Congress already has told the TV industry to switch their broadcasts by 2007 to a digital format, which uses computer language, from the current analog format, which uses radio signals sent as waves.
I understand that people like to live in suburbs, and I have no problem with that. But I think it's clear that if people had to pay all the costs of automobile use, then many of them would decide against suburban living because of the expense. But people don't have to pay all the costs of automobile use because, for one, the federal government subsidizes road construction by $30 billion a year (Arizona gets its share, too).
So I disagree with the idea of "people want them, people pay for them." To me it's more like "some people want them, everyone pays for them."
In the end, our disagreement seems to be over the extent to which gas prices have affected the creation of suburbs. I suppose neither of us has any real data on it.
I live in a suburb. In fact, I live on a large lot on the side of a desert mountain.
And I drive an SUV.
And I like it.
If you want to understand the real issues of alternative fuels, you first have to drop your paranoia and conspiracy theories. In general (there have been a few exceptions like the LA trolley cars), the system *evolved* through the *free* acts of *free* humans and corporations.
You do realize that the US government subsidizes automobile use (through road construction and such) by billions of dollars every year, no?
In europe, the idea is that all costs (including external costs) of using a car should be paid by the user through gas and car taxes. And europe has almost nothing like the suburbs found in the US.
I'm not arguing here that europe is better or worse than the US in this respect. I just hate to think that you believe that suburbs just "evolved freely", as it were.
The government's decision to subsidize or tax automboile usage has clearly played a huge role in the development of suburbs.
No, oil extraction will stop shortly after the amount of energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil exceeds the amount of energy gained from burning a barrel of oil
Only if the oil wells themselves use oil.
Oil wells of the future might well be powered by some alternative energy source. People will continue to demand oil if they have not yet replaced their legacy oil-using machines, or if, say, the new energy source is not practical on the scale of a car.
I mean, if the pentagon is willing to pay $5 million per barrel of oil to power their super jet that can't run on anything else, then hell, I'll go out there and pull up and down on the stupid well with my hands.
Saying that oil extraction will stop when people can't make money off it anymore is almost a tautology.
When ten people were killed on the staten island ferry a week or so ago, it was the leading news story that night, even internationally (BBC). Perhaps rightly so, but it takes like two weeks for that many people to be killed by cars in NYC, and you never hear about it.
Sometimes I read the Seattle Times from 80 or 100 years ago. I find it interesting how in the 20's there were often op-eds about how people would stop being killed by cars if drivers just paid more attention and slowed down. Now it just seems like death by automobile is seen as a necessary evil. For example, there are these public service ads that warn people against using pot and driving because you might kill your little brother or something. Of course it's not the car that's the problem it's the pot. You never see public service ads that are like "don't ever drive, you may kill a kid-- even if you're perfectly sober!"
Funnily, the Seattle Times installed Seattle's first traffic light. The very next day a car ran into it and smashed it. The driver said the light confused him (this was probably spring of 1923 or so).
we are a union of States where the individual should never be trumped by the masses -- unless that individual is harming another in visible and provable ways.
If raising taxes alone was the answer, you'd expect a lot of research into and use of alternative fuels to go on in Europe
Car companies are international. Just because the tax is european doesn't mean you'd only expect european car manufacturers to invest in alternative fuels. You'd expect research from every company that sells cars in europe, and, as the article states, every big car maker now has a fuel-cell program. No doubt the motivation for these programs is due, in part, to the size of the european gas tax.
In Holland, fuel companies get 25 cents for every liter of petrol sold...
The gas tax is pretty high in holland, and I agree that more of the tax revenue could be spent on research. But the article is proposing the tax for the US. In the US, gas tax doesn't even cover the cost of road construction, nevermind the externalities the articles mentions.
That is the problem I see with increased tax on fuels in the US. Like their European counterparts, the US government will discover that higher prices for petrol will most definitely not result in people driving less,
This is something I often see posted, and it baffles me. Europeans drive way less than people in the US. No doubt this is in large part due to the huge difference in cost. This seems like simple economics to me. True, a gas tax increase wouldn't change things over night, but in ten or twenty years there would be a significant decrease in US oil consumption.
and thus they will rejoice in their discovery of a 'milk cow' that brings much new revenues
The article specifically states that increase in gas tax should be used to decrease other taxes, not to increase government revenue.
