With the new GOP majority in Congress has come a new round of arguing
about how this nation should pay for its physical infrastructure.  The
U.S. has a rather long history of subsidizing transportation costs at
most levels of government, particularly the federal level.

In 1996 the Federal Highway Trust Fund will receive about 22.9 billion
dollars, and will spend most of it (19.4 billion) directly on
federal-aid highways.  (The remainder goes to a bunch of assorted
small things.)

Roads have a sort of "user fee" in the form of fuel taxes; however,
total federal revenue from transportation fuels in 1996 should be
about 6.6 billion (that includes things like avaition and marine fuel,
though motor fuel is the vast majority of it.)

So, in rough terms, the "user fee" of gasoline taxes only pay for
about 1/3 the federal outlays for the continued construction and
maintenance of federal highways.  People driving on the highway pay
1/3 the cost of that driving; the other 2/3s is picked up out of the
general fund, and so all taxpayers cover it.  It's amazing how many
people don't know that their driving is subsidized by the government.

This, not surprisingly, creates all sorts of market distortions.
Because highways are so heavily subsidized, the nation's rail
infrstructure has decayed, for example.  Urban transportation embraced
the highway and the automobile, which has led to sprawl, congestion,
pollution, and the creation of neighborhoods that effectively require
automobile ownership.

Is it fair to increase the gasoline tax to a level such that users of
federally-funded roads pay the full costs of creating and maintaining
them, or should the current system of subsidies be left alone?

56 responses total.

I think it would be fair to increase it to that level. This tripling of
the gas tax would have a lot of different effects, not all of which I can
divine.

(1) People would grouse a lot (they always do, anyway, though)
(2) Food prices and a lot of other prices would rise. Some perhaps
    dramatically. This inflationary tendency would need to be compensated for.
(3) The poor would be most affected by (2). This is a regressive tax.
    We would need to increase food stamps or something.
(4) Conservation would be greatly enhanced. Smaller cars would become
    popular again (after 5 years or so) gas mileage would shoot up.

Not only would it be fair to do this, it would help make transportation
more efficient. This is something the country really needs.

How about cutting spending?

Prices of perishable foods probably would go up somewhat.  Prices of other
items, which do not need to move about in quite such a hurry, should be 
less significantly impacted as other modes of transportation exist for them.

Ideally, of course, such a change would need to be phased in over a long
period of time.  One would hope that other taxation would be cut enough
to compensate for the increased burden of gas taxes (so people pay the
same average tax burden, but apportioned differently.)  That may not be
very likely, though.

Some other expenditures also could start to go away.  We probably would
not need to spend billions subsidizing Amtrak and urban mass transit if
we did not expect them to compete against highways we spend tens of
billions subsidizing.  Maintaining air quality and fuel efficiency would
be better done by market forces than by EPA mileage standards and
programs to punish employers who don't get their workers to car-pool.

Some of the poor would be SOL for a while by virtue of the fact that so
many recent communities are designed in a fashion such that there is
really no alternative to owning a car and driving it everywhere.  This
was shortsighted planning, but it's hard to know how to best address
it.

There would, of course, be some major losers.  Oil companies would lose,
but who cares?  The recreational vehicle industry would probably be
impacted rather severely, for instance, as would other automotive products
that guzzle large quantities of gas.

Reducing expenditures is an interesting idea; presumably you don't mean
allowing freeways to crumble into a condition of unsafety or letting
bridges fall down, but rather pushing responsibility for road
maintenance back to the states.  This has some interesting
possibilities, and arguably would be "more fair."  Dunno that it would
happen, though.

I am not so sure about freight prices going up too much. They might at first
but I am sure that as the rail infrastructure improves the cost of shipping
by train will drop. Personally I would love to see road traffic become less
of a first choice and other forms of transportation become more used. I dont
think the feds will change the status quo much. The people who voted them in
are Americans and lets face it, Americans *love* their cars. I know I do.

