Nope. I don't need gas subsidized. I need you to stop undermining it's extraction and making it artifically more expensive.
If you want gas to be more expensive that's fine. You pay for the extra cost. You and just you. I see no reason why I should be punished for your bad judgment.
I am more then happy to pay my fair share. But my fair share does not include your subsidies for alternative energy or your animosity for fossil fuels. I'm not paying extra for gas because you don't like gas. I'm not paying more for gas because you want to litter the desert with yet another failed solar power plant.
Come to California. We have DEAD solar and wind power plants going back to the 70s. That's how long we've been building them. They always work for a year or five and then shut down roughly when their debts come due. There isn't even money left to tear them down. So they sit out there in the desert like monuments to stupidity. And yet... every couple years another idiot comes along and says "hey lets build another one."
I'm not saying alternative energy will always be a pointless money sink. Its going to be the future eventually. But today it isn't. And it's counter productive for you to attack existing industry as a means to make uncompetitive systems artificially competitive.
So... if you want to pay for all that stuff, you pay for it.
Pave the f'ing road and stop looting the transit funds.
So the friction of the tires isn't relevant? I'm not contradicting you. I don't know... I just figured that would matter.
Further, if weight is all that matters that doesn't mean traffic doesn't matter. If you have a lot of little cars driving on a road even by your own calculation they would wear out the road. Not as fast as the same number of semis but heavy traffic clearly would have to matter. If tens of thousands of cars collectively weighing tens of thousands of tons move down a street every day then that has to add up.
If I wanted to ride the bus to work every day. I would.
How about this, next time you go out to eat, I'll order for you. Because you apparently think people have a right to make decisions for other people.
If I want to drive and I paid for the privilege, then leave me alone. And if I owe a fee, then I'll pay that. But don't bill me for a system I don't use and have no interest in using. And if I pay money into a system for a given service. SPEND it on that service or give me my money back.
wait... your notion is that other cars should be made to be quieter?
Sigh... why are people so addicted to passing STUPID laws.
Just leave it alone. No one cares what you think and no one should be forced to care. If people want noisy cars they'll buy them. If they don't, then they clearly disagree with you. It's their money and their choice. Making a car noisy is a stupid idea. And forcing electric cars to be nosier ignores that there are plenty of cars on the road that are exceptionally quiet. This is not a bad thing. it's a sign of good design. Noise is generally a sign of bad design. It means energy is being wasted on a vibration that isn't accomplishing anything. The same can be said of heat. The colder and quieter an engine is per horse power the more efficent it is... it's a good thing.
If you put some stupid speaker on my car that is forced to make a noise when I move. I will break it. And do you know who will pull me over for that? No one.
So please... pass a stupid law that will make everyone just that much more contemptuous of the legal system and that much more willing to disobey yet another stupid law.
Every time you pass a new law you've made it easier to be a criminal and harder to be an upstanding citizen. At some point you'll cross a line and be outnumbered. At which point god help us all.
Pass laws that NEED to be passed. Don't pass them simply because you're bored.
I merely object to people screwing with our energy supply and then complaining about the consequences.
How about this, if you want oil to be more expensive. YOU pay for it. I'll pay what the price would be if you hadn't interfered.
DO NOT F*CK with energy. It's like screwing with food or water. This is the sort of stuff that causes wars. People get their throats cut or just shot in the face for this sort of thing. And I think I guessed correctly in assuming you belong to a political faction that believes it has a right to make energy artificially expensive.
People are already dying for your stupidity, arrogance, and ignorance. The whole global economy is being affected by a series of feel good proposals that have backfired massively.
Want to buy homes for poor people? Welcome to the housing bubble.
Want to help people get college educations? Welcome to the spiraling cost of higher education and the collapsing public schools.
Want to provide cheaper or free healthcare? How is that working out?
It's not that you can't do these things it's that there are ways to do it and there are stupid ways to do it. And these political factions are stuck on stupid. Am I claiming that their oposition is perfect and makes no errors? Hardly. But neither are they so consistently self destructive.
