Should Law Subsidize Driving?

March 8, 2019 7:57 AM

Many of the automobile’s social costs originate in the individual preferences of consumers, but an overlooked amount is encouraged—indeed enforced—by law. Yes, the U.S. is car-dependent by choice. But it is also car-dependent by law. Long article by Greg Shill on hidden subsidies for driving across every area of law, summarized by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog USA).
posted by asperity (22 comments total)

Don't forget the trucking subsidy (also Streetsblog). West Texas highways are full of Yugo-sized potholes thanks to the petroleum industry over there.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:13 AM on March 8, 2019 [7 favorites]

This is amazing work. As someone car-free by choice, it's a constant struggle not to be perpetually pissed off at the entitlement drivers demonstrate every day. At least I know why.
posted by Automocar at 8:17 AM on March 8, 2019 [15 favorites]

Even in more walkable areas, a lot of traffic signals behave as if a pedestrian's time has no value at all: if you were really in a hurry, you'd be in your car.
posted by kurumi at 8:31 AM on March 8, 2019 [23 favorites]

It’s very important to remember that America’s car culture was a deliberate, planned, choice from the manufactoring concerns on top and the racist home building and blockbusting forces from below. None of this is from “natural market forces” or whatever fiction used to justify it.
posted by The Whelk at 8:35 AM on March 8, 2019 [40 favorites]

This is great work and seems designed to boil my blood on a friday morning. It's nice that the second article mentions Cambridge, MA in a somewhat positive light. I'll be dreaming of it as I continue my troublesome, car-less job search in Fresno, which has taught me the true meaning of things like this:

As a result walkable housing and retail are effectively outlawed in much of America.

Honestly, the streets, fences, and walls of this town seem to be designed to aggressively grief pedestrians.
posted by es_de_bah at 8:38 AM on March 8, 2019 [7 favorites]

People should be constantly reminded of this:

Street parking is storage of private property on public land. No one should feel entitled to a parking space.
posted by explosion at 8:54 AM on March 8, 2019 [22 favorites]

Previously (posted by me) on Metafilter: Adding up US subsidies for auto travel with and without the costs of war.
posted by salvia at 8:56 AM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

I think the best illustration of this is in some interesting work that was done using Vancouver as an example to look at the total social costs -- note that Canadian gas taxes are much higher than in the US. The conclusion was:

• If you spend $1.00 walking, society pays $0.01
• If you spend $1.00 cycling, society pays $0.08
• If you spend $1.00 on the bus, society pays $1.50
• If you spend $1.00 on driving, society pays $9.20.

And that bus number goes down as buses get more efficient -- they have a commuter calculator here; sufficiently heavily used buses like the B99, the busiest bus route in Canada and the US shows net negative costs to society.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 9:03 AM on March 8, 2019 [21 favorites]

The low injury coverage requirements are particularly obscene. If you hit and injure a pedestrian, the resulting ER visit will almost certainly run up a tab of upwards of $20K.
posted by ocschwar at 9:07 AM on March 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

In related news: Brooklyn Woman Arrested After Allegedly Slapping Senior Driver Who Crashed Her Car Into A Deli

The driver was not charged.
posted by Drab_Parts at 9:50 AM on March 8, 2019 [7 favorites]

That's an eye opener. I'd never considered I might be subsidizing people who do drive--except for the exorbitant costs of getting hit by one, which I learned about the hard way. I also had a roommate who was hit by someone with minimal insurance that didn't cover her long recovery and unemployment during it (she couldn't work for a year). I find that aspect of this especially upsetting. It's hard to believe that states let drivers loose without requiring them to be financially responsible for cyclists and pedestrians they might injure.
posted by pangolin party at 10:02 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

California's required coverage for maiming or killing someone is $15,000. Absurdly low as it is, but if you're low-income, it's $10,000. Which really drives home how there's no real expectation of drivers actually covering the damage they do.
posted by alexei at 10:42 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Metro Vancouver study finds oversupply of on-site parking at apartments

San Diego City Council approves change that will allow developers to construct apartment or condominium buildings with zero off-street parking spots if the housing is located within a half-mile of a major public transit stop.
posted by RobotHero at 11:09 AM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Honestly, when I read this, it feels like such a complicated tangle of things: if there's no way to get to work without a car, how can we penalize poor people who need to drive? (thinking specifically about insurance: I have definitely skimped on that pedestrian injury coverage when I was broke*) Is it equitable to increase gas prices the way we have tobacco prices, when you don't have a bus route that goes to your work, and the housing you can afford is in a crappy exurb?