Cars have been around for millenia.


Yes, you heard right. Transportation, for the most part, has always been
of the individual-owned ground vehicle travelling on roads. The only real
difference between our vehicles and those previous is that ours burn
flammible liquids and exhaust CO-2, water, and trace byproducts instead
of eating oats and hay and dropping poop.

Civilization has *never* been set up for mass transit, except in a few
very densely populated areas. And these were scarce in this country until
recently. Mostly, if you needed to go into town for whatever, you either
rode a horse or drove a carriage. I think it has already been established
in a previous Agora that horses, passenger mile for passenger mile, are
more polluting, more costly, and harder on roads than automobiles. Yet in
the first half of this country's history, they served us in good stead.

So why has commuting by automobile become a problem? Why is it so much more
expensive to maintain the roads? Why is safety an issue now and not in 1800?
(Horses safer than cars? Look what happened to Chris Reeves!)

As for letting roads crumble, maybe it would be better to build them right
in the first place so they don't need to be rebuilt every 10 years. Still,
I'd like to get the government out of transportation as much as possible.

Civilization has *always* been set up for mass transportation. They were
called "coaches" for a very long time, and the name transferred to
railroad coaches, which are the same thing except with a stronger horse to
pull more of them. Few people ever travelled long distances by individual
means of transportation: it is just not useable by the very young or very
old, and is much more expensive for everyone between. Ships carried
hundred across seas - no one rowed across; Conastoga wagons transported
family groups. Once sufficient power became available, the inherent
advantages of mass tranportation became possible. The once factor that has
prevented its dominance is the greater convenience of individual
transportation units, despite their very high cost and environmental
disadvantges. Economics are going to catch up with individual unit
transportation eventually, as fuel resources diminish. We'll eventually
look back upon the "age of the auto-mobile" perhaps fondly, but with a
recognition that it was just ridiculous to have squandered our resources
like that. 

It takes some coordination to operated national transportation systems, so
govnernment is an essential ingredient. I would much rather government did
it, than leaving it to the Robber Barons. 

Also, most goods were shipped in a mass transit way, if they were shipped at 
all.  Most goods were shipped by boats, and overland shipping was too 
expensive for most things.  

Welcome to the PBS item, coming soon, our special on the history of Pez.

I wanna produce it!!!  =)

thinking of transportation, mass and individual, during that "low speed
chase" about a year ago, only the Bronco was a car pool.

Re #5:  Yes, horses did create a form of individual transportation for
a long time.  Commonly horses were used to pull coaches.  It's more
complex than all that.

Really long-distance travel is, and always has been, communal.  Ships
carried many people long distances for many millenia, until that role
was taken over in the past 50 years or so by airplanes.

Intermediate-range travel is a lot harder to talk about, because it's
historically a pretty new thing.  It wasn't that long ago,
historically speaking, that most people might be live and die without
ever traveling more than 20-30 miles from their place of birth.  Sure,
a few people here and there visited China or rode about on ships or
rode horses and conquered most of Asia, but that wasn't everyman's
lifestyle.

Horses may have carried a few people into the west, but trains were
what "civilized" the west.  Collective forms of transportation are not
something we're going to see go away.

Some ideas, though, are really and truly new.  The idea of traveling
100 miles to and from work every day is a new one in history, as is
the idea of going 10 miles to buy a loaf of bread and thinking nothing
of it.

I don't expect to see Americans give up their cars.  Instead, we've
started to restructure the society around the absolute need to have a
car (e.g. the difficulty of stripping a repeat DUI offender of a
license, the resistance of elderly to giving up a license because
there is no reasonable alternative available.)

This has some significant costs, some to the people driving
(requirement to chauffer anybody who can't drive,) some to the people
who are too young/old/handicapped/poor/whatever to drive, some to the
collective environment (air pollution) or whatever.

