Re:Ride-Sharing Congests City Traffic
by mikepurvis on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @12:27AM
(#16480886)
Cities should always improve mass/public transit.
The challenges with finding the political will and thus budget to make those improvements are well documented. And ride sharing gets most of the same hidden subsidies as private vehicles: roads are maintained for "free", congestion and pollution are externalized costs, and cars get implicit priority when there is not dedicated (or adequate) infrastructure for pedestrians, bikes, and mass transit vehicles (as well as more subtle stuff such as refusing to ban RTOR, despite how dangerous it is to people on foot).
Because there's no good way of accounting for those costs or compensating for them, transit authorities are under constant scrutiny for their spending, and starved for money to put into system maintenance and capital improvements. But billion dollar highway expansions sail through approvals because it's "needed", as if the mass transit options which might have made the expansion unnecessary are somehow an extravagant amenity.
The challenges with finding the political will and thus budget to make those improvements are well documented. And ride sharing gets most of the same hidden subsidies as private vehicles: roads are maintained for "free", congestion and pollution are externalized costs, and cars get implicit priority when there is not dedicated (or adequate) infrastructure for pedestrians, bikes, and mass transit vehicles (as well as more subtle stuff such as refusing to ban RTOR, despite how dangerous it is to people on foot).
Because there's no good way of accounting for those costs or compensating for them, transit authorities are under constant scrutiny for their spending, and starved for money to put into system maintenance and capital improvements. But billion dollar highway expansions sail through approvals because it's "needed", as if the mass transit options which might have made the expansion unnecessary are somehow an extravagant amenity.