Everything these factions touch turns to shit. How many billions have you wasted on renewable energy and look at the result? You spend the wealth of empires like water on NOTHING. You have nothing to show for it all and you sacrifice EVERYTHING for it.
If I've misread you... forgive me... your statement made me fairly certain.
how you manage it isn't really important so long as you force them to compete for the privilege in open bids and hold them to reasonable standards.
At the other end of the spectrum there are places that use contractors frequently but they make a point of only using contractors RELATED to the politicians or their political contributors. As a result, the bid tend to be very high and the work quality low if it happens at all. The contractors become in this case a means of hiding bribes and kickbacks.
Making things public doesn't fix the problem either because the union can just as easily be involved as the contractor. The virtue of the contractor is that it's easier to have 20 contractors working for you then to have 20 different transit unions. And further, you can fire a contractor without a lot of fuss. But firing a whole union is almost impossible.
What going contractor really gives you is flexibility and it forces those doing the work to respect where their paycheck comes from. That means working efficiently and doing quality work. Because if you don't do both someone else will come up behind you and take the job from you.
And before someone boohoos that's situation, everyone else in the country deals with that all the time. I have people sniffing around my job all the time. I have to make a point of turning in work quickly and of high quality such that no one can make an argument against me. Further, I have to maintain a professional relationship with everyone.
Look at the teachers that get caught molesting children and they can't fire them. Same situation with the transit unions. They basically do nothing most of the time and it's politically impossible to get rid of them.
Go contractor and there will probably still be problems but at LEAST the f'ing pot holes will get filled. It's difficult to express exactly how infuriating the issue is...
It's nothing special. They're just competent. Our transit workers aren't. I don't know if it's their fault. I suspect it's their administrators but it's possibly politics or the union. You don't know. The problem is that this is a wide spread issue over most states and most cities in the US. So it's unlikely to be the local administration and is more likely some national law or political force that can systematically screw something up over the whole country.
The city is too large to give to any one or even a few contractors. You'd need to farm it out to dozens or even hundreds.
I live in Los Angeles. The city built OUT instead of UP. So we have a lot more roads then most cities of our population. You have to drive everywhere for everything. We have a bus system but it takes roughly two to five times longer to get anywhere using the bus. It's fine if you only go to one place and back every day. But if you actually do anything in the city that isn't in one area you need a car.
The whole city is built around the concept of the car. We have many major streets that hundreds of thousands of people flow down daily. Even on weekends we get traffic jams in some parts of the city.
Potholes in some areas will persist for months. Or roads will be closed causing the transport equivalent of a heart attack. On tiny off streets you can work during the day since no one is one those most of the time regardless. But for the major streets it has to be at night only.
As to the notion that it's more expensive to work at night. MAYBE. The current system is not cheaper however. So the net cost should be cheaper by switching to a contractor system.
We can do it slowly. Calculate what it costs us to do a job. Offer the job with that as the top price and then let construction companies bid for it with the lowest bidder winning.
Either we'll get a company that will do the work for less or we'll keep the work public.
Do you really doubt we won't get a contractor that will do it for less? Come on.
And while I'm sure you're going to say they'll do a sloppy job or something, we're not paying people to do a bad job. That's another thing that's nice about working with contractors rather then the public unions. If the union does a good or a bad job you have to pay them regardless. If a contractor does a bad job you can tell them to do it again and refuse payment until it's done right.
Point being, we will pay less and get a higher level of quality. It's almost impossible for that not to be true if you just think about it.
As to the complexity of dealing with all these various contractors. If you find it complicated then just subcontract that as well.
Calculate what it costs for you to manage all these little firms and offer the task out for bid. I'm sure you'll get one of the larger accounting firms or real estate management firms that will jump on the chance. And you'll pay less while getting better quality work.
I'm firmly of the belief that about 90 percent of what government does should be subcontracted. The only things we can't subcontract are politicians, police, and courts. Everything else could be subcontracted.
And in case I haven't brought this up, some cities and towns have tried this with the results I've described.
Costs fall, quality increases, and they're even able to add new services at no additional cost due to the massive cost savings.