I'm not some eco-freak who thinks people should give up their cars and
just spend the whole day living at home in geodesic domes.  I just
think transporation is getting to be an area where people should be
paying for their own use unless more compelling reasons for subsidy
exist.  How it gets phased out is another matter.  Some people suggest
the enhancement of formal tolls rather than the implicit toll of a gas
tax; most large cities have them on major routes, sometimes more to
limit use than to gather money.

Strange days indeed...

I, myself, am guilty of depending on my car.  In some European countries,
people walk or take a bike if the distance is one mile or less.  My 
father didn't even travel outside of the Alpena, MI area until he left for
the Army.  Just my 2 cents worth...  =)

marc usually takes the bus. i usually drive.
although not if we are going to the same place. ;-)

Where I live, the *only* way to get anyplace is by car.  Small towns
simply do *not* have mass transit.  Also, raising the gas tax would unduly
hurt people who drive big cars out of necessity, for example people with
big families.  No matter what you do, a van is never going to get much
better than 20 mpg.

So, should people with big families pay for the roads they drive on, or
should somebody else?  If somebody else, who and why?  It's not as though
somebody put a gun to their head and forced them to have a large family
and live in a small town.

It use to be that licence plate fees were dependent mostly on the mass of the
vehicle. This made sense; heavier vehicles put more stress on the pavement,
thus do more damage that is costlier to repair. Sometime in the early
1980s, they changed the rate structure so that the fees were proportional
to the value of a vehicle. The newest cars, massing only a ton, cost more to
license than old heavy clunkers massing two tons or more. I swore off any
possibility of owning anything brand new.

Of course there were stage coaches and sailing ships - as said, for *long*
distance transportation. There were "coaches" for intermediate and short
distances, too. But these functionally were more like taxi cabs than like
busses or subway trains. Most people did not live in town. This is an
agrarian society we're talking about, not an urbanized one. This means very
low population densities, which could not support anything like a bus
service. I would venture perhaps that the average farm or ranch was something
like 5 to 10 miles from town, wherein you could get that loaf of bread.
Walking this distance would take way too long, especially in a world of 18
hour work days.

The problem I see with gasoline taxes is that, fuel consumption having
little to do with actual destruction of roads, they always end up never being
enough for the highway repair budget. When more efficient cars started being
sold, the politicians started complaining that the gasoline conservation
which was finally being effected had reduced revenues from gasoline taxes.
It always seemed to me that this should have been accompanied by less need
for these revenues since the cars were lighter, travel was reduced, etc.

I would like to see transportation uncontrolled by anybody, robber baron or
not. This would require the invention of a personal vehicle that doesn't
need a government-built road to travel upon.

A vehicle that doesn't require roads has been a goal ever since people
were talking about "an airplane in every garage".  Invent something that's
practical and you'll make a mint.

The air is still a public resource, and any type of personal flying device
would still need to be controlled by the government for things like safety,
air pollution, and the traffic managed by the governemnt to make things work
and prevent collisions.  Maybe you should try transporter beams
instead?

Effective transportation infrastructures are simply not possible
without the power of eminent domain.  This is a darn good thing, because
otherwise the inherintly monopolistic nature of roads would cause it to
be a Very Bad Thing for them to be in private hands.

I find it hard to believe anybody normally rode 10 miles into town
just to get a loaf of bread.  If it's that far and inconvenient to get
into town, you would do it rarely and pick up as much stuff as you
could, possibly including some bread.  But really, I don't see the
point of this at all.  Large-scale land-based transporation didn't
really become practical until the train, and talking about what things
were like before trains seems irrelevant.

I also find it odd that everybody focuses on transporting people to
the exclusion of transporting freight.  In the "good old days" the
only personal-level transportation devices commonly used to haul
freight were camel caravans along the silk road; the expense made it
practical only for small, luxury items.

