me a yacht... it will be cheaper then a mass transit system and I'll find that a great deal more pleasant.
Give me a yacht now or "I find it more pleasant" is a fucking stupid argument.
as to airlines versus buses... airlines are mostly entirely self sustaining and self funding enterprises with no need for public investment. Everything is paid for by the people that fly airplanes.
Tell you what, you lower the cost of airline tickets by 75 percent eating that cost entirely with taxes that have nothing to do with airlines... say if you diverted a bunch of money from the education fund to pay for my cheaper airline tickets... and you have a comparable situation.
Because in cali we've seen the government direct gas tax money to fund education. Explain that please while our roads are falling apart. Its indefensible and stupid.
Can we please not be a nation of rampant fucktards? I'd feel better about my society if we didn't seem to go out of our way to do things in the most fucking stupid way possible and then stupidly respond "so what" when the obvious stupidity of it is explained.
As to your final point about poorly designed cities being utterly dependent on expensive and restrictive transport systems... I agree... they're dependent on it. Just as a man is depend on an artificial heart after you rip his natural one of his chest.
That must mean artificial hearts are great...
Look, I get your point. However, my counter point is that you're encouraging and enabling foolish city and urban planning by subsidizing transportation methods that are unable to fund themselves on their own merits and instead must have their funding provided in backhanded methods.
If mass transit were really as great as you think it is then people would be happy to pay the cost of running it at the ticket booth.
They're not willing to pay because its not that great. If you actually forced people to pay the cost of it they'd all suddenly realize how fucking awful mass transit is and has been for a long time.
Anything looks good if free or if the costs are hidden. Ask people to pay what it actually costs and very quickly you'll find what people really think of it and if your system is ACTUALLY competitive.
Its this sort of thing that screws up our society. The government comes in picking winners and losers. They decide what is and is not practical by taxing the shit out of things they don't like and subsidizing absurdly things they do like with the net result that things they don't like are STRANGELY unaffordable while things they do like seem like good buys.
Only their choices tend to be so hamfisted and impractical that often things that are taxed to shit are still cheaper or more practical then the things that are subsidized absurdly.
Look... I'd just like to know I live in a society not populated entirely by morons. And if I can't have that, then I want to be left alone.
That's all I want.
Don't be stupid or leave me alone. I think that's reasonable.
If you insist on pursuing foolish wasteful policies and insist on forcing me to pay for them and embrace them and organize my life around them... then I reserve the right to both judge you for that and take all practical actions to frustrate, undermine, derail, and otherwise stop your activities.
I think that's fair. Can't say I'll win but we tend only respect each other as human beings based on what we can do to each other if we don't... and I'm feeling more and more that a lot of people need to experience those consequences good and hard.
In what way? And what are you suggesting here? That we don't have roads? You want to have little tiny rail road tracks all over the cities down into every cul-de-sac? There is no city on the planet that can survive without its roads... it doesn't matter how much mass transit you've got. You still need roads. So its a zero sum game.
If you're going to build the roads anyway because you can't practically sustain a society without them... why is it so evil to just use them as the primary mode of transportation?
Yes yes... moronically over developed cities where they pack people in like distopian rats are not functional without mass transit... I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of mass transit but rather an argument against packing people in so densely that you're forced to use expensive, limiting, and impersonal transportation methods.
In regards to "it would only work if people did it right"... they say that about everything.
Seriously... how many things would work if people just did them right.
Communism? Everything owned by the state or some benevolent cooperative where everyone shares and shares alike like the animals in the Lion King... Circle of life and kumbayah?
Radical libertarianism? Everything held in private hands but arbitrated via enlightened self interest through competitive and open contract law allowing everyone to get what they need in a classless meritocracy?
In practice neither of these systems work because a certain percentage of the human population is composed of assholes. So you have to build the system to take the assholes into consideration or they'll just shit all over everything.
Ignore the assholes and all the sticky complex variables and nearly any "theoretical" system works.
In theory lots of things work. In practice you have to deal with "reality"... and in reality the theory has to take into consideration a much more complex and intractable set of givens that render many theoretically viable systems utterly unsustainable.
But for the sake of argument, lets say it was done correctly... it won't be... but lets say it would.
I would argue that while sure yes a train might be more efficient at going from known point A to known point B... but that is not actually what people need.
We don't all live or work at known point A or B. We live and work NEAR those places but not at them. Which means even if done correctly, the commuters bear an unrecorded burden to handle a portion of the commute on their own often by walking or biking or switching to multiple mass transit systems... to get from UNKNOWN point X to UNKNOWN point Y. So sure, you can go from point A to B. But that isn't what people are doing. Most people do not work or live in the bus/subway station.
The car takes you from a completely dynamic unknown point X to Y. What is more, the mass transit systems do not operate on YOUR schedule but rather theirs. Which means if you need to get across town at 2AM you might just be shit out of luck. I don't have this problem with my car. I had an IT emergency that i had to run off to at a company at 2AM on the other side of town.
Can we agree that mass transit would not serve my needs in that situation?
