Re: Oy, the toll schemers are back

Larry G wrote:

we took a trip through an older neighborhood of single family homes in
the 1200 sq foot size range.. with costs that are much more
"affordable" than the standard 2400 sq ft home - to be precise.. about
HALF of your typical home prices.

True. But in some places even half of the median sale price is unaffordable on the median salary, and public service jobs often fall far short of the median.

I would say that there are many folks that can 'afford" an older 1200
sq ft home but this is not the usual discussion when it comes to
"affordability".

What people want to "afford" is the high salary they can get in an
urban area and a 2400 sq foot home.. in a "nice" subdivision... as
opposed to the reality of their life/career situation.

We're not talking about folks who have "no choice" but to live in a
tent.

No, folks who are forced to live in a tent don't drive, otherwise they would be living in their car. (Apparently there is a community of otherwise homeless people living in vehicles in a corner of Seattle, which came to the attention of the news media when one of their number died under mysterious circumstances.)

We're talking about folks who want "more" than they truly can "afford"
and so we make them the "poster child" of why it is "unfair" to charge
tolls.

No, we're talking about folks who have been priced out of the housing market in cities (almost always cities as opposed to rural towns) which have a screaming, crying need for their services.

As if....they absolutely have NO OPTION other than driving every
single day, 50 miles.. at the height of rush hour.. often SOLO in an
SUV so that they can "afford" a house - that they really cannot
afford...(check the current subprime housing meltdown).

Actually, I would expect that many of these folks are actually not the ones driving at the height of rush hour, as by then they will already be needed at their jobs. But as congestion increases, "rush hour" expands to overlap the God-forsaken hours of the morning when these folks *do* have to be on the road.

Quite often these folks have strict schedules that are often not accommodated by current forms of transit, so they get stuck doing the 50 mile commute unless they get help with carpooling or there is enough of a critical mass that an extra transit run can be populated.

This is not at all the "affordability" crisis that is depicted.. as
the rationale for "free highways".

Actually, it is. The folks you describe could use a little help but by and large don't NEED it in the way those in the public service sector and the working poor do.

What we are REALLY talking about is "free roads" so that people can
have "more" house.. than they can truly afford in the first place. All
along.. these folks have been essentially using "free roads" to
subsidize the cost of the kind of house that they really wanted.....

Folks here out West will strenuously object to tolls on roads they consider already bought and paid for. Tolls are much better accepted back East simply because it's been done there for so much longer, but people are starting to see through the scam behind most toll agencies even though they know they are too politically entrenched for John Q. Public to do anything about it.

And the expectation for ages upon ages has been that it is the job of government to take care of the road infrastructure and figure out the best way to pay for it, not to farm it out to the highest bidder and make everybody pay twice for the same bit of road. Changing people's expectations that drastically is just not going to happen without a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I'm not unsympathetic. Everyone has their wishes and hopes.. we all
do.. but no one owes us more than what we can each individually afford
- and no one really should expect others to provide them with it
either.

But then again, we could probably build thousands of units of affordable housing or millions of lane-miles of road or track-miles of rail for what we've spent and are continuing to spend on the war in Iraq -- the hidden purpose of which is to *prevent* Iraqi oil from coming onto the market and lowering prices, so George II and his buddies can make a killing (literally and figuratively) in the oil markets. It's simply a matter of priorities.

The combined pressure of obscene energy prices, tolls, and the other costs of transportation has made the price of everything else -- especially food -- go up astronomically. Once we have someone sane in office who isn't beholden to the oil industry, we might see the folly of this approach and start making stuff closer to where it is used rather than shipping it hither and yon. Then we can talk about shortening commutes for even more people once those industries get rolling.

In the meantime, the reality is that you'll have a class of folks living lives of quiet desperation and you'll have a class of folks who are merely desperate to find a scapegoat for their own problems. But mixing up these classes of folks helps neither.

--
Mike McManus
Renton, WA
.

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