Look, does it surprise you that government confuses itself and there is mismanagement due to scaling issues?
Human management systems get increasingly inefficient as they get larger unless they maintain an ad hock quality throughout. This is why command economies are less effective then capitalist economies.
Theoretically, a command economy should be much more efficient because there is no competition. No waste on advertising. No unnecessary consumption. And yet in practice, capitalist systems are radically more efficient then command economies. Why? Because no centralized authority is competent to manage such large systems. It's like trying to light a stadium with a single giant bulb. Whereas the adhock systems give everyone their own flashlight and everyone walks around lighting their own way. Thus everyone can see. It's inelegant and chaotic but it works.
If you'd like, I can link you to the cities that are doing things this way so you can see that it works.
As to blind people crossing the road. That's just going to be a new challenge. I don't see why everyone in society has to have engine noise in otherwise silent cars just so blind people can tell cars are coming.
We've been building quiet excellent roads for thousands of years. So I don't know why you find the practice to be so exceptional. Further, roads tend to pay for themselves a hundred times over.
asphalt machines aren't noisy. At least the ones I've seen aren't. They patched a hole in my neighborhood not long ago and you couldn't hear the machine if you walked by it.
...so give me details that are useful. How long would the patch last? A day a year? Because we're not building anything to last forever. It's just a matter of it lasting a few years. The whole road gets relaid with some frequency.
If you need the sun to bake the surface then how does this work in places that are overcast or are naturally cold? They don't pave roads in iceland?
I'm extremely dubious of the notion that they need the sun to bake anything out of the pavement. I know concrete needs oxygen to cure but I've never heard for asphalt needing sun to bake out volatiles.
Again, hire a company to manage it. They'll have an incentive both to maintain the road or lose the contract and build the road properly so there is low maintenance.
The whole transit authority is a mistake. Oh, we should have one. But they should be entirely administrative and manage subcontractors which would be vastly cheaper. And even the administrators should be mostly automated.
There are a few cities that have had such terrible budget problem that they went to a full subcontractor system. They subcontracted everything but the police. They even subcontracted the city's accounting to a local accounting firm.
We'll see what the long term consequences are but so far they've been able to eliminate their deficit, increase services, improve the quality of existing services, and lower taxes.
That for me looks like overwhelming evidence that the public system was wildly inefficient and low quality.
A nice thing with subcontractors is that you can scale your needs up and down rapidly without having to take responsibility for people. So if I need a lot of workers for a project, I just hire the subcontractor to do it. And when the job is done I don't need those people anymore. If they're public they stay on my employment rolls collecting pay checks. If I subcontract, I only pay for the workers I need when I need them.
Imagine if you had to get some work done on your house and then had to employ your builders for the years in between every repair? It's silly. Obviously portions of the city need maintenance all the time. But often different types. Another thing that is good about subcontractors is that you get specialists. You might work with someone that only builds bridges. Where as if you're dealing with the transit union you could be dealing with a bunch of guys that have done everything at one point or another but aren't really expert at anything.
Anyway, my overriding point is that there is no excuse in a city of tens of millions of people for a pot hole to exist in one of the major streets for months on end. I don't care if they're going to do work on the street later. It's not acceptable. Hundreds of thousands of people flow that that street daily. Fix it. And it is also not acceptable for work to be done on that street during the day. Possibly this might be okay on a week end but probably not. It has to be done at night. It's like doing maintenance on an email server. Imagine if your gmail went down in the middle of the day and gmail said "oh sorry about that we're doing maintenance"... it's not acceptable. It can't do that it. And the roads are the same way. You can't do that in the middle of rush hour. And in some cities rush hour can last four or more hours. Traffic can be miserable. And no one appreciates a road crew making everyone's commute worse.
Honestly? Mostly because they can. Taxes tend to increase until the political force to impose them and the political force to evade them equalizes.
Look at the new soda tax they're proposing. They're saying they want to fight obesity. But their tax would include diet soda as well. Why? Because they can.