I can go anywhere I want whenever I want... directly. No detours. No stop offs to pick up people. I go where I want when I want.
Put a price on that.
Or more importantly put a price on not being able to do that. Because you pay that price when you use mass transit. You surrender a lot of your freedom to choose when and how you get places.
Don't get me wrong, mass transit is very handy in crowded cities. However, I would argue its really only useful in those cities and BECAUSE what you're ultimately dealing with is inefficiencies introduced by packing people in with such density that you've made it impractical for people to own and operate personal transport.
And obviously lets make sure to add the issue of storage/carrying capacity. For example, I recently visited some family about 50 miles from where I live. Could I have gotten there by mass transport? Absolutely. I could take a bus to the train station, then take the train, then switch to another bus, then walk a couple miles. It would have only taken about 4 to 5 times longer. Small price to pay for the warm glow of being a good soylent green cultist.
And not only that but I wouldn't have been able to bring the beer, the appetizers, and the cake that I brought to that party.
And that's not something unique to the few family get togethers I have throughout the year. I am constantly bringing things to places. To work, to home, to friend's places... things that do not easily carry under your arm.
Hell, the weekly grocery shopping trip would be utterly obnoxious if I had to use a subway or bus. I pack my car with loads of stuff. I think I bought 10 2 liter bottles of
While the agro subsidies are a point in your favor, I would point out that the cities profit from that by having cheaper food while no one but the cities profits from the mass transit.
Effectively, the cities should recoop the costs. After all the subsidies on agriculture depress prices by increasing supply which means the consumer pays less.
Explain how subsidizing mass transit helps anyone outside the cities?... it doesn't. It should be funded entirely by the cities without tapping into county, state, or federal funding.
Much has been made of that recently though I question the accuracy of the accounting. I've had too much experience with the convenient accounting of government to trust anything they're saying without auditing it.
We should both be well versed at this point with government officials double or triple counting revenue... citing costs/debt as being assets... throwing out cost and revenue projections that are utterly indefensible and never come close to projections.
I mean really... I'd have to be a moron to take that at face value. And you should know better yourself.
No offense, we'd have to audit that claim to see if it isn't entirely a fiction.
Given the higher cost of living in cities, the fact that everything is more expensive there... and I mean free market things not government services... it is very hard to argue that they are more efficient empirically. If they were, those costs should be lower.
If it were cheaper to deliver me goods in the city then it is in a rural area then why do I pay more in the city? Competition should drive the cost down if they're just profit taking. And the reality as we both know is that they are just passing on the HIGHER cost of delivering those goods to me in the city.
Why would you assume those costs would only apply to the private sector. It doesn't stop there. All the government services have a higher cost in the city.
Take something as basic as law and order. What do you think NYC pays per resident to provide police protection versus either the suburbs or rural areas. They're not comparable. The rural areas cost practically nothing to police. You could have 5 police officers for 10,000 residents in the boonies. If NYC had that ratio then they'd have about 5000 police officers in the whole city.
Yet they have a lot more... it closer to 40,000. Which to put things into perspective would be like that same town of 10,000 people having a police force of 40 police officers instead of 5.
So I'm going to call creative accounting on your whole premise. It doesn't pass the smell test. Please actually think about it rather then just automatically accepting anything a politician tells you to believe... it makes it very hard to respect your opinion when you do that.
I'd love to see the accounting on that. As it points out, the gas taxes used to pay for it no problem.
What exactly changed? You say we didn't raise our gas taxes but do we pay a proportionally lower tax today or are you saying the cost of maintaining the network has gone up?
And if it has gone up why? Is that due to proportionally more roads today then drivers? While being stuck in traffic it is very hard to argue that the ratio of roads to drivers is more today then it was in the past when the traffic was lighter.
So what else could cause the cost curve to change?
Is concrete and asphalt more expensive?
I have many guesses as to what could be going on here but none of them are going to be particularly flattering to your "we should just give the government more money" thesis.
And its irrelevant anyway... the accounting information either of us would need to make our point is not open to the public. Which means its just my assumptions against yours.
Phones make money by collecting a subscription fee that pays off the cost of the phone over the term of the contract.
Printers make money by charging extra for ink which pay off the cost of the printer of the life of the printer.
Buses collect no such other fees from customers. Rather, they collect the difference from the general tax funds or by in my opinion robbing national and state road funds.
The sorry state of many of our bridges is a direct result of cities draining road funds that are paid for by car drivers through gas taxes. Exactly why should my gas taxes go to pay for a bus? The city buses don't even pay the gas tax. They pay no taxes. They pay for nothing. Not their gas. Not their buses. Not the bus drivers. Its nearly all subsidies and that money often comes from over stressed general funds that are forced to underfund more critical services because of the misappropriation of funds. Or the money comes from specialized funds that only exist to fund things like roads and bridges... but now suddenly can't afford to do that because the f'ing buses took all the money. Which is why perpetually we are being told that we don't have enough money in the road fund. This is incorrect. We have plenty of money in the road fund... for roads... and bridges. What we don't have enough money for in the road fund is enough to pay for the newest mass transit project that some slimy politician got green lit ON TOP of the roads and bridges.
