A new report shows that Dublin is the 17th most congested city in the world, with motorists spending an average of eight days and 21 hours sitting in peak traffic a year.https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2020/0129/1111720-traffic-congestion-report/
Highways do not—and, except for brief periods in our nation’s history—never have paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label “user fees.” Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent.https://frontiergroup.org/sites/default/files/reports/Do-Roads-Pay-for-Themselves_-wUS.pdf
theconversation.com
Instead of free market capitalism versus the climate, we have fossil fuel welfare versus the climate. And if we reinvested that fossil fuel welfare into social and ecological welfare, we could create a much more socially and ecologically prosperous future.
The other step is improving how we spend money to stimulate economic development. After the recession, national firms came to us and said we’ll invest in downtown, but in exchange we need real guarantees and asked us to subsidize parking-garage costs. [In the last 10 years] taxpayers spent about $100 million subsidizing parking garages for these companies.https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/ask-an-expert-kansas-city-is-exploring-free-transit-should-seattle/
Free parking seems to be part of the normal order of our streets, like traffic lights and crosswalks. Although metering often exists near retail and during busy times, experts estimate that approximately 97% of the city’s curbside parking spaces are given away at no cost.https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-trade-free-parking-for-free-mass-transit-20191113-qdlrk64czrhyjejaxxsw7hky7y-story.html
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), pothole damages to U.S. motorists total about $3 billion per year. On a per-pothole-incident basis, that works out to about $300 per driver.https://www.pothole.info/2018/04/the-cost-of-car-damages-from-potholes/
The proposal to preserve auto manufacturing in Oshawa calls for a federal investment of $1.4 billion to $1.9 billion to transform the existing facility into a plant that would produce electric vehicles for government agencies such as Canada Post.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oshawa-gm-plant-ev-transformation-1.5291582