Europe has shown that the tax does not contribute to cleaner fuels in that case.
Europe has shown that a large gas tax will create more demand for fuel-efficiency. Demand for fuel-efficiency results in private investment in research by all car companies that sell to that market.
Re:A gas tax rather than an income tax, how amusin
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
there are already laws in many places requiring gas taxes to be used only for road construction. There is no reason similar laws could not be constructed that require, say, some of the gas tax to be used as tax relief for poor people.
what's with the belligerence? It's really just kind of annoying.
Re:A gas tax rather than an income tax, how amusin
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
umm, if you give the tax money BACK to the poorest people, then the tax is no longer stricly a "consumption tax".
Re:A gas tax rather than an income tax, how amusin
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
you should read the article more carefully. It specifically states that government revenue should not be increased:
Crucially, this need not be, and should not be, a matter of raising taxes in the aggregate. The proceeds from a gasoline tax ought to be used to finance cuts in other taxes--this, surely, is the way to present them to a sceptical electorate.
The extra revenue from the tax could just be handed out to poor people for all this article is concerned. Progressiveness is an entirely separate issue.
it's different in that it will eliminate traffic jams that often occur around toll booths and it will be fairer in that it will tax for all road use, not just use of a single road like the mass pike.
Darl: so, um. Ya. So we didn't try googling our code before we showed it in las vegas? Blake: ya, no. Lawyer#1: ya, um, we, ah. Ya. Lawyer#2: dropped the ball on that one! Darl: so, ya, and, um, it's, ah, in a book from 1977? Huh. Didn't know that. Blake: ya, a book! Who knew. Lawyer#1: didn't think to look in a book. Lawyer#2: ya, hm, ya, book. Darl: hmm, book. And, ya. Umm, it was released under the BSD license? Lawyer#1: ya, BSD. Hmm. Blake: so. That was, um. Ya. Lawyer#2: BSD. Uh hu. Darl: so... Dennis Ritchie? Really? He's famous and stuff. Blake: um, ya. Dennis Ritchie. Lawyer#1: Dennis Ritchie, uh hu. Famous. Lawyer#2: Hmm. Ya. Darl: um, Linda, if you could get my stockbroker on the phone that would be great, thanks.
so you would have preferred a slashdot story every day about how microsoft wasn't going to start competing with google, except on this particular day when such a story would have been noticeably absent? I think I prefer it the way it is.
My point is that this is an invalid argument. Bicycles cannot replace cars so it doesn't matter.
granted, I missed your point. But I think you need more analysis to make it valid. I could claim that airplanes are the most economical way to travel, since they can do things cars cannot. Of course this is silly, because one rarely needs to fly to anywhere. So, of course, we share airplanes (i.e. we have airline companies). I believe the same is true for cars (in fact, I belong to a car-sharing program). So, the question (whose answer I think you've taken for granted) is: how necessary are cars for daily living? You say that "most people need to own cars" and I disagree. Certainly, I wouldn't ask anyone to live in a rural area without a car, but 90 out of 115 million households are in a metropolitan area (see factfinder.census.gov).
for those that actually live in a city, I think very few need to use a car for daily living. In new york, for example, less than half of households even own a car, even in our car-centric culture (that number would be even smaller if car-sharing programs were more widespread, or if the city didn't put so much of its time into moving cars around quickly).
in the suburbs, yes, a car is required. But this is sad and unnecessary way for things to be, as I had the displeasure of finding out as a child. Yes, it was nice to have a yard, but the nearest playground was a mile away down a never-used sidewalk on a busy street. Anywhere one might want to go required a car. In trying to get the best of both the city and the country, suburbanites wind up with nothing but lots of houses and cars. But I suppose I'm without a point, because, as you would probably argue, people choose to live there because they WANT to live there...