And what do they decide to underfund when that happens? The roads and bridges. Heaven forbid that the stupid buses actually have to pay for anything.
And don't get me wrong. If cities want to subsidize their mass transit, that is fine. Really. Do whatever you want. But fucking pay for it yourselves rather then stealing from national highway funds or state highway funds or county road funds.
If its so fucking efficient then why do they keep needing to take other people's money to make it practical? That's something of a logical inconsistency.
The car drivers are expected to foot the bill while the money they did spend doesn't even go to pay for their services. And when that happens, the same politicians lie to the car drivers and say "oh we just don't have enough money to pay for the roads... you should pay more."... really? Should we pay more? Because since you're already stealing a large portion of the fund for one thing that has nothing to do with driving a car... tell me what else we should be paying with our gas taxes. Possibly education? You think I'm kidding but they've already done that. In California where I live they take a portion of the gas tax and put it towards all sorts of feel good education projects. Which is great... I have nothing against after school programs etc. But don't take it from the fucking gas fund. Bill that to the general fund so the state senate can have a hope in hell of making a sensible budget.
And this is a problem we have with a lot of projects. The accounting is so confused, conflicted, and outright corrupt in many places that its not possible to make a sensible budget. Exactly what would you base it on? The numbers people are telling you about anything are not accurate. The revenue numbers are wrong. The cost numbers are wrong. All the projection costs are wrong.
Look... Doubtless I'm sounding like a raving maniac here... fair point. But ladies and gentleman, I'm not wrong... and this sort of thing if we don't get a handle on it will trend us right into being a Banana Republic... and the weather in most of the US is not pleasant enough to make the US competitive as a banana republic. If the US becomes a banana republic, I'm moving to some place where you can actually grow bananas. At least then I've got the bananas.
In all seriousness... its not sustainable. And things that can't go on forever... don't.
Which is why the government should also subsidize all those costs for me. Think about how much it would help the economy and improve property values.
In all seriousness, this is the problem with making claims about various public services and projects benefiting the public at large.
You see this all the time with Stadium construction. Every time the sports teams say "hey, you'll improve the local economy, provide lots of jobs, etc etc... just buy us a stadium"...
Do those things happen? Statistically no. Yeah you get some jobs... yeah you get some more traffic in town... but not enough to pay for what the stadium cost. If that sort of thing worked then Cleveland or Detroit could turn themselves into economic power houses by building public works.
You can't. It doesn't work that way. And neither does it work that way with the mass transit.
The whole argument... no offense... is a product of intellectual laziness, ignorance, and the corruption of a few bad people that are wiling to take advantage of it.
Cars actually generate revenue. They're taxed very heavily and generate more revenue from those taxes then is spent on cars. A large portion of the gas tax for example is diverted for buses, bicycle roads, etc.
That only goes one way... car drivers do not benefit from taxes on bicycles or buses because neither of those things generate any net tax revenue.
As to airplanes, they are best subsidized at the rate they are taxed. They have no net drain on the national, state, or city budget. In fact, in many places there is a net profit.
To the contrary of your whole point, it is the "mass transit" programs that are prepetually in the red. The cars and airplanes tend to be well into the black.
here you'll bring up something about the US government bailing out an airline... you could say the same thing about any corporation that has more pull in washington then it deserves. Companies go out of business all the time. The government typically does nothing about it.
But if the corporation has friends in washington they can get a bail out. So you're pointing out that some airlines have such connections? Again... so what... you could say the same thing about any major corporation. Your argument ultimately is more that the US government is somewhat corrupt rather then that airlines are subsidized.
As to things benefiting direct users, who gets to decide any of that? Maybe you haven't considered how buying me a yacht would have positive impacts on the local economy?
For one thing it would employ yacht builders. For another it would look really nice and improve property values.
Your silly justifications ignore that its all supposition. You have no empirical basis for anything you're saying. And even if your position did have merit, you have no means of quantifying any of it. For example, that yacht you're buying me would improve the local economy. But would it improve the local economy more then it would hurt government funds or cause other problems? Obviously not.
Which is why not only do you have to show that it actually does provide a benefit but that its benefits outweigh its costs. You have no means of doing that which means you're just guessing.
And your guesses and the government's guesses aren't worth anything more then anyone else's guesses. They're not even educated guesses... they're wild assed assumptions.
Now since you started with an ad hominem I can only assume you're going to double down with more pathetic attempts to win an argument by totally ignoring the argument and simply attacking the person making it... well do your worst. Its utterly intellectually reprehensible and there is no way you could more undermine your own credibility then basing your whole argument on what was known to be a logical fallacy thousands of years ago.
And while you're at it... if you attempt ad verecundiam it won't be any better.
Your argument is that the status quo is only possible because of that subsidization. Consider that the status quo might not be a good thing.
