The way we regulate in a lot of Europe, may hit some issues as more electrics go on the road. Petrol taxes are a pretty important revenue source. Exempting electrics from that (by default) and all the other taxes help make them viable will eventually result in a meaningful revenue loss. It's also problematic to selectively benefit people who buy new cars and can afford to pay more upfront but less in running costs.
Even libertarians hate toll roads in practice but it would reduce traffic in big cities. The suburban commuters flood the interstates but don't pay for infrastructure.
One of the major issues I've had with toll roads is with the penalties for late payment (and with late payment penalties to government in general). I used toll roads on my commute often times i would take new routes depending on traffic and forget which parts required a toll.
It is mafia-like to more than double the amount owed for being late, if only for one day. I think this is a huge problem. Research and studies have shown that if you lower the penalties, you will actually collect more revenue. It is unconscionable that governments rail against late fees by banks, yet can more than quadraple in a period of six months or less.
There was a toll road I took in/near Boston crossing a single bridge where there was no way to realise as I approached, no way to pay in advance and no way to pay after realising. In a rental car, I was forced to wait on notification via the rental company and pay $50ish in charges. For a small, single bridge.
The modern toll roads in France are excellent. So quick and easy.
I bet most drivers would hate toll roads much less if they didn't clog traffic. There are a toll plazas around the U.S. that don't require drivers to slow down while driving through. Once these are the norm, I would expect tolls to be less unpopular.
My favourite tollbooth in the US was one where I handed cash to the attendant who gave me change and then paid the toll with coins by reaching outside their booth and depositing them in the machine.
How would you collect a mileage-based tax? Collecting it on the spot on toll roads seems like the most straightforward way to implement it.
Here in Japan the majority of the highway system has been privatized and they all have tolls, and it seems to work just fine. Driving solo between two cities 4 hours away is often more expensive in tolls alone than taking the bullet train.
It would become part of the same process of renewing your registration and getting smog checks. It would probably be like smog checks where there are many depots to get read, run by small businesses and gas stations. I would actually just roll it into the entire smog check system we have currently.
Far more efficient than toll roads, where you have to build toll infrastructure, hire employees, do enforcement and create traffic jams at every toll booth. RFID toll trackers are not enough in preventing the traffic jams. On top of that, you don't have to build anything to implement it today to create a usage tax for roads, since smog check equipment already checks your mileage. It also applies to all roads instead of a select few roads. To determine the distribution of where the tax money should go, you use the passive traffic tracker systems we have almost everywhere.
The libertarian sensibility is to make people who use the resource pay for it, so tolls are the correct way to pay for roads. If we could get a national system that charged based on the odometer, this would also be an option.
well insurance companies have something similar now where they track your driving using GPS.
In principle I like that because you pay for the risk you are, but in practice it sucks because I have no way to force the insurance company to just use the data to charge me insurance and not to track my peccadilloes.
I think GP was saying that, however much they might like private pay-per-use roads in theory, libertarians are still annoyed with road tolls in practice.
Not that I agree with that assessment, but that seems to be the intent.
You could give a Tesla buyer $5K tax credit or you could give decently specified bicycles with locks and lights to 10-20 people for the same money.
We don't tax non-smokers for daring to breathe nicotine free air, yet we shifted away from governments paying for hospitals with tobacco revenue. Tobacco is crazily expensive nowadays and it takes so long to buy it (with the new all brown packaging looking the same) that it seems to be priced out of accessible addictability. I think ICE motor cars will go the same way, plus there is that external cost of everyone benefiting from clean air.
Sure. And my dry cleaning, and my weekly shopping all just fit on my bike and.. Oh. Wait.
And my friends who live 20+ miles away will be delighted to have me over for dinner after having worked up a sweat. Not to mention being lucky enough to then pedal 2+ hours after that dinner.
My partner who's got a back injury? Well, tough for them, they should just stay home.
Bikes are a great thing. I have one, and I use it regularly - but they're not an either-or proposition in many environments. The way our cities are structured, we need cars. (On the West Coast. The East Coast has the benefit of a more traditional layout, often making them more walkable)
American attitudes to cycling are about 20 years behind the times. Cycling is a completely practical mode of transport for everyday journeys, even in low-density suburbs and moderately rural areas.
Yes, you can fit all your shopping on a bicycle. You can even take your kids to school on one.
Yes, your partner with a back injury can ride a bicycle. So can someone with coordination or balance problems, missing limbs or any number of other impairments.
1) These are all specialty bikes, and well outside the price range suggested in the GP ($250-$500)
2) No, my partner can't ride a bicycle. As advanced as your powers of remote diagnosing may be, they're wrong. It's not an option. We tried. (I'm from Germany. I'm somewhat acquainted w/ the idea of specialty bikes, and trust me, I looked at them)
3) Theoretically, I might fit my shopping needs on a bicycle. Alas, transportation here is so completely shot that taking that bike onto the road (what bikelanes?!?) is essentially a suicide attempt. Colleagues who have the ability to bike to work usually end up with about 1-2 severe accidents (broken bones) per year.
And yes, e-bikes might address the distance problem. I still can't do it in much less than 2 hours because... I live in LA. Nobody goes 20 miles in less than two hours ;)
4) Even if there was the political will to make it happen, no, not all American cities could look like this without ~20-30 years of rezoning and construction. US city planning is... special.
European solutions cannot simply be transferred to the US, as much as I'd wish for that. (Remember, I'm German - I've lived in cities friendly to people, instead of cars. I miss it).
And that's why the suggestion of getting rid of the e-car subsidy in favor of bikes won't work in the US. Nobody will use the bikes because the infrastructure doesn't exist.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't also work on improving the infrastructure, and on changing city planning, and creating workable public transit, and all those things - but they're long-term projects.