It seems there are, to a first degree of approximation, four ways of
paying for roads and using cost to manage the ways roads are built and
used:

- Subsidies from general governmental funds; i.e. taxpayers pay for
  roads based on whatever taxes are determined by (income,
  consumption) with no regard for whether they use roads at all.  This
  has been the traditional primary source of funding at the federal
  level, and often plays a significant role at the state level.

  I think this was once a good idea, and probably has a role to play
  in the future development, but has come to have far too overwhelming
  a role in the funding pie.  It is inefficient, distorts market
  forces, and makes roads into a commons susceptible to a tragedy.

- Road usage fees; tolls.  This is the most direct, and probably most
  sensible, way to pay for road construction and maintenance.
  However, the act of collecting tolls is somewhat expensive and can
  produce its own traffic headaches.

  One key advantage of tolls is they allow congestion pricing; they
  can be varied based on factors such as time of day, to encourage
  people to use roads during hours when they are normally
  underutilized.  Unfortunately, tolls are a pain for motorists to pay
  and a pain for to collect.  There is some promise that high-tech
  toll-tags can lessen these concerns, although they introduce new
  concerns about privacy.  This seems unlikely to be very effective in
  rural areas, where the cost of roads is much higher on a per-car
  basis.

- Excise taxes.  Lots of states have started getting into this racket,
  of levying a fee for having a car, ususally based on the value of
  the car.

  I think these are an all-around bad idea.  Newer, more valuable cars
  are no harder on infrastructure than older ones, and usually pollute
  less.  Somebody who owns a car just to drive to the supermarket once
  a week pays the same tax as somebody who drives hundreds of miles
  every day.  There is little encouragement to utilize what vehicles
  are owned more efficiently.

- Taxation of fuel.  This means people who drive more, or drive
  heavier vehicles, or older cars that are less efficient, tend to pay
  more.

  Fuel taxation is not the best way to pay for roads, but it's
  probably the best way in situations where tolls are impractical.  It
  may not precisely reflect road damage, but it comes a whole lot
  closer than excise taxes or sales taxes.

At the core, though, is still be base question: who pays for roads?  The
obvious default answer is "the people who use them."  If this answer is
wrong, who should pay for them instead?  Why?

 From the point of one that drives an awful lot I don't like the idea of more g
gas tax. I think we have enough.  As far as tolls on federal road to pay for
improvements Sure, I'd rather pay a little to drive on a better road.

You are all missing the point, a gas tax for roads is administered by
breaucrats and general funds are pork. It would be totally democratic to raise
the gas tax and enforce proper maintnance of the roads and bridges as a self
supporting operation. It would also fail nicely when gas ran out. Way to nice
for a politician who wants to raid some other part of the economy for pork.

And all the careful planning anyone can do is usually undermined by
unexamined assumptions.  The interstate highway system was going to
permanently end traffic congestion problems; no one noticed that this assumed
that driving would not increase once congestion was reduced and speeds
increased.  Similarly, a gas tax sufficient to cover infrastructure is
likely to have *lots* more consequences than those discussed earlier; you've
only hit the simple ones, I think, & even those may not come out as you'd
think.  (Nonetheless, I think such a move may be the best alternative we've
got; the current system is *terrible*.)

The major reason why roads usually wear out is not automobiles, but
truck traffic; if you were to (and you could) outlaw trucks, you'd see
roads become far cheaper.  Trucks represent commercial ventures; all
this talk about "usage fees" is really just a transparent attempt to
make passanger automobile traffic subsidize commercial trucking.  A
secondary factor is harsh weather, and more importantly, the salt used
to melt snow; besides the increased number of freeze/thaw cycles, the
salt is in itself directly harmful to concrete as well as steel.  The
use of salt & other corrosive chemicals is another commercial hand-out;
by making automobiles rust out faster, it subsidizes detroit; and by
making roads wear out sooner, it subsidizes commercial road building
companies.  If you wanted to dramatically cut road expenses, the first
things you'd do would be to use as little salt as possible on roads in
the winter, and you'd also reduce permissible truck axle loadings.  The
reason these things don't happen is because our society is designed to
maximize profits, not to minimize expenses.