We are always told how efficient cities are as compared to other forms of living but the cities are the only places that actually seem to need high levels of subsidization. If they were so efficient they wouldn't.
Cut the subsidy money off and a lot of people that live in cities won't be able to live there anymore.
They'll have to move to cheaper areas.
And then suddenly all the businesses that depend on the cheaper labor those people provide will either have to raise prices to attract sustainable labor or shut down.
This will cause a feed back loop that will push a lot of extra people out of the city until it reaches equilibrium.
At that level of density, it is unlikely the cities will need the mass transit systems being pushed at this point. People will be able to drive cars again in cities if they so choose. And prices for property and rent which are an ongoing issue in cities should be much more reasonable because demand will be a great deal lower.
You're right that the status quo needs the subsidies... but why should we protect the status quo?
Aspects of what "is" at any given point are going to be bad. You'll have to justify those subsidies on some other grounds besides "we can't do business as usual without them." Addiction to subsidies is not an argument for maintaining them indefinitely.
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I agree... it should be provided by people like you carrying me around in a palanquin while your sister feeds me peeled grapes.
Of course it should be free... everything should be free... food, housing, education, healthcare, clothing, internet access, movies, games, sex change operations, penis enlargements, and why not just speed boats.
I await your sturdy back to carry my ostentatious litter of glory. My feet shall never touch the ground again.
I can't wait.
If you're going to bill the wars to the cars then you're really digging for a point.
I might as well bill race riots and the tendency to spawn plagues on cities.
The wars are no more the result of wars then they were absent before the car existed.
Did we have wars before the automobile? Yes? Then you have no case. Utterly silly.
You think if we go all green suddenly 100 thousand years of hominid rivalry will turn into hands across the world kumbayah nirvana?
I'm sorry... I'm suppressing lots of flames right here... Its hard... you're saying really really stupid things... and I need to remember that you could be hung over or concussed or something... please try harder in the future... or I'll likely have a brain aneurysm from the strain.
Of course something doesn't need to personally profit me to be worthy of subsidization.
That said, a given community shouldn't be expected to pay for the toys of another community.
If my community wants to buy speed boats and use speed boats to get around... we could dig canals all over town and have free to use speed boats...
Do you think YOUR town or city on the other side of the country should pay for my town's speed boats? Yes or no?
Because you either agree with me or you're buying me speed boats.
Pick one... I'm now bored with you.
you think you wouldn't be starving to death within a month because you have bike paths?...
yo kay... the trucks that deliver everything that sustains you wouldn't be showing up... you got rid of the roads.
not even your mass transit works without the roads. the roads are fundamental to human travel for the last 5 to 6 thousand years.
I actually do... There are thousands of years of historical record on cities and what happens when the money runs out.
If they were more efficient then everyone in third world countries would live on top of each other in highrises made out of mud.
They don't because it isn't.
I further base my point empirically on the differing costs of living.
If packing people in were more efficient then you'd save money and that money would wind up in the pockets of the people that live in cities.
it doesn't... I can lots of easily obtainable empirical evidence. It requires a bit of inference of course but that is because I don't have legions of statisticians doing my bidding. I have to find correlative data points and cross reference them. Its pretty easy really and I'd love to hear your attempt to discredit it.
No captain strawman, I acknowledge that these systems are poorly conceived and outmoded... and disagree with sustaining them indefinitely out of logistical momentum and intellectual laziness.
Do you know what it would cost to fix a pot hole if you just let people fix it rather then farming it out to the god damn transit unions every single fucking time?
We're talking about splashing some asphalt into a hole every so often. Total cost of that is just north of zero.
We have a mix of private and public roads in California. The private roads are pretty much without exception better cared for... for some reason. While the funding for them is nothing extraordinary.
We even have some private highways. They're toll highways. For 10 dollars you can skip hours of traffic. A lot of people buy passes on those highways and commute on them every day.
Not only does that fee pay for the road's maintenance it also pays for it initial construction.
You want to see which of us is willing and able to pay his fair share? You'll blink first... then choke.
You're just saying that your system is inflexible and resistant to adaptation.
I agree... I think my whole thesis here is that its bad. So... I don't see where your point contradicts that.
Remember turbine engined cars? I think Chrysler made some in the 60s or 70s. They were pretty cool. They sounded like vacuum cleaners. They had all sorts of benefits. I think they were more fuel efficient on highways. And they were just a generally interesting piece of technology.
But they died because they had one overriding problem... they were trash at stop and go traffic or surface street traffic. They were great on open highways but they didn't rev up and down easily. They took a couple minutes to rev up to full power and once they got there they had to stay there or you'd lose power.
That's okay for an airplane... but it doesn't work for cars which is why we went back to the internal combustion engine which for all its sins revs up and down very quickly.
What you're saying about the city is that its the jet engine...
Well that's too bad. Painting yourself into a corner is not an argument for staying in the corner forever. By all means, taper the subsidization off over a period of decades so that there isn't chaos and people literally dying due to horrific inefficiency of it all slamming down on people all at once.
