The world will have to acknowledge that every single car, including electric cars, is a negative externality, and must be priced/taxed accordingly. EV credits are the most shockingly regressive and borderline evil environmental policy.
Posted by housingANDTransitPLS
23 Comments
That’s fine to tax them like that. Just don’t take car infrastructure. I think government raising taxes on cars will be fine. But taking car infrastructure and lanes instead of
Just building bike lanes and buss lanes instead is what’s wrong with car policy. It’s fundamentally unfair to pay more taxes for less car infrastructure
“The world will have to do thing that it has never done and no electoral majority wants to do.”
Neoliberals would win every election if they dropped Georgist LVT and change their anti car policy to a car neutral policy. Cars are very popular and good.
I will never ever forgive Trudeau for the EV tax credits. Taking money out of urban cores, where people take transit, pay high rents, and don’t own cars, to subsidize EV demand for suburbanites so they can import Teslas from abroad. There is no policy more damaging than this.
I will edit this comment later and make it my submission statement and put in more effort
Bikes are not feasible for the vast majority of employed US adults and never will be unless we move literally everybody into cities with mass transit.
Car dependence is bad, but that takes many decades to change. Meanwhile, electrification can be done within a decade.
EVs were the compromise!
(But actually though they are TBH)
Have you seen the price of cars lately? They are priced accordingly
This is prime perfect being the enemy of good right here trying to go after EVs.
EVs are good, actually.
We should have a network of electric buses around the country. It would reduce car dependence and be cheaper to operate than a regular bus.
Real “we simply need to have a general strike” energy.
I don’t see “walking” on the chart
we need to start congestion taxes on self-driving cars right now before they completely take over our streets, which they will. nobody is going to be driving themselves in dense urbanized areas just a decade from now. normalize congestion tax while they are considered a luxury for horrible people who choose comfort, convenience, safety and the environment over labor exploitation.
This is just stupid hardline ideological dogma, that appeals to no one except the most chronically online purity testers. You will never win anyone over with these impractical policies. This is just very alienating to most normal people
Yeah but I want my SFH McMansion with a double car garage.
Until we start building layers of LAND above existing houses, 2D expansion and adding more lanes is the most obvious way.
Maybe we can do intra/inter City high speed rail with big parking lots for suburby rail stations.
Bicycles are not replacing cars, no matter how much internet urbanists wish they will. To the average person, they’re a funny curiosity for people who like exercising. Not a serious replacement for their car.
People genuinely adore the freedom, convenience, practicality and comfort that their cars provide. That’s why you don’t need to give them a wall of text about why they must buy a car, like you’d have to with cycling. They just understand all those things intuitively.
The electrification of cars and buses isn’t some distraction holding the world back from a Dutch-style cycling utopia, it’s people themselves. They want private motorised transport, and that is non-negotiable to them. Hence why electrifying that is still a huge improvement to the world.
Im willing to accept that care are generally inefficient if very comfortable and should probably cost more, But forcing bikes on people is about as reasonable as degrowthers.
Transportation should be getting better and cheaper not worse, figure out how to construct literally anything at a reasonable cost then use that knowledge to build trains.
I bet walking would look even better, and it’s significantly safer than biking. What if we made everyone walk everywhere?
This is NEVER going to fly in the USA.
This is study run in one city that looks incredibly different than any city in America. It is also heavily dependent on assumptions around their national healthcare system design and costs. In other words, rerun it in Dallas and let’s see what makes sense there.
The punchline of this is basically that if people exercise more they have fewer major healthcare problems.
If you live are a typical American and live 30 miles from work, and you don’t want costly healthcare problems, my suggestion would be to stick to driving and use half the time you save not biking going to the gym where you can do much more targeted and safer workouts.
What’s that we rail on about progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Ahh yes, Cars famously produce negative net benefit. They didn’t at all make us more productive or grow the global economy.