clacy and dualstow, I don't think the issue is whether suburbs/exurbs are aesthetically pleasing. Or that people like living there. The Ponzi scheme series argues that they are inherently unsustainable whether one likes them or not, because people who live there aren't taxed enough. I am curious as to how broadly his street-cost example can be applied to different regions.
His model does seem, at first glance, to apply to the interstate highways though. I followed a trail of links from strongtowns to a Congressional Budget Office
report. The basic gist looked to be that the nation's highways expenses are exceeding the tax revenues used to support them. One of the "fixes" vaguely reminded me of the tier system JMG wrote about, and the private toll road that libertarians seem to write about quite a bit (and that fans of government roads usually don't like)... having people pay for the roads they travel on.
Charging drivers specifically for using roads would increase economic output by
allowing highly valued transportation to move more quickly and more reliably. Such
pricing could take the form of per-mile charges (also known as vehicle-miles traveled,
or VMT, charges), congestion charges, or tolls on Interstate highways. When faster
travel and avoiding delays were a priority, drivers could opt to pay for the use of a less
congested road, and when travel speed was less important, they could use a road with
a lower fee or avoid paying a fee by using a road without one. Charges that varied by
time of day or that differed by road would also affect economic activity by limiting
congestion.
Besides affecting travel, such pricing would raise revenues, which could be used to make
repairs, expand capacity, or substantially renovate the Interstate System or could be put
to other purposes. It would also provide important information for spending decisions
by showing how much drivers value the use of a road, helping to set priorities for future
improvements. Over time, with more use of pricing, spending could shift from less
productive to more productive uses of highways. Such shifts could boost economic
growth—or they could allow spending to be reduced without affecting overall growth.
According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), widespread use of
congestion pricing, for example, could reduce the amount of capital investment
needed to meet a given set of goals for performance of the highway system by roughly
30 percent.
So there you go. You'd pay to get the level of service you want. If you want to pay less, you have to travel on shittier roads. I do like how this would "increase growth" though.
However, that approach would raise several concerns: Charging drivers to use roads
could raise concerns about privacy, depending on the methods used. The approach
could also place a proportionately greater burden on low-income households.
Moreover, highway users could resent paying tolls if they believed that they had already
paid for the roads through gasoline taxes over the years. And technological hurdles
may exist: Although the costs of charging drivers are declining with improvements in
technology, the costs remain higher than those for collecting revenues through the
gasoline tax.
I read this as: pro-government people don't like to feel like they're on a private toll road. When they find out that their taxes don't fully pay for the road, they want more money to magically appear instead of paying more themselves. Poor people who probably shouldn't even be driving a car on the highway, as PS said, would need to be subsidized somehow. Oh, and highways would become permanently more expensive, since they'd now include means to make people pay for them when they use them.
I'm not saying all this in the mood of "Yeaaaa buddy! DIE HIGHWAYS! DIE!" In the same spirit as suburbs/exurbs, maybe the interstate is something that's really nice and definitely more convenient than the system of roads before it, but someone's gotta pay for it if it doesn't fund itself.
as Harry Browne used to say.
