I just got back from Amsterdam. How strange that whenever I emerged from Centraal Station, I never felt “basically stranded.” I felt awestruck by the beautiful canal houses and comforted by the cobbles beneath my feet. If my short-stay apartment hadn’t been a 10-minute walk from the station, no doubt I’d have hopped onto a streetcar — though judging by the loads of bikes parked by the station, many others no doubt made a different choice.

Only in a fatally car-damaged country would anyone describe the end of a rail journey as being stranded. That says more about car dependency than it does about any supposed limits of rail. I do like your idea of ending subsidies to roads, though.

Externalities fall into two categories: external costs and external benefits. Since the externalities he is talking about are clearly not external benefits, that means they are external costs.

“Externalities” simply means the cost or benefit is not born by the people deciding on the transaction, that they are third party costs or benefits.

“Externalities implies NOT COSTS” is either ignorance or a deliberate lie.

Anytime anyone is driven by anger the results will not be objective or scientific. As the saying goes “Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.” It’s sad to see such high levels of energy directed at being destructive rather than constructive. The highest achievers build things, it’s easier to be a critic and a grenade thrower like Randall, but it really doesn’t make the world a better place, just a bitter place.

It’s not like people there and think, “Oh, 80% subsidized roads…sweet!” and then go out and buy a car without thinking about the cost. No, they think, “How much is it gonna cost me to drive to work as opposed to taking the train?” And then they think, “Okay, it’ll cost X for the car, Y for the gas, and Z for the insurance.” Included within the price of gas is the gasoline tax, which funds the vast majority of NEW road improvements (though not old ones). How this could NOT be counted as a user fee is beyond me…it’s a cost, borne ENTIRELY by the user…isn’t that the definition of a use fee??

Like I said, I’m on your side, and I think that there are huge interventions in favor of the automobile. However, it’s intellectually dishonest to claim that there are huge accounting subsidies. There are not. The system is largely self-sufficient. Which does not make it any sort of approximation of the free market (for all the reasons I listed above – chief among them being mandatory low density zoning/parking regulations and the accumulated lost opportunity cost of all the land on which the roads – already paid for and controlled by the state – forgo), but rather than lie about facts to get people to be on our side, we should accept the fact that the argument is a difficult and nuanced one and it might take a while to convince people. There’s a reason the “market urbanism” opinion isn’t widespread, even though it’s right.

To engage in argument with one is to argue with a fool who crowns himself king because he pays taxes no greater or less than you or I and is blinded by a desire only to dismantle those things which do not please him.

“you’re not factoring in a HUGE user fee that people pay 100% of: the car itself and the gasoline it takes to drive it.”

Isn’t that an externality itself? If the roads weren’t there, people wouldn’t be buying the cars and the gasoline. So how can you include that as part of the “user fee” for the cost of roads?

One question: How was the figure of $220 billion as the annual cost of U.S. auto fatalities arrived at? May we assume that it includes the calculations that personal-injury attorneys and insurance companies use when they sue the guilty party attorney in a fatal accident, i.e., the remaining lifetime potential earnings of the fatally injured victim?

A friend of mine and I were discussing the issue of the “operating costs” of a highway system. He pointed out that since a highway is “self-operated,” i.e., the individual motorist stands in for the bus driver, subway or streetcar motorman, or train engineer, the real operating costs of the highways reappear under an assumed name as accident-insurance premiums. I find that claim intriguing. Perhaps some of the metaphysicians who follow this blog can evaluate its legitimacy.

“Do you really think there would be less congestion and energy waste without the Interstate Highway System promoted by moderate liberal (really) Eisenhower?”

Yes, that’s exactly what we think. If he had built a national high-speed rail network instead of a highway network, we would have less congestion (or the same congestion and less land use, if you like), faster speeds (100mph was doable as early as the ’30s) and less energy waste (trains at full capacity are more efficient than cars at full capacity, and much more efficient than cars with their prevailing occupancy of just over one passenger per vehicle).

Non-Libertarians especially should believe government statistics?

Um, no? Especially not from the Bush/Mineta administration. If you’re representative, Walt, then Libertarians have weird ideas about what the rest of the world believes.

http://www.vtpi.org/econ_stim.pdf

My money is on mass transit and bicycles being the cheapest, especially over the long run. We can build virtually an entire urban network of bikeways and high-quality shared use paths for what a mile or two of an urban arterial road would cost. The savings alone from ceasing the massacre of thousands for the “freedom” of the automobile would pay for this many times over.

O’Toole is an absolute fraud, and it’s time the media recognizes this.

In O’Toole’s analysis he absolutely has to include the “externalities” in his calculation of public cost of driving to have a credible argument. Like most libertarian thought that fails to regard economics as a social science, his argument has metaphysical blindness that is frankly inhuman.

best. line. ever.

this pretty much describes the US libertarian life philosophy — if you can’t force them to pay for it, they won’t, and so therefore, it is not a ‘cost’.

those dudes — and they are all dudes — are awesome.

‘Thus, under any accounting comparison, all transportation is clearly subsidized at an amount that is absolutely unsustainable by private (“unfettered by government” interventions) means. For the intellectually corrupt “anti”planner to consider highway subsidies “tiny” is a completely absurd disregard for the rational examination of reality.’

http://marketurbanism.com/2009/06/04/otoole-under-more-fire/