Whether it's six guys or twenty it doesn't change the fact that there are hundreds of stores across a large city all doing the same thing at roughly the same time. if they can do that every day in the bargain budget market then the city can sure as f' figure it out unless they're so incompetent that they lace up their shoes with Velcro.
Any time a crew shuts down a major street in the middle of the day to do road work... you're dealing with a transit union that found it more reasonable to inconvenience tens of thousands of people then the 10-20 guys doing the work.
It's like doing server maintenance on monday morning. Know any IT department that does that? Not one that keeps it's job. Outside of government, that sort of flagrant disrespect for everyone else results in heads rolling.
As to subsidies... I don't have a problem with that. Just do the work and don't divert funds. If I'm paying gas taxes that should go to roads. If I'm paying bus fare that should go to the bus. Never the twain should meet. If you want to stack additional tax money on either side, then go for it. But the gas tax should be reserved exclusively for road maintenance.
Something that bothers me is when money intended for one program is used to pay for something else. Especially since politicians will often campaign on the point that the money is for X when really they know you don't want to pay more for Y. So they talk about X and when you fund it they take the extra money from X and give it to Y on the sly.
How does water get into gravel bound together by tar?
And in any case, I have no doubt that the spot probably wears differently then the rest of the road. So what? So you have to retouch it every year or so.
If the logistics of keeping the road flat are too much for the transit authority to handle then they should delegate the task to someone more competent.
By that logic you should try to make gas cheaper and thus increase consumption rather then try to choke off consumption.
So... I can only assume you support the keystone pipeline, right? Or do you believe in reducing consumption... thus making the problem worse?
If you go out of your way to make my gas expensive and then want to pile an increasingly higher tax on top of it as I start cutting back... you've got another thing coming.
Stop standing in the way of consumption and then MAYBE you'll have a case if the problem doesn't go away as a direct consequence.
As to not scaling, there's no reason why you can't keep the budgets separate.
Tax the drivers for using the road and charge the passengers for using the bus. Why subsidize the bus with road taxes? They're already paying for the road the bus travels on. Why rob more money from the program to pay for subsidized mass transit? If the service is truly so good then people should be willing to pay the actual cost.
As to how budgets are combined, they actually like to have everything in ONE money pool. It lets them raise money for schools and then raid the fund to pay for other things. Or raise money for police and then raid the fund for something else.
I believe in compartmentalized budgets because it makes government more accountable and less corrupt. If the government says they're raising taxes for a given purpose, I want to know they're not going to just take out whatever money was added to that account and shift it to another hidden purpose. If you want to raise taxes to increase employee pensions then just admit it. Don't tell me you're going to improve schools and then steal the money to shift to the pensions.
If I pay something for roads. Then spend it on the roads. If I pay something for the bus. Then spend it on the bus. The games that are being played with budgets is in large part responsible for our fiscal problems.
We spend a great deal on education and yet have failing schools. We spend a great deal on medical care and yet get less for our money all the time.
There are hidden costs that are eating our contributions. Reveal them. Bring them out into the light of day. And once there we can decide if a given idea is worth a trillion annually.
As to wasting money by filling holes that will be taken care of in two weeks. that isn't acceptable. The holes need to be filled immediately. The cost of filling them is nothing in the context of the traffic and commerce that flows on major streets.
If the city doesn't like paying for holes it makes in the road... don't make holes. And if you do make one, fill it or put a steel plate over it. if you leave a giant hole in the road then you're incompetent.
As to flat rates being just as expensive as the transit union. This has been tried. You are empirically wrong. Some communities do rely on private contractors to do road maintenance amongst other things and it tends to slash costs dramatically. Largely because the contractor employs fewer people that work harder... eg like everyone else.
By that argument we should spread broken needles around the neighborhood to give the impression of a drug problem... or better yet host crack heads in some homes just to make sure there's a steady supply of dead junkies found naked on park benches to keep the property values low.
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Nope. I don't need gas subsidized. I need you to stop undermining it's extraction and making it artifically more expensive.
If you want gas to be more expensive that's fine. You pay for the extra cost. You and just you. I see no reason why I should be punished for your bad judgment.
I am more then happy to pay my fair share. But my fair share does not include your subsidies for alternative energy or your animosity for fossil fuels. I'm not paying extra for gas because you don't like gas. I'm not paying more for gas because you want to litter the desert with yet another failed solar power plant.
Come to California. We have DEAD solar and wind power plants going back to the 70s. That's how long we've been building them. They always work for a year or five and then shut down roughly when their debts come due. There isn't even money left to tear them down. So they sit out there in the desert like monuments to stupidity. And yet... every couple years another idiot comes along and says "hey lets build another one."
I'm not saying alternative energy will always be a pointless money sink. Its going to be the future eventually. But today it isn't. And it's counter productive for you to attack existing industry as a means to make uncompetitive systems artificially competitive.
So... if you want to pay for all that stuff, you pay for it.
Pave the f'ing road and stop looting the transit funds.
How many months are they allowed to sit there unfilled in the middle of major streets?
So the friction of the tires isn't relevant? I'm not contradicting you. I don't know... I just figured that would matter.
Further, if weight is all that matters that doesn't mean traffic doesn't matter. If you have a lot of little cars driving on a road even by your own calculation they would wear out the road. Not as fast as the same number of semis but heavy traffic clearly would have to matter. If tens of thousands of cars collectively weighing tens of thousands of tons move down a street every day then that has to add up.
If I wanted to ride the bus to work every day. I would.
How about this, next time you go out to eat, I'll order for you. Because you apparently think people have a right to make decisions for other people.
If I want to drive and I paid for the privilege, then leave me alone. And if I owe a fee, then I'll pay that. But don't bill me for a system I don't use and have no interest in using. And if I pay money into a system for a given service. SPEND it on that service or give me my money back.
wait... your notion is that other cars should be made to be quieter?
Sigh... why are people so addicted to passing STUPID laws.
Just leave it alone. No one cares what you think and no one should be forced to care. If people want noisy cars they'll buy them. If they don't, then they clearly disagree with you. It's their money and their choice. Making a car noisy is a stupid idea. And forcing electric cars to be nosier ignores that there are plenty of cars on the road that are exceptionally quiet. This is not a bad thing. it's a sign of good design. Noise is generally a sign of bad design. It means energy is being wasted on a vibration that isn't accomplishing anything. The same can be said of heat. The colder and quieter an engine is per horse power the more efficent it is... it's a good thing.
If you put some stupid speaker on my car that is forced to make a noise when I move. I will break it. And do you know who will pull me over for that? No one.
So please... pass a stupid law that will make everyone just that much more contemptuous of the legal system and that much more willing to disobey yet another stupid law.
Every time you pass a new law you've made it easier to be a criminal and harder to be an upstanding citizen. At some point you'll cross a line and be outnumbered. At which point god help us all.
Pass laws that NEED to be passed. Don't pass them simply because you're bored.
Where did I say I wouldn't pay my share?
I merely object to people screwing with our energy supply and then complaining about the consequences.
How about this, if you want oil to be more expensive. YOU pay for it. I'll pay what the price would be if you hadn't interfered.
DO NOT F*CK with energy. It's like screwing with food or water. This is the sort of stuff that causes wars. People get their throats cut or just shot in the face for this sort of thing. And I think I guessed correctly in assuming you belong to a political faction that believes it has a right to make energy artificially expensive.
People are already dying for your stupidity, arrogance, and ignorance. The whole global economy is being affected by a series of feel good proposals that have backfired massively.
Want to buy homes for poor people? Welcome to the housing bubble.
Want to help people get college educations? Welcome to the spiraling cost of higher education and the collapsing public schools.
Want to provide cheaper or free healthcare? How is that working out?
It's not that you can't do these things it's that there are ways to do it and there are stupid ways to do it. And these political factions are stuck on stupid. Am I claiming that their oposition is perfect and makes no errors? Hardly. But neither are they so consistently self destructive.
Everything these factions touch turns to shit. How many billions have you wasted on renewable energy and look at the result? You spend the wealth of empires like water on NOTHING. You have nothing to show for it all and you sacrifice EVERYTHING for it.