When semi-trucks are outlawed, only outlaws will have semi-trucks!

Getting rid of trucks would reduce all traffic - as soon as the 
gasoline in the underground storage tanks at your corner service
station went dry - about 2 or 3 days? But there are bicycles.
And learning to hunt, skin, gut, and preserve game, while you
are tending that big garden out back, would be useful also. Please
give me a little lead time before the truck-ban goes into effect.

I don't think anybody wants to see trucks banned.  However, Marcus is 
correct that cheap roads have caused them to be utilized for larger-scale
longer-route freight that once would have gone some other way (probably
rail.)  It will always be necessary to have something like a truck carry
goods to their final destinations, but having a truck go on long-distance
runs doesn't make much sense unless there's some reason other options are
not practical (e.g. the goods in question are perishable.)

In some areas, sand is used instead of salt.  This is especially true in
more northern areas, where it is often too cold for salt to be effective.

That may be true, but even though it gets very cold in A2, they
still use a lot of salt, and it corrodes the highways (and your car).

A gas tax would offset some of the truck-rail inequities the government
established when it pumped so much money into the highway system.
Perhaps more goods would go by rail then.

Has anyone studied the reasons we have allowed the rail system to deteriorate
to the present state? I have not, and would like some insights.
.,

IMHO, the rail system in this country has gone to hell because the 'Big Three'
didn't have a piece of it. Might be a conspiracy theory, but it would make
a lot of sense. Rail is fast and effiecient, but slightly inconvienient, while
automobiles main attraction is the convienience.

I could be mistaken, but I think Arnold was talking about freight shipment
as well as (instead of?) transportation of human beings.  Jets killed
trains for moving people around in most typical cases (except places
where cities are close together, but not too close.)  Rail lines are
being abandoned all over the country, in some cases even when they are
profitable, and only really large amounts of freight like coal and
ore and grain usually travel that way.

There's been plenty of attention as to why the rail system has been
deteriorating here.  There are really several parts to that question;
because you have to answer whether you mean street cars, interurbans,
actual mainline railroads, or various assorted other specialized
railroads.  For instance, at one point, logging operations were done
with railroads, and a variety of specialized locomotive types specially
adapted to primitive track conditions and very low speeds were designed.
Those are all gone now, of course.  Basically, modern off-road equipment
is just plain a lot better for the purpose.

Short & medium haul passenger service, such as street cars and
interurbans, are a much different case.  There are a variety of reasons
there, including social and economic circumstances, as to what happened
there.  In the heyday of these services, before the 20's, these services
were wildly successful; and in many cases, spawned very interesting
patterns of growth as lines were laid out radially from cities, and
people settled out along the lines as near as they could get (ie, within
walking distance).  The automobile was certainly one of the key factors
in its demise.  The automobile syphoned many riders away, which made
these operations much less profitable.  Instead of living in radial
spokes, people started to fill in the gaps, making rail service
generally less convenient.  Automobile drivers complained about the ruts
in the street, and residents complained about the unsightly clutter of
wires overhead.  Getting rid of the old and often run-down street rail
equipment was sometimes seen as a matter of urban pride.  This is the
era when GM said "what was good for GM, was good for america;" and
apparently the automobile companies did in fact buy and dismantle a
number of interurban systems in order to promote the sales of buses &
automobiles.

A few such systems do of course survive today.  They're generally
located in cities that are large enough that it's pretty obvious that
getting rid of of the urban or interurban light rail systems would
result in a major transportation crisis.  In fact, several new ones have
been built in recent years - the washington dc metro is one such
example.