I'm not unreasonable. But neither is this an excuse to do business as usual forever.
As to subsidizing things you want more of... then why do you subsidize unemployment?...
just curious if you've thought that one through or if the logical connections are a surprise to you here.
Look.. you want to subsidize stuff?... I don't really care. Just keep the population subsidizing it to the population that actually uses it and keep the accounting honest such that you're not playing an accounting version of "where's the marble"... too much of that is a shell game and I have very little patience for it. So long as the people that benefit are the people that pay and the accounting books properly reflect what things cost and who paid for it... I'm fine with it.
Try to force people that live a thousand miles away to pay for your bus system or play games with the accounting books and I see no reason why I should treat it as anything but graft and fraud.
Not an issue unless you live in an area with unreasonable congestion... and those areas only get that way because of subsidized housing, food, healthcare, transport, etc that make living in unsustainable places marginally affordable.
It would save a lot of money and be much more sustainable if people would just live in places that they could afford without subsidies. Does that mean the mega cities empty? Yep... they're dinosaurs. They're only viable with subsidies and will only survive so long as the money flows.
What happens historically when that money is cut off? The cities empty. Rome had wild goats roaming the streets after the fall of the empire because everyone left what was previously one of the densest population centers in the world. Why? The subsidies ran out. Rome used to have free food and subsidized housing during the Empire... but when that came crashing down the grain ships stopped... and people very quickly dispersed.
Don't get me wrong. There are pros to population density. However, most of them were rendered irrelevant after the invention of the airplane and the internet.
I can be anywhere in the world in a day. One day and I can be anywhere. And with the internet and a little 21st century savvy you can telepresence anywhere on earth in about 5 seconds.
That renders most of the practical benefits of packing that many people into such a small space utterly irrelevant.
That we continue to do this is largely due to logistical momentum. It made sense in the 1960s and so we just keep doing it.
How often when you hear about some public works program do you hear the politicians referencing the 1930s or something? Its retrograde. They're thinking politically... and politics is a poor guide of what is and is not reasonable.
Why should I pay for your mass transit in your city when I don't even live in your state?
Why is gas tax money diverted to after school programs when we have roads that need repair... and then why does the same government that did that feel it is reasonable to turn around say they need more money for roads after they just emptied the fund to pay for something totally unrelated?
Cars are not subsidized especially. I don't know what you're talking about.
And regardless... I'd love to see you try and run anything without roads. We can get by without your mass transit projects. We cannot survive without roads. You'd starve in your city like trapped rats.
As to liking farmers and being a conservative... I really find it amusing that people tip their hands so easily. Here you're basically admitting to being a thoughtless political hack that distills all discussions down to some preprocessed political talking point incapable of actually thinking for yourself or processing things individually.
That's really too bad... I wish you were human.. but you're apparently a tape recorder made out of meat... a parrot that someone taught to wear clothes... pick one and have a cracker.
Even if they are it is a zero sum game because you can have a city without mass transit but you can't have a city without roads.
The Romans had roads... I don't think they had mass transit.
So with or without mass transit you're going to have roads.
Roads and cars are also more flexible, offer more direct access, can be used at any time to get nearly anywhere, and the cost of building a road is nothing compared to the cost of building a road/rail AND then sustaining a regular bus/train route on that road.
They're just better for all the reasons peer to peer networking is better then running everything through some massive fucking server farm.
Is the server farm good for providing ONE thing... sorta... its certainly easier to manage. But in terms of raw file transfer bandwidth you can't compete with 100 million people all passing a file to the left or right. No server farm can compete with that. Could all of them do it collectively? Sure... and while I'm not making an argument against server farms, the point is that a decentralized ad hoc transfer system has qualitative and quantitative advantages.
as to places being more pleasant with such things... fine... give me a yacht... it will be cheaper then a mass transit system and I'll find that a great deal more pleasant.
Give me a yacht now or "I find it more pleasant" is a fucking stupid argument.
as to airlines versus buses... airlines are mostly entirely self sustaining and self funding enterprises with no need for public investment. Everything is paid for by the people that fly airplanes.
Tell you what, you lower the cost of airline tickets by 75 percent eating that cost entirely with taxes that have nothing to do with airlines... say if you diverted a bunch of money from the education fund to pay for my cheaper airline tickets... and you have a comparable situation.
Because in cali we've seen the government direct gas tax money to fund education. Explain that please while our roads are falling apart. Its indefensible and stupid.
Can we please not be a nation of rampant fucktards? I'd feel better about my society if we didn't seem to go out of our way to do things in the most fucking stupid way possible and then stupidly respond "so what" when the obvious stupidity of it is explained.
As to your final point about poorly designed cities being utterly dependent on expensive and restrictive transport systems... I agree... they're dependent on it. Just as a man is depend on an artificial heart after you rip his natural one of his chest.
That must mean artificial hearts are great...
Look, I get your point. However, my counter point is that you're encouraging and enabling foolish city and urban planning by subsidizing transportation methods that are unable to fund themselves on their own merits and instead must have their funding provided in backhanded methods.