If I've misread you... forgive me... your statement made me fairly certain.
If I'm right... Kill yourself.
how you manage it isn't really important so long as you force them to compete for the privilege in open bids and hold them to reasonable standards.
At the other end of the spectrum there are places that use contractors frequently but they make a point of only using contractors RELATED to the politicians or their political contributors. As a result, the bid tend to be very high and the work quality low if it happens at all. The contractors become in this case a means of hiding bribes and kickbacks.
Making things public doesn't fix the problem either because the union can just as easily be involved as the contractor. The virtue of the contractor is that it's easier to have 20 contractors working for you then to have 20 different transit unions. And further, you can fire a contractor without a lot of fuss. But firing a whole union is almost impossible.
What going contractor really gives you is flexibility and it forces those doing the work to respect where their paycheck comes from. That means working efficiently and doing quality work. Because if you don't do both someone else will come up behind you and take the job from you.
And before someone boohoos that's situation, everyone else in the country deals with that all the time. I have people sniffing around my job all the time. I have to make a point of turning in work quickly and of high quality such that no one can make an argument against me. Further, I have to maintain a professional relationship with everyone.
Look at the teachers that get caught molesting children and they can't fire them. Same situation with the transit unions. They basically do nothing most of the time and it's politically impossible to get rid of them.
Go contractor and there will probably still be problems but at LEAST the f'ing pot holes will get filled. It's difficult to express exactly how infuriating the issue is...
It's nothing special. They're just competent. Our transit workers aren't. I don't know if it's their fault. I suspect it's their administrators but it's possibly politics or the union. You don't know. The problem is that this is a wide spread issue over most states and most cities in the US. So it's unlikely to be the local administration and is more likely some national law or political force that can systematically screw something up over the whole country.
Put the contract up for bid. Bet they'll bid a fraction of what we're currently paying.
The city is too large to give to any one or even a few contractors. You'd need to farm it out to dozens or even hundreds.
I live in Los Angeles. The city built OUT instead of UP. So we have a lot more roads then most cities of our population. You have to drive everywhere for everything. We have a bus system but it takes roughly two to five times longer to get anywhere using the bus. It's fine if you only go to one place and back every day. But if you actually do anything in the city that isn't in one area you need a car.
The whole city is built around the concept of the car. We have many major streets that hundreds of thousands of people flow down daily. Even on weekends we get traffic jams in some parts of the city.
Potholes in some areas will persist for months. Or roads will be closed causing the transport equivalent of a heart attack. On tiny off streets you can work during the day since no one is one those most of the time regardless. But for the major streets it has to be at night only.
As to the notion that it's more expensive to work at night. MAYBE. The current system is not cheaper however. So the net cost should be cheaper by switching to a contractor system.
We can do it slowly. Calculate what it costs us to do a job. Offer the job with that as the top price and then let construction companies bid for it with the lowest bidder winning.
Either we'll get a company that will do the work for less or we'll keep the work public.
Do you really doubt we won't get a contractor that will do it for less? Come on.
And while I'm sure you're going to say they'll do a sloppy job or something, we're not paying people to do a bad job. That's another thing that's nice about working with contractors rather then the public unions. If the union does a good or a bad job you have to pay them regardless. If a contractor does a bad job you can tell them to do it again and refuse payment until it's done right.
Point being, we will pay less and get a higher level of quality. It's almost impossible for that not to be true if you just think about it.
As to the complexity of dealing with all these various contractors. If you find it complicated then just subcontract that as well.
Calculate what it costs for you to manage all these little firms and offer the task out for bid. I'm sure you'll get one of the larger accounting firms or real estate management firms that will jump on the chance. And you'll pay less while getting better quality work.
I'm firmly of the belief that about 90 percent of what government does should be subcontracted. The only things we can't subcontract are politicians, police, and courts. Everything else could be subcontracted.
And in case I haven't brought this up, some cities and towns have tried this with the results I've described.
Costs fall, quality increases, and they're even able to add new services at no additional cost due to the massive cost savings.
