In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
I wonder what would be the energy cost of onboard co2 extraction for vehicles? Could there be a theoretical automobile that used a carbon-oxygen cycle fuel but which emitted nothing, where a "gas station" would push fuel into the vehicle and then pull out the stored material that was formerly emissions?
Source: I live in Texas.
Part of the problem of automobiles is that we put the industry on such extreme welfare that it makes no sense to do anything else. If we remove that welfare, the industry will be forced to shift.
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
"Degree of coverage of motorised road traffic infrastructure costs: 111%"
Gasoline is regulated both by federal, local, and state laws.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...
https://www.wearethepractitioners.com/index.php/topics/art-a...
Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
Thanks for the warning, but a couple decades of activism has tought me long ago to let go of the idea of winning total support from the most strident opposition. Sometimes people just need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better world for them and their neighbors. That's ok.
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
Switzerland is different though: you know the police aren’t going to put up with crap at all (and they will arrive fairly quickly if there is an incident), so free could really work. Although I was never tempted to drive while living in Switzerland (in the next city over from Geneva). I don’t think free works in the USA however.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
But it does highlight the fact that we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.), so why not public transport?
I mean, you cant honestly believe 20 cents per gallon covers the 25 trillion in Interstate costs, right?
Or the over 1 trillion dollars in damages in Texas alone due to oil drilling.
Look up what % of infrastructure costs that tax covers wherever it is you live.
Surprised? Now consider that the infrastructure is just a tiny % of the overall cost. What about the whole car and gas supply chains? What about the externalities of burning so much fossil fuel every day? What about the healthcare costs of having to treat natural consequences of sedentary lifestyles? What about the opportunity costs of the loss of life due to the above and simply due to traffic deaths and injuries?
> we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.)
My point is: this "we" includes all those drivers too. That is, whatever the $$ that gets paid into maintaining the infra, it comes from "we", which include the drivers. And since the non-drivers also need private companies/drivers to move things around, they are also part of the story. They do not subsidize anything.
They are the only public transportation available.
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
Here, I found some street parking for cars: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Quai+Turrettini/@46.205451...
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
