I think he's a little too motivated to criticize US transportation policy and so he completely overlooks a crucial factor -- regardless of the state of public transportation, a comprehensive evacuation plan needs to involve state-sponsored emergency transport, and the government of New Orleans failed dramatically on that count. This is much more important, in terms of a disaster scenario, than the everyday public transit framework. But you can't really draw a line from "disaster evacuation plans" to "US gas policy"...it feels to me like he's shoehorning "public transit" into the starting place where "disaster evacuation plans" ought to be so that it looks as if he is able to draw a line.
From the context of this guy I think his main interest is in the the way blame is being apportioned, not in transit per se. He's pointing out an inconsistency in the way we assign responsibility for managing negative outcomes of events. Certainly that is the main reason I thought it was an interesting post - despite my interest in public transit I am far more interested in the abstract question of, "When shit happens to you, is it your fault?" Because I have noticed inconsistency in this in other spheres before and I never thought to apply it to this particular situation, but I do think he's right. (Though in fairness he should have noted that just as the government is trying to control gas prices to remove this burden from drivers, it is also promising monetary relief to the people directly affected - the real difference in treatment is not what has been provided but what has been said.) I agree with you that my first thought, if a hurricane were to head toward Madison, would not be "OMG! If we'd only given more money to Madison Metro, none of this would have happened!"
great post. I too was reminded of how this government cares so deeply for cars and so little for public transportation. A friend of mine sent a forward to me after Katrina not about donating money/supplies to red cross, but about signing an e-mail petition to lower gas prices. wtf? No, I'm GLAD they are high, so that people can start using gas responsibly. Stop buying SUVs, carpool to work, plan your f-ing errands so that you do them all at once instead of in a zillion trips, and for god sakes WALK whenever you can! Unfortunately many cities are laid out in such a way that people will never get anywhere other than by car, but at least those of us who can walk should.
I realize the point of this post is about when you're responsible vs not, but I'm pointing out that I noticed this same thing happening regarding the reaction to the gas prices.
That's great if have a decent job and can afford those gas rates, but if you are poor, or even lower middle class, a gas tax like that would fuck you over real quickly.
Sure, if you live in a city you might be able to take the bus or the train, but if you live in, say, rural North Dakota where mass transit simply is not an option and you are making $18K a year, a gas tax like that would be damn near fatal.
Yeah, what we really need is gas taxes like that combined with excellent public transportation everywhere. But as anyone who's played SimCity knows, retro-fitting excellent public transit into someplace that didn't have it from the beginning is obnoxiously painful. Alas.
Not that that practically addresses your North Dakota example, barring semi-magical forms of transit. How does rural Europe deal with this I wonder..? Granted, no place in Europe is as remote to sizable cities as the middle of N.Dakota is, and in places like Germany, the trains really do run to every podunk town. They still don't run to farms, of course... I hear bio-diesel is getting popular in some parts there, and is presumably taxed less. I wonder if a similar scheme could work in the rural U.S.
The public transportation options are also extremely different here than they are in Europe. People like to make the quality of European public transportation vs. US public transportation a big moral thing, but in many ways it's not. Europe is smaller. Major European cities, by and large, developed before the car was invented, and necessarily ended up with a pedestrian-friendly scale which was subsequently friendly, both geographically and culturally, to population density and public transportation retrofitting. The same is simply not true in the US, where a handful of cities developed before the car gained prominence (and, I note, many of those cities do have adequate public transportation), but many didn't really take off until people's transportation options were much different.
And the rural comparison similarly doesn't work because of problems of scale. It's much easier to run trains to every podunk town in Germany than to every podunk town in, say, the Midwest, because the Midwest is huge and, for very very much of it, there is simply nothing there. It's just a long way between towns, and every inch of that way is costing you money with no compensating revenue.
I do think the commitment to public transportation is smaller in the US...but the fact is, to get a similar level of transportation quality here, you would need a much higher level of commitment (in terms of both money and cultural attitudes) than you see in Europe, and that just doesn't seem feasible, particularly when most people have and are happy with, and generally have structured their lives to rely upon, another options.
Aside from the cultural problem that ukelele mentioned, one problem with biodiesel is that the EROEI for biodiesel is probably only around 1.1-1.5, so it's not too efficient. It's good for the rare enthusiast though- if I can afford it, I'll get my next car converted(I think it costs ~5-8k extra, but I'm not sure) to process used oil from the local Mickey D's. But as far a large scale, it's not that great.
