The autotopia train has already passed and it won’t be coming back. Public desire for Levittowns started in the 20s but construction didn’t get really underway till the 60s and it peaked in the 80s. Public desire for in-city housing began growing in the 90s, and the last crash made it clear that the only kind of development that holds its real estate value is dense and walkable and near rail transit. A couple dozen cities have built light rail since 2000, and while I don’t think much of it is adequate, it always gets expanded. Cheap gas is gone and it’s just a question of whether it’s two years or four before it reaches $5/gallon. All the suburbs and exurbs have already been built. The closer-in ones will expand but the farther-out ones have already started becoming less desirable. Those blocks of empty houses didn’t happen in downtown SF and LA but in Stockon and Riverside where people didn’t really want to live anyway, it was just cheaper than the coast. So when they had an incentive to leave, they did. This will acelerate as the cost of living in the exurbs becomes untenable. So things are turning around, but it will still take twenty years until the pent-up demand for walkable neighborhoods becomes saturated and is no longer out of reach of so many people.

Pork as a whole is made out to be a bigger deal than it really is. 1-2% of the federal budget is actually earmarks. Amtrak long-distance routes are a minuscule drop in the bucket that’s not worth blowing a gasket over.

Getting pork under control wouldn’t even come close to getting us out of debt. And what’s wrong with politicians going to Washington to bring home federal dollars to their constituents? That’s really why *we* send those fuckers out in the first place.

And you’re free not to believe the $5-15/gallon study I linked to.

No, it isn’t. In fact, there’s no fuel efficiency data on page 11 of that document at all.

The state gas taxes don’t cover road costs, either.

That’s a different claim. I am responding to your nonsensical claim that a 20 cent/gallon increase in gas taxes would “increase the taxes on national highways by between 100% and 400%.” It’s just not true. And even if it were true, it’s irrelevant to the fact that 20 cents/gallon is just a tiny subsidy (less than one cent per passenger-mile), and is only a tiny fraction of the subsidies provided to mass transit users. Transit users receive vastly higher direct subsidies per passenger-mile of travel than motor vehicle users.

And with respect to indirect subsidies, I repeat my challenge a third time: If you seriously think you can show that motor vehicle users receive more indirect subsidies per passenger-mile than transit users, please do so. And I do mean SHOW, with citations of relevant facts and evidence, not merely ASSERT with unsubstantiated claims.

The state gas taxes don’t cover road costs, either. California hasn’t studied this issue, but Texas has, and even without the effect of externalities, roads in Texas are subsidized between 50 and 84 cents on the dollar. With the effect of externalities, the gas tax would have to be raised between 3 and 15 dollars a gallon, depending on who you ask, in which case car ownership would probably drop to the level of Hong Kong and Singapore, which do not practice road socialism.

Meanwhile, New York City Transit (subways plus buses) has a farebox recovery ratio of 40%, which does not include ancillary revenues from such sources as advertising.

I see no 82 mpg figure in your link. Where is it? And what is your point in mentioning this number anyway?

18.2 cents is only the FEDERAL gas tax. States impose additional taxes on gasoline. The total gas tax in California, for example, is 63.9 cents per gallon. An addition of 20 cents per gallon, to cover direct subsidies to motor vehicle users, would be an average of about 1 cent per vehicle-mile. This is about 2% of the average total cost per vehicle-mile of owning and operating an automobile. Increasing the cost of driving by 2% would have only a negligible effect on demand.

Transit users, in contrast, receive about 70 cents on the dollar in direct subsidies. Increasing the cost of using transit to cover direct subsidies would triple or quadruple the price of tickets. That would have an enormous negative effect on demand.

67% is what Subsidy Scope says the recovery ratio for national highways is, today. Yes, it was higher 10 years ago; the entire point of the study is that national highways are increasingly subsidized today. What you’re doing is the equivalent of a politician who stares at a poll a week before the election saying he’s down 5 points, and then says that the average over the past 3 months has had him down by only 1 point, so he may actually win.

Um, unsubstantiated AND irrelevant.

I repeat my challenge: If you seriously think you can show that motor vehicle users receive more indirect subsidies per passenger-mile than transit users, please do so.

No, it says what I told you it says. Go to the page you linked to. Click on the link labeled “user fee revenues and allocations for download.” Scroll over to the column labeled “% user revenues as share of total highway funds.” You will see that the average figure over the last 10 years is around 75%. Neither your own link nor the study I linked to supports your absurd claim that “eliminating direct subsidies would increase the taxes on national highways by between 100% and 400%.” Your claim doesn’t even make sense. We don’t impose taxes on national highways.