... which is fine with me IF they paid the true price of driving:
You may argue that the cost of the roads isn't included but most road maintenance is paid for by gas tax therefore it is already rolled into the expense of the gas
I've heard 80% of road construction is paid for by gas taxes (but I have no reference). So driving a car is subsidized by a huge amount. But, even if 100% of road construction was paid for by gas taxes, what about the marsh area that now has a highway running through it? Doesn't that have value? It's not just car drivers who pay for the loss of that-- everyone pays. What about the neighborhood that was destroyed to put in a highway? Yes, property owners were paid the purchase price of their properties, but everyone pays for the loss of a neighborhood and loss of continuity in a city. Increased threat of lung cancer? I'm still waiting for that check. Increased risk of being killed while walking? Often, cars owners don't even get a ticket after killing someone (see rightofway.org). Dependence on foreign countries? Land lost to free parking spaces?
so, IF the cost of all these things, and whatever I've missed, was estimated, and if the gas tax was increased accordingly, THEN I would be perfectly happy to see people driving around in their cars.
true, it would be impossible to estimate the monetary value of these things very well at all, but anything is a better approximation than the subsidy we now have.
a couple more points:
$0.15/mile is nuts. The government's reimbursement rate is $.35/mile, and a you can get up to $1.25/mile if you go nuts the other way (lightrailnow.org). As I said, it's not valid to assume everyone needs cars.
yes, it's been claimed that bicycles can cause impotence, but not sterility.
computer-controlled cars would be a giant step forward, as would non-polluting cars. But we're not there yet! And highways themselves are destructive to cities and natural areas.
cars may be as efficient as bicycles in terms of number per lane per second, I don't know.
yes, good debate. I don't think this thread has gone too far. It's a shame slashdot stories are a ghosttown ten seconds after the've been posted.
the point of the link I posted was to refute your claim that cars are most economically efficient. Your response is to make this a car vs. bike argument. Of course cars have advantages over bicycles. No one is claiming that bicycles can carry as much as easily as cars. I'm not claiming all transportation should be done by bicycles, and I'm not claiming no transportation should be done by cars, as I already said.
Yea. Just not when it's winter. Biking is dangerous when you have good traction. It's suicide on ice and snow....
Bicicles are dangerous, much more dangerous than cars. In a car you are surrounded by a safety cage and strapped in. You can hit things at very high rates of speed and still survive. Bicicles don't give you protection from anything. That's not their job
by this logic, walking is extremely dangerous because, per mile, more people are killed walking than almost every other mode of transportation. But of course this is silly-- the reason people get killed walking is because of cars. It's not WALKING that's dangerous, it's cars. The same is true for cycling-- NINETY PERCENT of cycling fatalities are a result of cars. (www.bts.gov/publications/tsar/2000/chapter3/index.html)
And cycling would be significantly safer if more money was spent educating people about the dangers of cycling, in the same way people are educated about the dangers of driving (e.g., few people are aware of how dangerous cycling while intoxicated is).
Yes. Absolutely. A walmart in a town means greater prosperity for thousands of people
ok, you get your underwear for a dollar less. I prefer a store that I can walk to, and whose owner actually lives in the town he or she is affecting. On this point we simply have different opinions.
I would also have to shop much more often because what I bring home would never fit on a bike. That istelf is inefficient use of time.
again, if people paid the true price of driving, people would drive less, stores would be smaller and closer. Economically less efficient for the stores- yes, but outweighed by other benefits. I suppose this is the heart of our disagreement: I see the damage cars do as something worth taking large steps to eliminate, you do not. You see cars as not inevitable, I do not. So be it.
There would be many more transportation related deaths if people rode bikes instead of driving cars to work... Bicicles are also bad for boys. Biking too much can destroy your ability to have kids. Usually surgery can fix it but do you really want someone cutting around down there?... As a society we can't function without cars
and with these unfounded and/or twisted and exaggerated claims, I stop posting.
publicpurpose.com -- a site run by wendell cox consultancy. For more information on wendell cox, see, for example, this article from fair.org about "pre-digested" research from conservative, well-funded think tanks. (about a quarter of the article winds up being about mr. cox):
www.fair.org/extra/9809/local-think-tanks.html or do a google search on him to find several articles about his fact-twisting.
Bicicles are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year
this is simply not true. People bicycle all the time in colder climates. Yes, it is more dangerous to ride if there is ice or snow, but driving is also more dangerous. And public transportation becomes relatively safer when the driving conditions are bad.
Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous.
I just posted a link claiming that the true speed of an automobile is five miles/hour and all you have to say is "bicycles are very slow?" Yes, they are dangerous-- but so is the alternative, as the families of 40,000 people witness every year.