If we direct policing towards stopping more people for speeding or failure-to-yield, how is that going to interact with racist policing generally?

What is the time scale for overhauling our built environment to reduce sprawl? Is there any goddamn way to deal with the NIMBYs? (In recent years in my small city, we've had major upheavals over parking meters downtown and very mild steps towards increasing residential density!)

Although, I guess I'm also a little heartened by some of the ones that appear more straightforward, assuming the political will existed. MAYBE just stop exempting trucks and SUVs from emissions requirements?!?!?! Some of the items about regulations (other countries ban bull bars?) are new to me and also seem pretty less fraught, amazingly enough.

I want** to see us deal with this problem! I just know it's difficult and complicated. sigh

* how is this handled in countries with a sane health care system?

** obligatory "I take the bus to work 90% of the time, make the effort to walk/bike to the grocery store, didn't drive until I was 26, ex got hit by a truck while cycling, etc" - I've edited this comment a bunch in the hopes of not coming across as "this is all fine! we can't do anything!" but simply that the complicatedness of it all is daunting.
posted by epersonae at 11:11 AM on March 8, 2019 [9 favorites]

if there's no way to get to work without a car, how can we penalize poor people who need to drive?
We start by questioning the assumption that everybody needs to drive. 15% of US adults don't have a driver's license. Even in middle age, 8-10% of adults don't have a driver's license. Considering just 25-64 year olds, that's 15 million adults. (These rates are much higher in the poor, of course.) I think it's incumbent on society to do something for these people.

I'm not sure that making poor people who don't drive (whether from choice, finance or necessity) spend $200 extra a month on a space to park a car they don't have is helping the problem.

Improving the quality of the non-auto transportation system means more people in more places don't need to drive. Allowing more buildings near transit means more people can live in places they don't need to drive. But more fundamentally, you solve mobility problems with mobility solutions and you solve poverty problems with poverty solutions.

If we direct policing towards stopping more people for speeding or failure-to-yield, how is that going to interact with racist policing generally?
We don't need to stop anyone for speeding; photo radar does the job admirably. The ideal thing would be to tie traffic tickets to income, as is done in Finland.

What is the time scale for overhauling our built environment to reduce sprawl? Is there any goddamn way to deal with the NIMBYs?
One thing that's heartened me is to see massive broad strokes, like RobotHero mentioned in San Diego, or Minneapolis' recent city wide upzoning. For spending some extra political capital, you can upzone 1000x as many parcels.

I want** to see us deal with this problem! I just know it's difficult and complicated.
While I agree it's important to bring up these sorts of intersectional issues and mitigate where possible, I think that solving the problems of the auto dominant city is difficult; requiring all possible solutions to also simultaneously solve income inequality and systemic racism is not going to make the job easier.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 12:03 PM on March 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I got to police departments buying bullbars and I nearly shouted in frustration.

Just as a starting point, I would love to see pedestrian crosswalks enforced. I know we have an overpolicing problem in the lives of people of color so I am not sure what the answer is. But so many times I have stood under those blinking yellow lights that are supposed to indicate a pedestrian in the crosswalk and watched cars blast through the intersection without even noticing. The number of times I would be dead if it weren't that I assume all cars will ignore laws and caution in an effort to kill me is at least in the double digits.

My brother in law was once hit by a car in slow motion and the driver didn't even notice. I bet that guy got his text sent, though.

SUVs are a fucking scam. No more exemptions. "Light duty trucks" can get with the program already.
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:11 PM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Off the top of my head, Dupont Circle in DC is one of the most pedestrian-hostile designs I've seen, at least people have been killed by vehicles there since I moved here, and everyone seems to have pretty much thrown their hands up because I mean the cars have to drive somewhere.