Look, does it surprise you that government confuses itself and there is mismanagement due to scaling issues?
Human management systems get increasingly inefficient as they get larger unless they maintain an ad hock quality throughout. This is why command economies are less effective then capitalist economies.
Theoretically, a command economy should be much more efficient because there is no competition. No waste on advertising. No unnecessary consumption. And yet in practice, capitalist systems are radically more efficient then command economies. Why? Because no centralized authority is competent to manage such large systems. It's like trying to light a stadium with a single giant bulb. Whereas the adhock systems give everyone their own flashlight and everyone walks around lighting their own way. Thus everyone can see. It's inelegant and chaotic but it works.
If you'd like, I can link you to the cities that are doing things this way so you can see that it works.
I want my car silent.
As to blind people crossing the road. That's just going to be a new challenge. I don't see why everyone in society has to have engine noise in otherwise silent cars just so blind people can tell cars are coming.
We've been building quiet excellent roads for thousands of years. So I don't know why you find the practice to be so exceptional. Further, roads tend to pay for themselves a hundred times over.
The question is why don't buses?
asphalt machines aren't noisy. At least the ones I've seen aren't. They patched a hole in my neighborhood not long ago and you couldn't hear the machine if you walked by it.
...so give me details that are useful. How long would the patch last? A day a year? Because we're not building anything to last forever. It's just a matter of it lasting a few years. The whole road gets relaid with some frequency.
If you claim filling pot holes is rocket science I'm going to laugh at you derisively.
If you need the sun to bake the surface then how does this work in places that are overcast or are naturally cold? They don't pave roads in iceland?
I'm extremely dubious of the notion that they need the sun to bake anything out of the pavement. I know concrete needs oxygen to cure but I've never heard for asphalt needing sun to bake out volatiles.
Again, hire a company to manage it. They'll have an incentive both to maintain the road or lose the contract and build the road properly so there is low maintenance.
The whole transit authority is a mistake. Oh, we should have one. But they should be entirely administrative and manage subcontractors which would be vastly cheaper. And even the administrators should be mostly automated.
There are a few cities that have had such terrible budget problem that they went to a full subcontractor system. They subcontracted everything but the police. They even subcontracted the city's accounting to a local accounting firm.
We'll see what the long term consequences are but so far they've been able to eliminate their deficit, increase services, improve the quality of existing services, and lower taxes.
That for me looks like overwhelming evidence that the public system was wildly inefficient and low quality.
A nice thing with subcontractors is that you can scale your needs up and down rapidly without having to take responsibility for people. So if I need a lot of workers for a project, I just hire the subcontractor to do it. And when the job is done I don't need those people anymore. If they're public they stay on my employment rolls collecting pay checks. If I subcontract, I only pay for the workers I need when I need them.
Imagine if you had to get some work done on your house and then had to employ your builders for the years in between every repair? It's silly. Obviously portions of the city need maintenance all the time. But often different types. Another thing that is good about subcontractors is that you get specialists. You might work with someone that only builds bridges. Where as if you're dealing with the transit union you could be dealing with a bunch of guys that have done everything at one point or another but aren't really expert at anything.
Anyway, my overriding point is that there is no excuse in a city of tens of millions of people for a pot hole to exist in one of the major streets for months on end. I don't care if they're going to do work on the street later. It's not acceptable. Hundreds of thousands of people flow that that street daily. Fix it. And it is also not acceptable for work to be done on that street during the day. Possibly this might be okay on a week end but probably not. It has to be done at night. It's like doing maintenance on an email server. Imagine if your gmail went down in the middle of the day and gmail said "oh sorry about that we're doing maintenance"... it's not acceptable. It can't do that it. And the roads are the same way. You can't do that in the middle of rush hour. And in some cities rush hour can last four or more hours. Traffic can be miserable. And no one appreciates a road crew making everyone's commute worse.
hybrids are so uncommon that they're not statistically relevant.
Honestly? Mostly because they can. Taxes tend to increase until the political force to impose them and the political force to evade them equalizes.
