Reason TV on Cap Bikeshare

[jabberwocky]

Libertarians are insane. No surprise here.

[ShawnoftheDread]

They never call it socialism. They say it’s a waste of taxpayer money to help a demographic that doesn’t need it, and that it isn’t used by a demographic that was specifically cited as beneficiaries.

[thucydides]

Things like CaBi and bike trails occur because of socialism. Roads, OTOH, come about because of the free market. I mean, come on. FREEways. FREE enterprise.

[DaveK]

…and I used to think she was hot. We’ve come a long way from Alternative Nation.

[DaveK]

@ShawnoftheDread 23164 wrote:

They never call it socialism. They say it’s a waste of taxpayer money to help a demographic that doesn’t need it, and that it isn’t used by a demographic that was specifically cited as beneficiaries.

They are also wrong. The grant they cite specifically used to help underserved markets hasn’t even been issued yet. There is an equity issue there, but they don’t help their case.

[ShawnoftheDread]

@DaveK 23167 wrote:

They are also wrong. The grant they cite specifically used to help underserved markets hasn’t even been issued yet. There is an equity issue there, but they don’t help their case.

Which is a legit argument to make against the video. But “SOCIALISM” and “libertarians are insane” are less-than-legit arguments.

[jabberwocky]

Basically it comes down to “these forms of transit I don’t use should be self sustaining” while ignoring the fact that most peoples preferred form of transit (automobiles and roads) are subsidized out the wazoo and have been for decades.

Roads that can carry automobile traffic are expensive. Enormously expensive to build and quite expensive to maintain. Anything that reduces road use is likely worth the money purely from a cost-benefit perspective.

[baiskeli]

@jabberwocky 23181 wrote:

Basically it comes down to “these forms of transit I don’t use should be self sustaining” while ignoring the fact that most peoples preferred form of transit (automobiles and roads) are subsidized out the wazoo and have been for decades.

And they probably want those to not be subsidized either. A toll booth on every corner!

[jopamora]

EZPass fits perfectly on a headset.

[DaveK]

@baiskeli 23184 wrote:

And they probably want those to not be subsidized either. A toll booth on every corner!

You’d be surprised at the amount of cognitive dissonance on that point. Bike/ped facilities are the tools of Stalin, but they won’t say word one about roads, bridges, or airports. In my former hometown there were serious discussions about putting toll booths on a major commuter arterial street (not limited access) at the county line to make up for the damage out-of-county commuters were doing to the roads. That would be getting closer to a user fee. Needless to say this did not go over well.

[JimF22003]

Pretty good response on Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/21/bicylists_the_new_limousine_liberals/

[DismalScientist]

@DaveK 23206 wrote:

You’d be surprised at the amount of cognitive dissonance on that point. Bike/ped facilities are the tools of Stalin, but they won’t say word one about roads, bridges, or airports. In my former hometown there were serious discussions about putting toll booths on a major commuter arterial street (not limited access) at the county line to make up for the damage out-of-county commuters were doing to the roads. That would be getting closer to a user fee. Needless to say this did not go over well.

The gas tax conceptually is pretty close to a user fee.

One could argue that gas taxes are not set at the appropriate level to account for the costs of driving based on one gallon of gas. Another issue is that different road have different social costs per gallon of gasoline burned. Similarly the costs that individual cars impose differ from the car’s MPG. The gas tax is probably the easiest method to impose a cost on drivers for road. It does not allow government potential monitoring individual road usage than toll booths, separate assess based on mileage, and GPS-based systems.

One problem with the system as it exists now is that those damn cyclists don’t have to pay for trail and road use and, even worse, pedestrians don’t have to pay for their trail and sidewalk use.:rolleyes:

Note that the roads are too subsidized crowd forgets sometimes that both auto drivers and bicyclists benefit from these subsidies. Most of my riding is on streets after all, not trails.

Now gas taxes paying for transit: that’s a win-win for me. Here we have auto drivers, which I rarely am, paying to induce other likely drivers to get stuck in smelly silver tubes, thereby reducing traffic that I, as a cyclist, now have less to deal with.

[jabberwocky]

@DismalScientist 23216 wrote:

Note that the roads are too subsidized crowd forgets sometimes that both auto drivers and bicyclists benefit from these subsidies. Most of my riding is on streets after all, not trails.

Yeah, but the thing is, the reason roads cost as much as they do is solely because of automobile and truck traffic. Designing a road to handle cars and multi-ton trucks is considerably more expensive than roads would be to only handle bikes and pedestrians (especially bridges). And gas taxes don’t even come close to paying for roads anyway (gas taxes cover about half of road infrastructure costs, the rest comes from other taxes that everyone pays).

[lordofthemark]

@DismalScientist 23216 wrote:

The gas tax conceptually is pretty close to a user fee.

One could argue that gas taxes are not set at the appropriate level to account for the costs of driving based on one gallon of gas. Another issue is that different road have different social costs per gallon of gasoline burned. Similarly the costs that individual cars impose differ from the car’s MPG. The gas tax is probably the easiest method to impose a cost on drivers for road. It does not allow government potential monitoring individual road usage than toll booths, separate assess based on mileage, and GPS-based systems.

The other problem with the gas tax is that revenues decrease as vehicles get higher MPG’s – which may be a desirable result on other grounds, but does not solve the highway financing problem. If we do not raise the gas tax, we don’t have enough revenue – and if we do, we increase the incentive to more fuel efficient vehicles – again, not necessarily a bad thing, but only makes the highway finance problem worse.

And its possible, IIUC, to have some tamper proff odometer check system that would capture number of miles, without indicated where those miles were driven. Incremental costs for particular roads would of course require a more intrusive system.

Is this too far off topic?

[DismalScientist]

I haven’t claimed that the gas tax is set at the right level, just that it may be the best, if imperfect way, to impose a user fee.

My jargonized answer for lordofthemark is that I see no empirical evidence suggesting the long run elasticity of gas tax has a different sign that the short run elasticity. In English, I doubt that raising the gas tax would induce sufficiently higher mileage cars that the increase in tax would result in a net reduction of revenues. Remember that much of the potential revenue comes from trucks moving stuff around the country. I doubt that there is much room for greater efficiencies in these vehicles.

The collection of gas taxes is relatively anonymous from the perspective of the driver. I don’t want to tell the government how much I have driven every year.

[Author]

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