If mass transit were really as great as you think it is then people would be happy to pay the cost of running it at the ticket booth.
They're not willing to pay because its not that great. If you actually forced people to pay the cost of it they'd all suddenly realize how fucking awful mass transit is and has been for a long time.
Anything looks good if free or if the costs are hidden. Ask people to pay what it actually costs and very quickly you'll find what people really think of it and if your system is ACTUALLY competitive.
Its this sort of thing that screws up our society. The government comes in picking winners and losers. They decide what is and is not practical by taxing the shit out of things they don't like and subsidizing absurdly things they do like with the net result that things they don't like are STRANGELY unaffordable while things they do like seem like good buys.
Only their choices tend to be so hamfisted and impractical that often things that are taxed to shit are still cheaper or more practical then the things that are subsidized absurdly.
Look... I'd just like to know I live in a society not populated entirely by morons. And if I can't have that, then I want to be left alone.
That's all I want.
Don't be stupid or leave me alone. I think that's reasonable.
If you insist on pursuing foolish wasteful policies and insist on forcing me to pay for them and embrace them and organize my life around them... then I reserve the right to both judge you for that and take all practical actions to frustrate, undermine, derail, and otherwise stop your activities.
I think that's fair. Can't say I'll win but we tend only respect each other as human beings based on what we can do to each other if we don't... and I'm feeling more and more that a lot of people need to experience those consequences good and hard.
In what way? And what are you suggesting here? That we don't have roads? You want to have little tiny rail road tracks all over the cities down into every cul-de-sac? There is no city on the planet that can survive without its roads... it doesn't matter how much mass transit you've got. You still need roads. So its a zero sum game.
If you're going to build the roads anyway because you can't practically sustain a society without them... why is it so evil to just use them as the primary mode of transportation?
Yes yes... moronically over developed cities where they pack people in like distopian rats are not functional without mass transit... I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of mass transit but rather an argument against packing people in so densely that you're forced to use expensive, limiting, and impersonal transportation methods.
In regards to "it would only work if people did it right"... they say that about everything.
Seriously... how many things would work if people just did them right.
Communism? Everything owned by the state or some benevolent cooperative where everyone shares and shares alike like the animals in the Lion King... Circle of life and kumbayah?
Radical libertarianism? Everything held in private hands but arbitrated via enlightened self interest through competitive and open contract law allowing everyone to get what they need in a classless meritocracy?
In practice neither of these systems work because a certain percentage of the human population is composed of assholes. So you have to build the system to take the assholes into consideration or they'll just shit all over everything.
Ignore the assholes and all the sticky complex variables and nearly any "theoretical" system works.
In theory lots of things work. In practice you have to deal with "reality"... and in reality the theory has to take into consideration a much more complex and intractable set of givens that render many theoretically viable systems utterly unsustainable.
But for the sake of argument, lets say it was done correctly... it won't be... but lets say it would.
I would argue that while sure yes a train might be more efficient at going from known point A to known point B... but that is not actually what people need.
We don't all live or work at known point A or B. We live and work NEAR those places but not at them. Which means even if done correctly, the commuters bear an unrecorded burden to handle a portion of the commute on their own often by walking or biking or switching to multiple mass transit systems... to get from UNKNOWN point X to UNKNOWN point Y. So sure, you can go from point A to B. But that isn't what people are doing. Most people do not work or live in the bus/subway station.
The car takes you from a completely dynamic unknown point X to Y. What is more, the mass transit systems do not operate on YOUR schedule but rather theirs. Which means if you need to get across town at 2AM you might just be shit out of luck. I don't have this problem with my car. I had an IT emergency that i had to run off to at a company at 2AM on the other side of town.
Can we agree that mass transit would not serve my needs in that situation?
I can go anywhere I want whenever I want... directly. No detours. No stop offs to pick up people. I go where I want when I want.
Put a price on that.
Or more importantly put a price on not being able to do that. Because you pay that price when you use mass transit. You surrender a lot of your freedom to choose when and how you get places.
Don't get me wrong, mass transit is very handy in crowded cities. However, I would argue its really only useful in those cities and BECAUSE what you're ultimately dealing with is inefficiencies introduced by packing people in with such density that you've made it impractical for people to own and operate personal transport.
And obviously lets make sure to add the issue of storage/carrying capacity. For example, I recently visited some family about 50 miles from where I live. Could I have gotten there by mass transport? Absolutely. I could take a bus to the train station, then take the train, then switch to another bus, then walk a couple miles. It would have only taken about 4 to 5 times longer. Small price to pay for the warm glow of being a good soylent green cultist.
And not only that but I wouldn't have been able to bring the beer, the appetizers, and the cake that I brought to that party.
And that's not something unique to the few family get togethers I have throughout the year. I am constantly bringing things to places. To work, to home, to friend's places... things that do not easily carry under your arm.