Look at the new soda tax they're proposing. They're saying they want to fight obesity. But their tax would include diet soda as well. Why? Because they can.
Whether it's six guys or twenty it doesn't change the fact that there are hundreds of stores across a large city all doing the same thing at roughly the same time. if they can do that every day in the bargain budget market then the city can sure as f' figure it out unless they're so incompetent that they lace up their shoes with Velcro.
Any time a crew shuts down a major street in the middle of the day to do road work... you're dealing with a transit union that found it more reasonable to inconvenience tens of thousands of people then the 10-20 guys doing the work.
It's like doing server maintenance on monday morning. Know any IT department that does that? Not one that keeps it's job. Outside of government, that sort of flagrant disrespect for everyone else results in heads rolling.
As to subsidies... I don't have a problem with that. Just do the work and don't divert funds. If I'm paying gas taxes that should go to roads. If I'm paying bus fare that should go to the bus. Never the twain should meet. If you want to stack additional tax money on either side, then go for it. But the gas tax should be reserved exclusively for road maintenance.
Something that bothers me is when money intended for one program is used to pay for something else. Especially since politicians will often campaign on the point that the money is for X when really they know you don't want to pay more for Y. So they talk about X and when you fund it they take the extra money from X and give it to Y on the sly.
I find that to be deeply corrupt.
How does water get into gravel bound together by tar?
And in any case, I have no doubt that the spot probably wears differently then the rest of the road. So what? So you have to retouch it every year or so.
If the logistics of keeping the road flat are too much for the transit authority to handle then they should delegate the task to someone more competent.
By that logic you should try to make gas cheaper and thus increase consumption rather then try to choke off consumption.
So... I can only assume you support the keystone pipeline, right? Or do you believe in reducing consumption... thus making the problem worse?
If you go out of your way to make my gas expensive and then want to pile an increasingly higher tax on top of it as I start cutting back... you've got another thing coming.
Stop standing in the way of consumption and then MAYBE you'll have a case if the problem doesn't go away as a direct consequence.
As to not scaling, there's no reason why you can't keep the budgets separate.
Tax the drivers for using the road and charge the passengers for using the bus. Why subsidize the bus with road taxes? They're already paying for the road the bus travels on. Why rob more money from the program to pay for subsidized mass transit? If the service is truly so good then people should be willing to pay the actual cost.
As to how budgets are combined, they actually like to have everything in ONE money pool. It lets them raise money for schools and then raid the fund to pay for other things. Or raise money for police and then raid the fund for something else.
I believe in compartmentalized budgets because it makes government more accountable and less corrupt. If the government says they're raising taxes for a given purpose, I want to know they're not going to just take out whatever money was added to that account and shift it to another hidden purpose. If you want to raise taxes to increase employee pensions then just admit it. Don't tell me you're going to improve schools and then steal the money to shift to the pensions.
If I pay something for roads. Then spend it on the roads. If I pay something for the bus. Then spend it on the bus. The games that are being played with budgets is in large part responsible for our fiscal problems.
We spend a great deal on education and yet have failing schools. We spend a great deal on medical care and yet get less for our money all the time.
There are hidden costs that are eating our contributions. Reveal them. Bring them out into the light of day. And once there we can decide if a given idea is worth a trillion annually.
As to wasting money by filling holes that will be taken care of in two weeks. that isn't acceptable. The holes need to be filled immediately. The cost of filling them is nothing in the context of the traffic and commerce that flows on major streets.
If the city doesn't like paying for holes it makes in the road... don't make holes. And if you do make one, fill it or put a steel plate over it. if you leave a giant hole in the road then you're incompetent.
As to flat rates being just as expensive as the transit union. This has been tried. You are empirically wrong. Some communities do rely on private contractors to do road maintenance amongst other things and it tends to slash costs dramatically. Largely because the contractor employs fewer people that work harder... eg like everyone else.
By that argument we should spread broken needles around the neighborhood to give the impression of a drug problem... or better yet host crack heads in some homes just to make sure there's a steady supply of dead junkies found naked on park benches to keep the property values low.