We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work
this is somewhat true, I suppose, but the long distances we need to travel are in large part due to the very fact that we rely on automobiles. Why doesn't your office open more locations? Because people can just drive their cars to work. Fewer office (or supermarket or movie theater) locations in turn means more and more traffic, and more people demanding more roads. More roads (and thus faster transporation) leads to fewer and fewer locations of things, and so on. I agree that there is some gain in efficiency to have, say, a walmart surrounded by a parking lot rather than several smaller stores, but is that something we really want? Yes, there is a gain in efficiency in terms of money, but there are losses that are not as tangible (as can be seen by the fact that many people oppose the building of new walgreens-type stores).
Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town?
The very reason kids even need to be carried around town by their parents is that they can't drive cars and there aren't any alternatives. If streets were bike-friendly, or if there were adequate public transportation, your kids could get where they need to go on their own. The fact that children in car-centric areas are so dependent on their parents for transportation is an often-used argument against cars.
Bringing your groceries home
my bike (and feet) are working just fine for this.
Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach
yes, there are times when cars a very handy, and I think no one is advocating completely getting rid of them. In fact, these are good examples of when you actually might need a car, if, say, your relatives live in some out-of-the-way place. Notice, however, that people normally only do these things several times per year.
People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.
people don't pay the true price of driving their cars. If people had to pay for the damage their cars cause to quality of life in cities and to the environment, and had to pay for securing oil in foreign countries, etc., then people would save lots (more) money.
come on man, if you build it, they will come. Name one major area that fixed traffic problems by putting in more roads. This is the course Los Angeles took-- build more and more roads. Now they have some of the worst traffic in the world AND some of the worst pollution in the world. It just doesn't work. Everyone can't have a backyard and be near to a major cultural center and expect to just be able to drive around in cars traffic-free. It hasn't happened and it won't.
as a car-hater, I hope people do forget cars and drive SUVs instead. All the sooner until we run out of gas. I dearly hope to live until the day when the last drop is pulled from the earth. (I have probably fifty years left, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed).
here's my plan: a gradually increasing tax on gasoline (with a corresponding decrease in income/sales tax).
this tax would pay for:
1) the fact that if I live in a city I will die one or two years earlier in large part due to car pollution. 2) the deaths of 5000 pedestrians per year. 3) the time I waste everytime I get to a street and have to wait thirty seconds just to get across (stoplights only exist because there are cars). 4) a significant fraction of the military (no one denies that the US interest in the middle east is due, at least partly, to securing oil). 5) the time spent by police officers dealing with traffic violations. 6) the land used up by roads and public parking spaces beyond what is required by a pedestrian/cyclist (taxed at the same rate as the local property tax). 7) etc.
when the tax is fully in place, people will be paying the TRUE PRICE of driving their vehicles, and there will be many fewer people driving as a result. Urban areas will gradually become less car-centric.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress already has told the TV industry to switch their broadcasts by 2007 to a digital format, which uses computer language, from the current analog format, which uses radio signals sent as waves.
So I disagree with the idea of "people want them, people pay for them." To me it's more like "some people want them, everyone pays for them."
In the end, our disagreement seems to be over the extent to which gas prices have affected the creation of suburbs. I suppose neither of us has any real data on it.
And I drive an SUV.
And I like it.
If you want to understand the real issues of alternative fuels, you first have to drop your paranoia and conspiracy theories. In general (there have been a few exceptions like the LA trolley cars), the system *evolved* through the *free* acts of *free* humans and corporations.
You do realize that the US government subsidizes automobile use (through road construction and such) by billions of dollars every year, no?
In europe, the idea is that all costs (including external costs) of using a car should be paid by the user through gas and car taxes. And europe has almost nothing like the suburbs found in the US.
I'm not arguing here that europe is better or worse than the US in this respect. I just hate to think that you believe that suburbs just "evolved freely", as it were.
The government's decision to subsidize or tax automboile usage has clearly played a huge role in the development of suburbs.
Only if the oil wells themselves use oil.
Oil wells of the future might well be powered by some alternative energy source. People will continue to demand oil if they have not yet replaced their legacy oil-using machines, or if, say, the new energy source is not practical on the scale of a car.
I mean, if the pentagon is willing to pay $5 million per barrel of oil to power their super jet that can't run on anything else, then hell, I'll go out there and pull up and down on the stupid well with my hands.
Saying that oil extraction will stop when people can't make money off it anymore is almost a tautology.