The cultural part is, I think, the toughest to get past. The case studies of the Nacirema still ring true- we tend to buy large gas guzzling SUVs whether we need them or not, then proceed to drive them anywhere further than 100 yards away even if we could just walk.
There's something about "having a car" = "freedom" in this country, which I doubt afflicts Europe to the same degree.
There would be a ramping up, of course, rather than an instantaneous jump up to final levels.
I expect that having "gas stamp" eligibility similar to food stamp eligibility would significantly mitigate the effects- and, if coupled with lifting the cap on FICA taxes and including capital gains in income, could make it so that there's no greater burden on families earning under 35k, even allowing for higher transport prices on things like food.
It's definitely a very blunt instrument, but market forces simply aren't going to get any migration away from gasoline fast enough to avoid an even bigger blow when we finally pass Hubbert's Peak.
It's sort of interesting to me that you say that when your last job, and the job you're presently applying for, were both far enough away from your house that a car were your only option. If you didn't have the wherewithal to afford higher fuel prices, you would have had to constrict your job search such that you couldn't have landed any of those things, thus further decreasing your economic status.
I suppose gas taxes might, in the very long run, motivate different sorts of infrastructure, but in the meantime they would limit the options of the most vulnerable quite substantially.
So a lot of the Midwest is rural and spacey, but I bet it won't be so much the case in 100 years. I guess my question is, what could be done now to encourage the sort of growth that allows for public transit? I think you're right that increased fuel prices are an awfully blunt instrument and green-liberals should be a little more mindful of who's actually going to be hurt when that happens, but it has the advantage of being (a) a vaguely free-market solution and (b) inevitable. (That is, an increase in the price of fuel is inevitable because supply is limited - the taxes people mention are of course not inevitable.) So, uh... any better ideas?
In general I've become pretty distrustful of the free market to tend toward solutions that satisfy me ;). In particular, the costs of supporting a minority position are often very high and I think it artificially depresses the appearance of support. The clearest example of this (in my head) is where you have two mediocre mainstream candidates for office and a bunch of little guys that are more talented, but also weirder and less agreeable. In a winner-take-all system like ours, in order for it to be worthwhile to "vote your conscience" in a tight election, you have to be confident that enough other people will support your guy to make some sort of difference (be it a slight shift in public opinion or whatever). Otherwise the chance of getting stuck with the greater of the two mediocrities is going to be a compelling reason not to. Ditto with boycotts, etc - huge companies like Microsoft are difficult to boycott; you can do it, but it has costs and those costs are only compensated for if enough other people do it to make a dent. In the public transit world, the only way you're going to get more money is increased ridership, but if the service sucks and it takes you 2.5 hours to get to work, that doesn't exactly get balanced by the positive effect of one additional rider. It's only worth the hell if a bunch of other people have got your back.
It's a tough world in which to be an idealist, is I guess what I'm saying. And I hope you know me well enough to know I'm not some foamy jack-booted totalitarian who wants to eat your cat ;) and that I am merely saying that the free market, its solutions to optimization problems do not overwhelmingly impress me, for lo, the local maxima, they are disappointingly sticky.
See above comments regarding how I'd structure gas taxes wrt the vulnerable.
As for my own situation, I would need to be in a far more dire situation(as in, dependents) before it'd cause me serious problems. Even if gas prices suddenly zoomed up to European gas tax levels, that's what, an additional $3/gallon? Given that I consume under 2 gallons per commute, that's at most $6 per day. While $30/week and ~$150/month is not trivial, it's something that I could easily account for by moving into a smaller place, eating out once less per week and bagging rather than buying the school lunch, or something like that. I could also get to both places via public transportation. It'd just have the annoyance of tacking on an additional 50% to commuting time.