Hell, the weekly grocery shopping trip would be utterly obnoxious if I had to use a subway or bus. I pack my car with loads of stuff. I think I bought 10 2 liter bottles of
While the agro subsidies are a point in your favor, I would point out that the cities profit from that by having cheaper food while no one but the cities profits from the mass transit.
Effectively, the cities should recoop the costs. After all the subsidies on agriculture depress prices by increasing supply which means the consumer pays less.
Explain how subsidizing mass transit helps anyone outside the cities?... it doesn't. It should be funded entirely by the cities without tapping into county, state, or federal funding.
Much has been made of that recently though I question the accuracy of the accounting. I've had too much experience with the convenient accounting of government to trust anything they're saying without auditing it.
We should both be well versed at this point with government officials double or triple counting revenue... citing costs/debt as being assets... throwing out cost and revenue projections that are utterly indefensible and never come close to projections.
I mean really... I'd have to be a moron to take that at face value. And you should know better yourself.
No offense, we'd have to audit that claim to see if it isn't entirely a fiction.
Given the higher cost of living in cities, the fact that everything is more expensive there... and I mean free market things not government services... it is very hard to argue that they are more efficient empirically. If they were, those costs should be lower.
If it were cheaper to deliver me goods in the city then it is in a rural area then why do I pay more in the city? Competition should drive the cost down if they're just profit taking. And the reality as we both know is that they are just passing on the HIGHER cost of delivering those goods to me in the city.
Why would you assume those costs would only apply to the private sector. It doesn't stop there. All the government services have a higher cost in the city.
Take something as basic as law and order. What do you think NYC pays per resident to provide police protection versus either the suburbs or rural areas. They're not comparable. The rural areas cost practically nothing to police. You could have 5 police officers for 10,000 residents in the boonies. If NYC had that ratio then they'd have about 5000 police officers in the whole city.
Yet they have a lot more... it closer to 40,000. Which to put things into perspective would be like that same town of 10,000 people having a police force of 40 police officers instead of 5.
So I'm going to call creative accounting on your whole premise. It doesn't pass the smell test. Please actually think about it rather then just automatically accepting anything a politician tells you to believe... it makes it very hard to respect your opinion when you do that.
I'd love to see the accounting on that. As it points out, the gas taxes used to pay for it no problem.
What exactly changed? You say we didn't raise our gas taxes but do we pay a proportionally lower tax today or are you saying the cost of maintaining the network has gone up?
And if it has gone up why? Is that due to proportionally more roads today then drivers? While being stuck in traffic it is very hard to argue that the ratio of roads to drivers is more today then it was in the past when the traffic was lighter.
So what else could cause the cost curve to change?
Is concrete and asphalt more expensive?
I have many guesses as to what could be going on here but none of them are going to be particularly flattering to your "we should just give the government more money" thesis.
And its irrelevant anyway... the accounting information either of us would need to make our point is not open to the public. Which means its just my assumptions against yours.
No it has nothing to do with that.
Phones make money by collecting a subscription fee that pays off the cost of the phone over the term of the contract.
Printers make money by charging extra for ink which pay off the cost of the printer of the life of the printer.
Buses collect no such other fees from customers. Rather, they collect the difference from the general tax funds or by in my opinion robbing national and state road funds.
The sorry state of many of our bridges is a direct result of cities draining road funds that are paid for by car drivers through gas taxes. Exactly why should my gas taxes go to pay for a bus? The city buses don't even pay the gas tax. They pay no taxes. They pay for nothing. Not their gas. Not their buses. Not the bus drivers. Its nearly all subsidies and that money often comes from over stressed general funds that are forced to underfund more critical services because of the misappropriation of funds. Or the money comes from specialized funds that only exist to fund things like roads and bridges... but now suddenly can't afford to do that because the f'ing buses took all the money. Which is why perpetually we are being told that we don't have enough money in the road fund. This is incorrect. We have plenty of money in the road fund... for roads... and bridges. What we don't have enough money for in the road fund is enough to pay for the newest mass transit project that some slimy politician got green lit ON TOP of the roads and bridges.
And what do they decide to underfund when that happens? The roads and bridges. Heaven forbid that the stupid buses actually have to pay for anything.
And don't get me wrong. If cities want to subsidize their mass transit, that is fine. Really. Do whatever you want. But fucking pay for it yourselves rather then stealing from national highway funds or state highway funds or county road funds.
If its so fucking efficient then why do they keep needing to take other people's money to make it practical? That's something of a logical inconsistency.
The car drivers are expected to foot the bill while the money they did spend doesn't even go to pay for their services. And when that happens, the same politicians lie to the car drivers and say "oh we just don't have enough money to pay for the roads... you should pay more."... really? Should we pay more? Because since you're already stealing a large portion of the fund for one thing that has nothing to do with driving a car... tell me what else we should be paying with our gas taxes. Possibly education? You think I'm kidding but they've already done that. In California where I live they take a portion of the gas tax and put it towards all sorts of feel good education projects. Which is great... I have nothing against after school programs etc. But don't take it from the fucking gas fund. Bill that to the general fund so the state senate can have a hope in hell of making a sensible budget.
