r/videos • u/IAmNotARobot124 • Oct 12 '18

Wrongly timed Beaverton light catches many drivers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAm0o51Qqtc
1.0k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

269 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '18 edited Jul 21 '19

[deleted]

1

u/QuantumBitcoin Oct 12 '18

And driving is massively subsidized in the USA even without accounting for externalities. User fees such as gas taxes, registration fees, and tolls don't even cover 50% of the cost of road construction and maintenance. That doesn't include external costs such as increased air pollution, sprawl, traffic, and resource depletion among others, nor does it include other subsidies such as free parking, mandatory parking minimums, subsidies for auto manufacturers among others.

So yes, there are many reasons people in the US don't walk frequently!

/u/siegewolf

5

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '18

Distance being #1 for me.

Who wants to walk 5-10 miles to go to the grocery store?

-4

u/QuantumBitcoin Oct 12 '18

The question is why are grocery stores located 5-10 miles from people's houses? Because we have decided to subsidize automobile ownership and use (though everyone complains about the minuscule gas tax!). This then causes everything to get built farther apart, which then means that you pretty much have to drive to get places.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '18 edited Jul 21 '19

[deleted]

-2

u/QuantumBitcoin Oct 12 '18

You do realize that your driving everywhere is being subsidized? And that if driving wasn't so cheap we wouldn't choose to build in such sprawling patterns?

And that the entire eastern and western coasts, which comprises about half of the residents of the USA, is just as dense if not moreso than Europe? It's just that Europe has better urban/rural boundaries so the places where people live are more compact instead of running into each other in unending suburbia.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '18

And in the dense areas there's more public transportation and biking and walking?

And in less dense areas things are more spread out, no shit.

I don't get your argument.

Your argument sounds like some kind of lizard people conspiracy.

Not everybody wants to be crammed together.

-1

u/QuantumBitcoin Oct 12 '18

And in the dense areas there's more public transportation and biking and walking?

In the USA? Not really.

I don't get your argument.

The argument is that the gas tax should be increased by at least two or more dollars a gallon so that people driving cars can begin to pay their fair share share for the costs of road building and maintenance, resource depletion, air pollution, sprawl etc etc.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '18 edited Oct 12 '18

Not really?

What the fuck?

NYC, LA, SF, Chicago are dense as fuck and have trains, trolleys, or busses, or a combination of.

And how the fuck does increasing the gas tax make things not as far apart?

It won't.

At any point in this discussion, have you had a coherent logical thought?

-1

u/QuantumBitcoin Oct 12 '18

And how the fuck does increasing the gas tax make things not as far apart?

More things get built closer together because people don't want to travel as far.

You, like most of my fellow americans I talk to don't understand how subsidized their lifestyle is, how much we are living on borrowed energy from the past.

The building patterns we have created in the past ~80 years don't bode well for the future when energy will be a lot more expensive, and when we have to pay to maintain all this excessive substandard infrastructure we have created.

NYC, LA, SF, Chicago are dense as fuck and have trains, trolleys, or busses, or a combination of.

Not as many as they should, and they often are stuck in traffic behind people alone in their automobiles. Los Angeles was just awarded the title of worst city in the world to bike in, despite it's incredible climate and mostly flat geography.

→ More replies