Automobile-based transportation and city design is inherently subsidized. It’s the biggest form of socialism that American individualism accepts unlike any other: free parking for everyone, free roads for everyone. It doesn’t matter how much weight or size your vehicle has, being charged money for parking or paying a lot of money at the gas pump is seen as an assault on freedom itself.

I believe I read that Massachusetts spends something like $12,000 per capita on public roads and highways. And yet we keep telling ourselves that transit oriented development and mass transit is “expensive.”

in the status quo of typical car-focused urban development, the US government needs to subsidize EV car companies or else other countries with lower labor costs will demolish the US automotive industry and consumers will be forfeiting too much of their earnings on the basic needs of daily transportation as oil becomes more and more scarce.

The big 3 automakers are already propped up by the chicken tax. It’s no coincidence that trucks drive most of the profit of US automakers and that they’ve been moved from utilitarian work vehicles to family cars to maximize sales. If you sell a family a sedan it’ll be low profit margin, competing with dozens of other options. Sell them an F-150 and you enjoy an oligopoly with a small subset of brands that have factories in the US.

I’d like automotive subsidy to be redirected into fixing urban design mistakes and meaningfully reduce car trips per capita. I’m not talking about extreme stuff like eliminating cars entirely, I’m talking about a situation where the majority of people don’t feel the need to get in a car to meet 100% of their daily needs.