Everyone's take-away is different, but I find the general argument that the cost of driving is hugely under-priced to be compelling. In my opinion this piece hits on a good example: the overall cost wasn't really appreciated when the highway was built and the department of transportation seems to be trying to ignore the cost even today.

I too find the argument compelling that driving is under-priced, but I'm always leery of any reasoning that stops there, as the next step usually seems to be "well, we need to correct the price," which is only a good solution in a vacuum.

As the Macron government in France learned the hard way, underpricing one mode of transport for decades has a profound effect on multiple other markets, and suddenly trying to correct it has a very real human cost. When driving is underpriced, public transport can't compete, and investment in it wanes. Meanwhile, residential development adapts to automotive transport with sprawl.

And so a significant part of the population has no fallback if they become priced out of driving. A good policy solution must take the transportation, housing, and labor markets into consideration when pricing in the externalities of driving.

Passenger cars are a rounding error compared to freight trucks when it comes to pollution and road wear. Rather than waste money trying to squeeze more money out of people commuting to work, perhaps we should jack up the taxes on the freight companies. It may be fashionable to blame car culture, but even people without a car benefit greatly from our transportation system.

I don't know how Portland/Oregon funds this, but based on my experience in Texas:

1. If the drivers are in a different district, their taxes are primarily going to other schools.

2. The drivers aren't paying taxes to pay for this that bikers, bus-riders, and remote workers don't also pay, so it's not correcting the externality. It's not that the drivers are paying for it; the drivers and everyone else are paying for it.

As for 1, I think it wouldn't be the fault of the drivers. They pay for using the roads. If the tax system isn't distributing it properly, how is it their fault? You could argue they don't pay enough, but there is no info about amounts they pay in the article.

As for 2, i was assuming there are specific taxes for cars, or at least for petrol. That's the case in my country, don't know how it works in the US.

You're right that this is a bad-tax-allocation problem, not a "rich people shouldn't commute through poor neighborhoods" problem.

There are petrol taxes and car registration fees, but that mostly goes to funding road construction and maintenance. This makes sense at first glance, but the article illustrates that it's missing a lot of the costs of driving.

Public education in the US is funded to a large extent by local property taxes. (The result is that rich neighborhoods have considerably better-funded schools than poor neighborhoods.)

Commutes in the US are commonly long enough that it's entirely normal to find people end up driving through poor school districts, while their education-directed dollars go mostly to their own schools. If dealing with the pollution comes from the local district's property taxes (or simply leaves the students breathing polluted air), you've got an uncorrected externality.

If you work in Oregon you pay Oregon income tax, regardless of where you live.

> Don't drivers pay taxes, which also go to the school district - so actually, the vehicle drivers ARE paying for it?

In many states and certainly federally, the fuel tax does not pay for the roads themselves, much less their externalities.

One of the many ways that driving is subsidized, is that nobody is paying property taxes for the property that the roads use.

In most cases, local property taxes are earmarked for the local municipality, so in many cases, the inner city school does not get funding from the commuter.

Furthermore, many states with a highly disparate representation of suburban/rural vs urban representation (ie counties and cities based on geography), tax revenue is often taken from the city to support suburban/rural initiatives and roadways - this is also true on the federal level (ie Manhattan is a giver to rural military bases)

You could argue if roads should be paid for by the government, and I would be sympathetic to it. But you could at least make a case that roads benefit everyone (even people who don't drive buy the goods that trucks deliver via roads), and that it would be too impractical to privatize all roads. In any case, it would be a different discussion from "rich people are ruining the health of our kids". That's what I criticize about the article - the spin. Personally I actually hate cars and think they are given too much space in modern society.

Not collecting property taxes for roads would be just another way of the government paying for the roads.

> taxes

The highway carries a lot of cummuters from Clark County in a different state.

> twist, the kid’s family may only be able to afford...

The district used to be poor and black (back when the school was created) its pretty middle class and gentrified these days though. The freeway that cuts through there mostly is surrounded by industry and a hospital until it gets further north of the school. Part of this widening proposal is actually to cap sections of the freeway where it cuts through the more commercial part to the south of the school.

Unfortunately the school is really in a shit place regardless of widening or not. It shouldn’t be next to a freeway.

If they are commuters, they are paying Oregon income tax.

What is that, four identical posts saying the same identical thing? You're so excited about Oregon's income tax rules that you've forgotten the only relevant fact about USA public school funding. Schools aren't funded by income taxes. School districts are funded by local property taxes. The property taxes paid by Clark county residents and their landlords go to their own children's schools. The schools of the children they poison every day don't see a dime.

How are the drivers paying for it? From what I understand from the article, the school isn't receiving any extra money to clean this up, and the drivers aren't paying any additional road tax to drive on this piece of road.

As the article points out, and as has been known for decades, car drivers don't pay for most of the external costs they cause, and this is an excellent example of that.

I think the argument that they should pay extra taxes for that specific road is very strange. I think in generally they pay fuel tax and maybe something on cars (don't know the US system), and in theory that should pay for the roads and other externalities. It could just be distributed so that places with more pollution get more money.

Of course it's possible they don't pay enough, but that has nothing to do with that particular school.

I'm not saying they should pay some extra toll for that stretch of road, I'm just pointing out that they're not paying for the damage they're causing. The school or the kids aren't receiving money for the damage that's caused by the pollution from those cars.

If that's the case, I don't think it is their fault. The tax collectors should then distribute the taxes they collected in a different way.

Also, it stands to debate of the kids are forced to live in the pollution.

While the article mentions that the school was there before the highway, the students were probably not born yet. So they (or their parents) made a choice to live there and go to that school.

So who is paying for the increased health care costs of the kids?

Maybe the people living there should factor it into their decision for living there?

If they could afford that they probably wouldn't be there in the first place.

So the Highway is doing them a a favor, by making the place affordable.