I'd be fully in favor of banning private vehicles inside the former Washington city lines.

Ugh. Let's not forget all the laws that allow/encourage fucking suburbs to exist, since their very existence is predicated on laws that value the automobile above all else.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:44 PM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

We are about to embark on a new multi-billion dollar generation of automobile subsidies with "self-driving cars" that can't really self drive. There is already talk of making over the car infrastructure to accommodate "self-driving cars" by changing traffic signals and signage, changing lane alignment and markings, restricting pedestrians and bicycles, etc. The cars will always be too stupid to deal with real life on the street so real life will have to change to accommodate stupid cars.
posted by JackFlash at 2:44 PM on March 8, 2019 [9 favorites]

The streetsblog article is good overall, but it makes the false claim that there are no vehicle safety regulations to reduce risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian safety requirements go all the way back to the folding hood ornaments back in the 70s or early 80s. Normal ones were impaling pedestrians in collisions, so automakers were required to make them floppy enough to not do that. Even light trucks have been required to make some far too modest changes to bumper design for pedestrian safety in the last decade or two, though they can't be considered safe by any stretch of the imagination..
posted by wierdo at 3:14 PM on March 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

In Australia I think things have worked out pretty fair - fuel excise tax brings in 18 billion a year, while total spending on roads is around 5 billion a year **, so road users in fact subsidize other federal programs. From an insurance point of view, we have something called TAC in Victoria, we pay money into it as part of our annual vehicle registration, and it provides full medical insurance + income replacement cover + continuing care and support for anyone injured as part of a road transport accident, whether they were a driver, pedestrian or cyclist, regardless of fault.

So for example, drivers pay about $800 per year to register their vehicle which includes TAC, and if they hit a pedestrian, the state steps in to pay for their treatment, replace all their lost income for the time they were injured, and provide assistance like wheelchairs.

** there is also a couple of billion spending per state on roads by the state governments, which doesn't get counted as part of federal expenditure, and gets funded in other ways, they're usually once-off upgrades.
posted by xdvesper at 10:48 PM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

This should be required reading for anyone who says we dont have the money for high speed rail, and other public transit programs. I do however think the author’s dismissive attitude towards self driving cars is somewhat misguided. Although full autonomous driving is still a good ways away for most drivers, new entry level autos, including civics and corollas, include some pretty amazing safety features. That’s not to diminish his other points, but I’m a bit more optimistic regarding the tech.

Also semi-derail, I must have been living in a cave for the past few years because I was completely unaware that Elsevier bought SSRN.
posted by Mr Mister at 8:39 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ugh. Let's not forget all the laws that allow/encourage fucking suburbs to exist, since their very existence is predicated on laws that value the automobile above all else.

Here in Brisbane (and Australia in general, as far as I can tell) we like to build sprawling 20+ townhouse complexes in the outer suburbs and exurbs, on land parcels that would typically have maybe four or five "traditional" houses.

So where there were once maybe 5 cars, you suddenly have 20 (despite the fact that the attached car ports or garages don't give you enough space to open a door on a Micra, so you suddenly have dozens of cars parked in the street, which is public land, and a dozen more from the townhouse complex opposite on the other side of the street, so you can't fit your fucking car down the middle of street half the time anyway).

This happens because they build the townhouse complexes, but they aren't sited near train stations, and no new bus stops suddenly magically appear, and the developers don't care because that's the city's problem, and it's brown bags all around anyway. The feeder roads to the CBD, where everybody works, don't suddenly become magically wider with extra lanes. No new infrastructure at all, absolutely zero proper city planning. Just bulldozing a bunch of trees adding 20 more cars to the treacle.

I catch the bus to and from work (in the city), my partner works from home, but yes we do have a car (which I hate, and am never buying from that dealer or manufacturer ever again), and yes we are part of the problem, though mainly on weekends.

I hate car culture, and I hate the culture of cars.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:20 PM on March 13, 2019 [3 favorites]