And this is a problem we have with a lot of projects. The accounting is so confused, conflicted, and outright corrupt in many places that its not possible to make a sensible budget. Exactly what would you base it on? The numbers people are telling you about anything are not accurate. The revenue numbers are wrong. The cost numbers are wrong. All the projection costs are wrong.
Look... Doubtless I'm sounding like a raving maniac here... fair point. But ladies and gentleman, I'm not wrong... and this sort of thing if we don't get a handle on it will trend us right into being a Banana Republic... and the weather in most of the US is not pleasant enough to make the US competitive as a banana republic. If the US becomes a banana republic, I'm moving to some place where you can actually grow bananas. At least then I've got the bananas.
In all seriousness... its not sustainable. And things that can't go on forever... don't.
Which is why the government should also subsidize all those costs for me. Think about how much it would help the economy and improve property values.
In all seriousness, this is the problem with making claims about various public services and projects benefiting the public at large.
You see this all the time with Stadium construction. Every time the sports teams say "hey, you'll improve the local economy, provide lots of jobs, etc etc... just buy us a stadium"...
Do those things happen? Statistically no. Yeah you get some jobs... yeah you get some more traffic in town... but not enough to pay for what the stadium cost. If that sort of thing worked then Cleveland or Detroit could turn themselves into economic power houses by building public works.
You can't. It doesn't work that way. And neither does it work that way with the mass transit.
The whole argument... no offense... is a product of intellectual laziness, ignorance, and the corruption of a few bad people that are wiling to take advantage of it.
Nothing more.
roads are subsidized by car drivers through gas taxes...
Put a tax on buses that pays for buses and I have no problem with them.
I await your next argument... but kindly don't compare the two unless they're actually comparable.
They're apples and oranges and you know it.
Wrong.
Cars actually generate revenue. They're taxed very heavily and generate more revenue from those taxes then is spent on cars. A large portion of the gas tax for example is diverted for buses, bicycle roads, etc.
That only goes one way... car drivers do not benefit from taxes on bicycles or buses because neither of those things generate any net tax revenue.
As to airplanes, they are best subsidized at the rate they are taxed. They have no net drain on the national, state, or city budget. In fact, in many places there is a net profit.
To the contrary of your whole point, it is the "mass transit" programs that are prepetually in the red. The cars and airplanes tend to be well into the black.
here you'll bring up something about the US government bailing out an airline... you could say the same thing about any corporation that has more pull in washington then it deserves. Companies go out of business all the time. The government typically does nothing about it.
But if the corporation has friends in washington they can get a bail out. So you're pointing out that some airlines have such connections? Again... so what... you could say the same thing about any major corporation. Your argument ultimately is more that the US government is somewhat corrupt rather then that airlines are subsidized.
Ad hominem is not a counter argument.
As to things benefiting direct users, who gets to decide any of that? Maybe you haven't considered how buying me a yacht would have positive impacts on the local economy?
For one thing it would employ yacht builders. For another it would look really nice and improve property values.
Your silly justifications ignore that its all supposition. You have no empirical basis for anything you're saying. And even if your position did have merit, you have no means of quantifying any of it. For example, that yacht you're buying me would improve the local economy. But would it improve the local economy more then it would hurt government funds or cause other problems? Obviously not.
Which is why not only do you have to show that it actually does provide a benefit but that its benefits outweigh its costs. You have no means of doing that which means you're just guessing.
And your guesses and the government's guesses aren't worth anything more then anyone else's guesses. They're not even educated guesses... they're wild assed assumptions.
Now since you started with an ad hominem I can only assume you're going to double down with more pathetic attempts to win an argument by totally ignoring the argument and simply attacking the person making it... well do your worst. Its utterly intellectually reprehensible and there is no way you could more undermine your own credibility then basing your whole argument on what was known to be a logical fallacy thousands of years ago.
And while you're at it... if you attempt ad verecundiam it won't be any better.
I'd agree with your point but why do it?
Your argument is that the status quo is only possible because of that subsidization. Consider that the status quo might not be a good thing.
We are always told how efficient cities are as compared to other forms of living but the cities are the only places that actually seem to need high levels of subsidization. If they were so efficient they wouldn't.
Cut the subsidy money off and a lot of people that live in cities won't be able to live there anymore.
They'll have to move to cheaper areas.
And then suddenly all the businesses that depend on the cheaper labor those people provide will either have to raise prices to attract sustainable labor or shut down.
This will cause a feed back loop that will push a lot of extra people out of the city until it reaches equilibrium.
At that level of density, it is unlikely the cities will need the mass transit systems being pushed at this point. People will be able to drive cars again in cities if they so choose. And prices for property and rent which are an ongoing issue in cities should be much more reasonable because demand will be a great deal lower.
You're right that the status quo needs the subsidies... but why should we protect the status quo?
Aspects of what "is" at any given point are going to be bad. You'll have to justify those subsidies on some other grounds besides "we can't do business as usual without them." Addiction to subsidies is not an argument for maintaining them indefinitely.