You live in nearly the most bicycling-hostile place on the planet. This is important context for your comment.
Everyone's different, but my experience was that leaving LA did wonders for my mindset, health, and general well-being. Though, rather paradoxically, 90% of my bike commute (Santa Monica to El Segundo via Venice and Dockweiler beach) was great. That other 10% was brutal, and my ribs still hurt.
Also - "Nobody will use the bikes because the infrastructure doesn't exist." - perhaps that money could be used to build it?
Using the money for infra would certainly be a better use than actually buying bikes. Ideally, we work on e-cars as well, because infrastructure projects move on the order of decades (SF does not hold the monopoly on NIMBYism :)
But while LA is certainly exceptionally bad, many cities in the US suffer from sprawl to an extent that bikes are, right now, impractical. (Which we need to change, no doubt.)
Phoenix is arguably not very well suited to human habitation without artificial life support... (air conditioning, which may prove necessary to sustain humans as the wet bulb temp increases)
I forget HN is USA car culture with no public transit until hyperloops magically happen! This is a cultural difference, you Americans can't even walk unless it is a hike up Half Dome or something, walking to the shops is just not allowed - jaywalking they call it?!?
In Europe we have trains for going direct to city or town centre, with plenty of stops in between. I spend quality time with my phone on the train journey there, I arrive alive rather than tired out by breathing the exhaust from the car in front, as happens if you 'sit in traffic' warming the planet. Furthermore, I can drink sociably when out on bike/train - I don't have to ride the road to the station on the way back and I don't have to be the boring driver who cannot go with the party. I also don't disturb people revving an engine late at night or risk the lives of others at the wheel of a two tonne machine. I don't take up parking space or impose on my hosts that they provision parking arrangements for me. As for the sweat thing, that is not a problem on a bike, however, trapped in a tin box, sat on a seat that never gets washed, with 360 degree greenhouse, that can be bad for the sweat thing, even with air-con. I am also not tied to an invisible cord to the car, only able to make a certain amount of paces from it, free rather than chained to all this moral baggage.
Dry cleaning? Basic 30 wash for me. Drip dry. I go to weddings, interviews and posh business things, I am even on first name terms with the guy in the dry cleaners, but my needs for dry cleaning are not in your American league of consumerist normality. The idea that I could not do my dry cleaning because I didn't have a car - I so would love to have that problem rather than laugh at those that do.
Shopping. Do you Americans eat your own weight in food every 168 hours? Yes growing children do need mountains of food but you can get all that stuff delivered these days and you can pick up really fresh nice food on a daily basis from better shops than that big box store you Americans have to drive to.
...ah backs.
Back injuries happen in many ways, IMHO those that don't cycle are headed for back injury from spending too long sitting down, sitting in cars and putting on the pounds.
I know you propose 'cars for all' as the only real world way, but what about blind people? Tough for them. Or people with no arms maybe they should just stay at home. That excuse for 'must have cars' is sub-par for HN logical reasoning.
> I forget HN is USA car culture with no public transit until hyperloops magically happen!
> Do you Americans eat your own weight in food every 168 hours?
Please just don't. Building upon and reinforcing stereotypes doesn't add to the discussion. Regardless of what you're responding to, do better than this. Some people don't have access to good public transportation: that's just a fact. Sharing how you approach life is great. Doing so in a way that bashes a group of people—regardless of what group it is—isn't helpful or make your statements amenable to reasoned consideration. HN is a community you choose to participate in. Are you accurately described by the statements you attribute to the HN community?
Once you're done with your tirade, let me gently direct you back to what I actually said: "Bikes are a great thing[...] but they're not an either-or proposition in many environments."
While you could maybe be a bit less polemic about it if you'd actually like to engage in a debate instead of yet another Internet flamewar, you've understood the core of the problem: Introducing bikes in the US is a cultural issue. It's a long slog. Dropping a subsidy for e-cars (which is crucial to drop pollution levels and break petroleum dependency) for bikes nobody will use right now is... not helping anybody.
You might also want to improve your understanding of another culture before you insult them wholesale. So, a few things:
* "jaywalking" means illegally crossing the street. Which exists in Europe as well as the US.
* "As for the sweat thing, that is not a problem on a bike". You really might want to learn about humidity.
* "you can pick up really fresh nice food on a daily basis from better shops". No, no you really can't. The shopping situation here is dismal.
Giving a bike to a person who may or may not be interested in a bike is a good way for that bike to collect dust in storage(or put up for sale). Heck, even people who go out and spend their own money on bikes frequently end up abandoning them after their motivation wanes
It's more about gov't subsidy than personal preference. I hate driving, but my car is definitely not collecting as much dust as I'd like it to. It would be smart of us to have good bike infrastructure - compared to subsidizing personal autos it's cheaper, more capacity, improves local economy, more environmentally sustainable, and lower health costs.
100% agreed! I regretted my comment after I made it because the bike subsidy was just an example, and I responded to the example and not to the actual point of the post.
Some countries are considering taxing your own production. In many countries the tax on fossile fuel is an important income for the state. The money needs to come from somewhere. (It seems very shortsighted to penalise expansion of solar power right now though.)
If I produce solar energy to be stored in a few Tesla power walls for my own usage I don't see how they'll be able to tax me. I own and control all the hardware and monitoring and could modify accordingly.
Cells from EVs will likely be downcycled for use as stationary storage (think Tesla's Powerwall and similar). Often only a couple of cells go bad in a pack, so they are easy to repurpose. In Norway some of the larger charging sites have huge stationary batteries as buffers (evens out spikes and act as phase balancing).
You can recycle 100% of the lithium in a li-ion battery, but atm it's more costly to recycle than just mine the stuff - hopefully this will change in the near future.
We'll have to tax them eventually.