I've been of the opinion that gas taxes should be higher since about freshman year in HS. That was when I noticed that there were an awful lot of people driving in rather than taking the bus in...which led to even more congestion on the roads. Granted, it would cut the commute each way from about 75 minutes to 60 minutes...but not having any high schoolers driving in would probably ease traffic at least 10-20%.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 11:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 12:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 01:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 01:14 am (UTC)I realize the point of this post is about when you're responsible vs not, but I'm pointing out that I noticed this same thing happening regarding the reaction to the gas prices.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 03:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 04:12 pm (UTC)Sure, if you live in a city you might be able to take the bus or the train, but if you live in, say, rural North Dakota where mass transit simply is not an option and you are making $18K a year, a gas tax like that would be damn near fatal.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 04:26 pm (UTC)Not that that practically addresses your North Dakota example, barring semi-magical forms of transit. How does rural Europe deal with this I wonder..? Granted, no place in Europe is as remote to sizable cities as the middle of N.Dakota is, and in places like Germany, the trains really do run to every podunk town. They still don't run to farms, of course... I hear bio-diesel is getting popular in some parts there, and is presumably taxed less. I wonder if a similar scheme could work in the rural U.S.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 04:58 pm (UTC)And the rural comparison similarly doesn't work because of problems of scale. It's much easier to run trains to every podunk town in Germany than to every podunk town in, say, the Midwest, because the Midwest is huge and, for very very much of it, there is simply nothing there. It's just a long way between towns, and every inch of that way is costing you money with no compensating revenue.
I do think the commitment to public transportation is smaller in the US...but the fact is, to get a similar level of transportation quality here, you would need a much higher level of commitment (in terms of both money and cultural attitudes) than you see in Europe, and that just doesn't seem feasible, particularly when most people have and are happy with, and generally have structured their lives to rely upon, another options.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-12 02:16 am (UTC)The cultural part is, I think, the toughest to get past. The case studies of the Nacirema still ring true- we tend to buy large gas guzzling SUVs whether we need them or not, then proceed to drive them anywhere further than 100 yards away even if we could just walk.
There's something about "having a car" = "freedom" in this country, which I doubt afflicts Europe to the same degree.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-12 02:03 am (UTC)I expect that having "gas stamp" eligibility similar to food stamp eligibility would significantly mitigate the effects- and, if coupled with lifting the cap on FICA taxes and including capital gains in income, could make it so that there's no greater burden on families earning under 35k, even allowing for higher transport prices on things like food.
It's definitely a very blunt instrument, but market forces simply aren't going to get any migration away from gasoline fast enough to avoid an even bigger blow when we finally pass Hubbert's Peak.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 05:01 pm (UTC)I suppose gas taxes might, in the very long run, motivate different sorts of infrastructure, but in the meantime they would limit the options of the most vulnerable quite substantially.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 09:36 pm (UTC)In general I've become pretty distrustful of the free market to tend toward solutions that satisfy me ;). In particular, the costs of supporting a minority position are often very high and I think it artificially depresses the appearance of support. The clearest example of this (in my head) is where you have two mediocre mainstream candidates for office and a bunch of little guys that are more talented, but also weirder and less agreeable. In a winner-take-all system like ours, in order for it to be worthwhile to "vote your conscience" in a tight election, you have to be confident that enough other people will support your guy to make some sort of difference (be it a slight shift in public opinion or whatever). Otherwise the chance of getting stuck with the greater of the two mediocrities is going to be a compelling reason not to. Ditto with boycotts, etc - huge companies like Microsoft are difficult to boycott; you can do it, but it has costs and those costs are only compensated for if enough other people do it to make a dent. In the public transit world, the only way you're going to get more money is increased ridership, but if the service sucks and it takes you 2.5 hours to get to work, that doesn't exactly get balanced by the positive effect of one additional rider. It's only worth the hell if a bunch of other people have got your back.
It's a tough world in which to be an idealist, is I guess what I'm saying. And I hope you know me well enough to know I'm not some foamy jack-booted totalitarian who wants to eat your cat ;) and that I am merely saying that the free market, its solutions to optimization problems do not overwhelmingly impress me, for lo, the local maxima, they are disappointingly sticky.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-12 02:49 am (UTC)As for my own situation, I would need to be in a far more dire situation(as in, dependents) before it'd cause me serious problems. Even if gas prices suddenly zoomed up to European gas tax levels, that's what, an additional $3/gallon? Given that I consume under 2 gallons per commute, that's at most $6 per day. While $30/week and ~$150/month is not trivial, it's something that I could easily account for by moving into a smaller place, eating out once less per week and bagging rather than buying the school lunch, or something like that. I could also get to both places via public transportation. It'd just have the annoyance of tacking on an additional 50% to commuting time.
I've been of the opinion that gas taxes should be higher since about freshman year in HS. That was when I noticed that there were an awful lot of people driving in rather than taking the bus in...which led to even more congestion on the roads. Granted, it would cut the commute each way from about 75 minutes to 60 minutes...but not having any high schoolers driving in would probably ease traffic at least 10-20%.