When ten people were killed on the staten island ferry a week or so ago, it was the leading news story that night, even internationally (BBC). Perhaps rightly so, but it takes like two weeks for that many people to be killed by cars in NYC, and you never hear about it.
Sometimes I read the Seattle Times from 80 or 100 years ago. I find it interesting how in the 20's there were often op-eds about how people would stop being killed by cars if drivers just paid more attention and slowed down. Now it just seems like death by automobile is seen as a necessary evil. For example, there are these public service ads that warn people against using pot and driving because you might kill your little brother or something. Of course it's not the car that's the problem it's the pot. You never see public service ads that are like "don't ever drive, you may kill a kid-- even if you're perfectly sober!"
Funnily, the Seattle Times installed Seattle's first traffic light. The very next day a car ran into it and smashed it. The driver said the light confused him (this was probably spring of 1923 or so).
like by polluting the air?
Car companies are international. Just because the tax is european doesn't mean you'd only expect european car manufacturers to invest in alternative fuels. You'd expect research from every company that sells cars in europe, and, as the article states, every big car maker now has a fuel-cell program. No doubt the motivation for these programs is due, in part, to the size of the european gas tax.
In Holland, fuel companies get 25 cents for every liter of petrol sold...
The gas tax is pretty high in holland, and I agree that more of the tax revenue could be spent on research. But the article is proposing the tax for the US. In the US, gas tax doesn't even cover the cost of road construction, nevermind the externalities the articles mentions.
That is the problem I see with increased tax on fuels in the US. Like their European counterparts, the US government will discover that higher prices for petrol will most definitely not result in people driving less,
This is something I often see posted, and it baffles me. Europeans drive way less than people in the US. No doubt this is in large part due to the huge difference in cost. This seems like simple economics to me. True, a gas tax increase wouldn't change things over night, but in ten or twenty years there would be a significant decrease in US oil consumption.
and thus they will rejoice in their discovery of a 'milk cow' that brings much new revenues
The article specifically states that increase in gas tax should be used to decrease other taxes, not to increase government revenue.
Europe has shown that the tax does not contribute to cleaner fuels in that case.
Europe has shown that a large gas tax will create more demand for fuel-efficiency. Demand for fuel-efficiency results in private investment in research by all car companies that sell to that market.
what's with the belligerence? It's really just kind of annoying.
umm, if you give the tax money BACK to the poorest people, then the tax is no longer stricly a "consumption tax".
Crucially, this need not be, and should not be, a matter of raising taxes in the aggregate. The proceeds from a gasoline tax ought to be used to finance cuts in other taxes--this, surely, is the way to present them to a sceptical electorate.
The extra revenue from the tax could just be handed out to poor people for all this article is concerned. Progressiveness is an entirely separate issue.
yes, but how long would it take them to send a library of congress across a football field?
it's different in that it will eliminate traffic jams that often occur around toll booths and it will be fairer in that it will tax for all road use, not just use of a single road like the mass pike.
Darl: so, um. Ya. So we didn't try googling our code before we showed it in las vegas?
Blake: ya, no.
Lawyer#1: ya, um, we, ah. Ya.
Lawyer#2: dropped the ball on that one!
Darl: so, ya, and, um, it's, ah, in a book from 1977? Huh. Didn't know that.
Blake: ya, a book! Who knew.
Lawyer#1: didn't think to look in a book.
Lawyer#2: ya, hm, ya, book.
Darl: hmm, book. And, ya. Umm, it was released under the BSD license?
Lawyer#1: ya, BSD. Hmm.
Blake: so. That was, um. Ya.
Lawyer#2: BSD. Uh hu.
Darl: so... Dennis Ritchie? Really? He's famous and stuff.
Blake: um, ya. Dennis Ritchie.
Lawyer#1: Dennis Ritchie, uh hu. Famous.
Lawyer#2: Hmm. Ya.
Darl: um, Linda, if you could get my stockbroker on the phone that would be great, thanks.
so you would have preferred a slashdot story every day about how microsoft wasn't going to start competing with google, except on this particular day when such a story would have been noticeably absent? I think I prefer it the way it is.
here are the lines from linux:
}
}
}
and Unix System V:
}
}
}
SAP is turning the nose!
we're all doomed.
My point is that this is an invalid argument. Bicycles cannot replace cars so it doesn't matter.
granted, I missed your point. But I think you need more analysis to make it valid. I could claim that airplanes are the most economical way to travel, since they can do things cars cannot. Of course this is silly, because one rarely needs to fly to anywhere. So, of course, we share airplanes (i.e. we have airline companies). I believe the same is true for cars (in fact, I belong to a car-sharing program). So, the question (whose answer I think you've taken for granted) is: how necessary are cars for daily living? You say that "most people need to own cars" and I disagree. Certainly, I wouldn't ask anyone to live in a rural area without a car, but 90 out of 115 million households are in a metropolitan area (see factfinder.census.gov).
for those that actually live in a city, I think very few need to use a car for daily living. In new york, for example, less than half of households even own a car, even in our car-centric culture (that number would be even smaller if car-sharing programs were more widespread, or if the city didn't put so much of its time into moving cars around quickly).
in the suburbs, yes, a car is required. But this is sad and unnecessary way for things to be, as I had the displeasure of finding out as a child. Yes, it was nice to have a yard, but the nearest playground was a mile away down a never-used sidewalk on a busy street. Anywhere one might want to go required a car. In trying to get the best of both the city and the country, suburbanites wind up with nothing but lots of houses and cars. But I suppose I'm without a point, because, as you would probably argue, people choose to live there because they WANT to live there...
You may argue that the cost of the roads isn't included but most road maintenance is paid for by gas tax therefore it is already rolled into the expense of the gas
I've heard 80% of road construction is paid for by gas taxes (but I have no reference). So driving a car is subsidized by a huge amount. But, even if 100% of road construction was paid for by gas taxes, what about the marsh area that now has a highway running through it? Doesn't that have value? It's not just car drivers who pay for the loss of that-- everyone pays. What about the neighborhood that was destroyed to put in a highway? Yes, property owners were paid the purchase price of their properties, but everyone pays for the loss of a neighborhood and loss of continuity in a city. Increased threat of lung cancer? I'm still waiting for that check. Increased risk of being killed while walking? Often, cars owners don't even get a ticket after killing someone (see rightofway.org). Dependence on foreign countries? Land lost to free parking spaces?
so, IF the cost of all these things, and whatever I've missed, was estimated, and if the gas tax was increased accordingly, THEN I would be perfectly happy to see people driving around in their cars.
true, it would be impossible to estimate the monetary value of these things very well at all, but anything is a better approximation than the subsidy we now have.
a couple more points:
$0.15/mile is nuts. The government's reimbursement rate is $.35/mile, and a you can get up to $1.25/mile if you go nuts the other way (lightrailnow.org). As I said, it's not valid to assume everyone needs cars.
yes, it's been claimed that bicycles can cause impotence, but not sterility.
computer-controlled cars would be a giant step forward, as would non-polluting cars. But we're not there yet! And highways themselves are destructive to cities and natural areas.
cars may be as efficient as bicycles in terms of number per lane per second, I don't know.
yes, good debate. I don't think this thread has gone too far. It's a shame slashdot stories are a ghosttown ten seconds after the've been posted.
Yea. Just not when it's winter. Biking is dangerous when you have good traction. It's suicide on ice and snow. ...
Bicicles are dangerous, much more dangerous than cars. In a car you are surrounded by a safety cage and strapped in. You can hit things at very high rates of speed and still survive. Bicicles don't give you protection from anything. That's not their job
by this logic, walking is extremely dangerous because, per mile, more people are killed walking than almost every other mode of transportation. But of course this is silly-- the reason people get killed walking is because of cars. It's not WALKING that's dangerous, it's cars. The same is true for cycling-- NINETY PERCENT of cycling fatalities are a result of cars. (www.bts.gov/publications/tsar/2000/chapter3/index .html)
And cycling would be significantly safer if more money was spent educating people about the dangers of cycling, in the same way people are educated about the dangers of driving (e.g., few people are aware of how dangerous cycling while intoxicated is).
Yes. Absolutely. A walmart in a town means greater prosperity for thousands of people
ok, you get your underwear for a dollar less. I prefer a store that I can walk to, and whose owner actually lives in the town he or she is affecting. On this point we simply have different opinions.