Mainline passenger service, of course, is an entirely different market.
There, it is pretty definitely the case that the jet airplane, in the
1950's, is what really made the difference; it was a lot faster, but not
much more expensive.  Railroads still do have an advantage for medium
haul runs, largely because they generally go right into the middle of
the city, whereas airports are generally located out on the periphery.
Time-wise; it's nearly as fast to take the railroad as the airplane from
Ann Arbor to Chicago.  In europe, where the distances are closer, and
airports less convenient, railroad passenger service is still quite
popular.

For rail freight service, on the other hand, the factors are quite
different.  In many cases, the extra expense of air freight just doesn't
make sense.  Perhaps the most significant factor here is the rise of
long haul trucking, especially in the years after world war 2 as the
interstates were built.  To ship things by rail, you generally either
need a spur right up to your factories & warehouses, or you need to do
at least a bit of trucking at both ends.  If you have to do transfers,
then there is a significant amount of extra time, labor, and expense, in
going between rail & trucks.  Particularly in the north east, where the
distances are least; trucks have done quite well.  In the south west,
where the distances are the most; freight railroads are still quite
profitable.

Another factor in all of this is the "monopoly" factor.  Railroads were
among the earliest very large corporate organizations; they were leaders
in the fields of information technology, organizational structure,
finance, and other familiar elements of corporate america today.  There
were abuses, of course, and there were also many instances where
corporations acted to benefit their own interests, and even when that
was quite proper, it still did not always put these companies in a very
favorable light to the public.  As a result, many people didn't trust
railroads, some people positively hated railroads, and railroads were
generally not very popular, especially when acted to maximize their
profits.  Consequently, railroads became quite heavily regulated, as
government attempted to correct the abuses, and as economic
circumstances shifted, it became much harder for railroads to show much
profit.  That means, today, railroads have a low profit margin, and
don't tend to attract a lot of investment cash.  That makes it hard for
railroads to invest in capital improvements, especially in times of
economic hardship.

I tend to use a car a lot in the US, because the rail and other public
transportation systems just aren't up to the point of easy usability in
Michigan, but I found not having to worry about parking or traffic during my
week in Hungary very pleasant.  Budapest has probably the best public
transportation system I've ever used, mixing busses, trams, and a subway
system, with most routes running about every five minutes.  To make it even
nicer, Budapest's transit system is a circulatory system, rather than a radial
one.  Budapest's transit maps look almost like the street maps because there
are so many different routes.

The one time I thought it might be nice to have a car there was when we were
going to the town about 80 miles outside Budapest where my cousin was getting
married.  Even then it turned out that a car was not needed, and probably
wouldn't have made things any easier.  Going there we took the Subway right
from our hotel to the bus station, where we got on a bus which took us to a
bus stop about two blocks away from the hotel where were staying in the small
town.  Going back to Budapest, we walked to the train station, got on the
train, changed trains once, and then we were in Budapest.  We took a tram
right from the train station to our hotel.

Back in #27, though, I was talking about truck-rail inequities, so I
was not even thinking about passenger traffic, but rather freight.
I think the government is hurting the rail industry by subsidising so heavily
the infrastructure used by its main caompetition, trucking.

the railroads didn't "know" to accumulate capital for maintenance
and repairs. They blew it.

Re #33:  The government subsidizes the rail system, too.  What do you
think Amtrak is?

The government subsidizes *passenger* rail.  I thought it rather obvious
he was talking about freight.

You got that right.
The government makes railroads maintain their own infrastructure.
This is one reason that they can't compete with trucks better for long-haul
freight. No amount of subsidy for passengers will woo them back to trains.
The airlines have that business, not the trucks.

 What about ConRail? Conrail is partially funded by the gov and they carry
some freight. There's not many railroads left these days.. I can name about
5 that still exist. Is Union Pacific still in business?.

Conrail is not subsidized by the government.  It was originally set up as a
government corporation, but eventually sold into a private corporation after
putting scads of money into the railroad.  Many are mad that the gov sold it
off after putting so much money into it.  I believe most of the freight rr's
in Europe are owned by the governments.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss