Drivers do not pay for roads

A report published earlier this year confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation that’s widely disbelieved: Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Group and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Who Pays for Roads?” exposes the myth that drivers are covering what they’re using.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/ 

Academic study shows how US law favors autos and driving

A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Decades of investment in this shift have created a car-centric landscape with Dickensian consequences.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3345366 

Externalities are costs incurred by for-profit firms that are not accounted for

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/

How much would you charge your employer for 8 days and 21 hours of your time? This is what we are giving free to the oil-auto-and-sprawl for-profit industries.

Roads do not pay for themselves

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 

Fossil fuel subsidy measured in the Trillions of US dollars

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.

Kansas City, MO, $10 million a year for just downtown parking!

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. One of the biggest subsidies to oil, autos, and sprawl.

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