I would also have to shop much more often because what I bring home would never fit on a bike. That istelf is inefficient use of time.
again, if people paid the true price of driving, people would drive less, stores would be smaller and closer. Economically less efficient for the stores- yes, but outweighed by other benefits. I suppose this is the heart of our disagreement: I see the damage cars do as something worth taking large steps to eliminate, you do not. You see cars as not inevitable, I do not. So be it.
There would be many more transportation related deaths if people rode bikes instead of driving cars to work ... Bicicles are also bad for boys. Biking too much can destroy your ability to have kids. Usually surgery can fix it but do you really want someone cutting around down there? ... As a society we can't function without cars
and with these unfounded and/or twisted and exaggerated claims, I stop posting.
publicpurpose.com -- a site run by wendell cox consultancy. For more information on wendell cox, see, for example, this article from fair.org about "pre-digested" research from conservative, well-funded think tanks. (about a quarter of the article winds up being about mr. cox):
www.fair.org/extra/9809/local-think-tanks.html
or do a google search on him to find several articles about his fact-twisting.
this is simply not true. People bicycle all the time in colder climates. Yes, it is more dangerous to ride if there is ice or snow, but driving is also more dangerous. And public transportation becomes relatively safer when the driving conditions are bad.
Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous.
I just posted a link claiming that the true speed of an automobile is five miles/hour and all you have to say is "bicycles are very slow?" Yes, they are dangerous-- but so is the alternative, as the families of 40,000 people witness every year.
We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work
this is somewhat true, I suppose, but the long distances we need to travel are in large part due to the very fact that we rely on automobiles. Why doesn't your office open more locations? Because people can just drive their cars to work. Fewer office (or supermarket or movie theater) locations in turn means more and more traffic, and more people demanding more roads. More roads (and thus faster transporation) leads to fewer and fewer locations of things, and so on. I agree that there is some gain in efficiency to have, say, a walmart surrounded by a parking lot rather than several smaller stores, but is that something we really want? Yes, there is a gain in efficiency in terms of money, but there are losses that are not as tangible (as can be seen by the fact that many people oppose the building of new walgreens-type stores).
Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town?
The very reason kids even need to be carried around town by their parents is that they can't drive cars and there aren't any alternatives. If streets were bike-friendly, or if there were adequate public transportation, your kids could get where they need to go on their own. The fact that children in car-centric areas are so dependent on their parents for transportation is an often-used argument against cars.
Bringing your groceries home
my bike (and feet) are working just fine for this.
Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach
yes, there are times when cars a very handy, and I think no one is advocating completely getting rid of them. In fact, these are good examples of when you actually might need a car, if, say, your relatives live in some out-of-the-way place. Notice, however, that people normally only do these things several times per year.
People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.
people don't pay the true price of driving their cars. If people had to pay for the damage their cars cause to quality of life in cities and to the environment, and had to pay for securing oil in foreign countries, etc., then people would save lots (more) money.
most economically efficient? Check out, for example:
c ia l_effects.html
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/so
In short, "The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour."
come on man, if you build it, they will come. Name one major area that fixed traffic problems by putting in more roads. This is the course Los Angeles took-- build more and more roads. Now they have some of the worst traffic in the world AND some of the worst pollution in the world. It just doesn't work. Everyone can't have a backyard and be near to a major cultural center and expect to just be able to drive around in cars traffic-free. It hasn't happened and it won't.
as a car-hater, I hope people do forget cars and drive SUVs instead. All the sooner until we run out of gas. I dearly hope to live until the day when the last drop is pulled from the earth. (I have probably fifty years left, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed).
here's my plan: a gradually increasing tax on gasoline (with a corresponding decrease in income/sales tax).
this tax would pay for:
1) the fact that if I live in a city I will die one or two years earlier in large part due to car pollution.
2) the deaths of 5000 pedestrians per year.
3) the time I waste everytime I get to a street and have to wait thirty seconds just to get across (stoplights only exist because there are cars).
4) a significant fraction of the military (no one denies that the US interest in the middle east is due, at least partly, to securing oil).
5) the time spent by police officers dealing with traffic violations.
6) the land used up by roads and public parking spaces beyond what is required by a pedestrian/cyclist (taxed at the same rate as the local property tax).
7) etc.
when the tax is fully in place, people will be paying the TRUE PRICE of driving their vehicles, and there will be many fewer people driving as a result. Urban areas will gradually become less car-centric.