Re: Monorail. Monorail! Monoraaaail!

David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So far as the cost of highways is concerned, motorists do pay about
their actual price--more if you accept the argument that most of the
wear and tear is due to trucks.

Once again I ask, if that were so, why have sales taxes been
repeatedly raised to fund roads?

So far as congestion is concerned, motorists pay the cost on average
but not on the margin--a situation that could be changed by congestion
pricing where practical.

To be fair, bus riders who suffer from congestion that they are not
contributing to ought to be compensated for their wasted time.

Buses are delayed by congestion, not just during the passenger's
trip, but also before it, causing the bus to arrive late, after the
passenger has been wasting even more time standing out in the weather
waiting for the bus. Also, motorists often don't let buses pull back
into traffic, causing further delays at every stop.

Similarly, automobiles on average pay the accident cost.

How do you figure that? What's the true cost of spending the rest of
your life in chronic pain in a wheelchair? Do you think the amounts
insurance companies pay reasonably compensate for that? In other
words, how much would someone have to offer you up front before you'd
consent to being permanently paralyzed below the waist?

You're also not accounting for hit-and-run accidents. If I don't
see and memorize the license plate of the car that cripples me, how
exactly am I to get so much as a nickel for my loss?

You're also not accounting for lost opportunity cost: The millions of
people who don't walk or don't bike because they reasonably fear being
crippled or killed by motorists.

You're also not accounting for the astronomical costs of wars to
preserve the supply of foreign oil. Or the further wars, and security
upgrades, necessary to protect us against people made wealthy by
selling us oil, who want to use that money to kill as many of us
as possible.

And what happens when that foreign oil eventually runs out?

You're also not accounting for the law enforcements costs. The
majority of police work is patrolling for rogue motorists, and the
majority of crimes are "moving violations." And these are not trivial
crimes, even though they're often treated as such. They kill and
cripple more people, and do more property damage, than all other
violent crime put together. Cars kill more Americans than guns do,
even though there are more guns that cars in the US.

At every place I've ever worked at which (unlike my present workplace)
most people drove to work, commuting was the number one complaint.
People (with occasional exceptions) don't *like* to drive. They
don't like the risk. They don't like the cost. They don't like the
congestion. They don't like the pollution. They don't like the
unreliability. They do it only because they've systematically been
robbed, by the government, of all reasonable alternatives.

It's as if the only way to get electricity was to have a generator
of one's own, in one's own house, which required lots of space and
lots of daily attention, produced lots of noise and pollution, and
occasionaly exploded killing everyone nearby. Had government's
energy policies over the past century been as irrational as its
transportation policies, that could be the situation today.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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