I’m in the side of transit should be free, but as I understand it, the fare is often a pretense to more easily enforce problematic behavior on the train. Fare evasion and other antisocial behavior often come together.

California has quite the gas tax, but it seems to do little to change behavior. Likely because the alternatives to driving are generally not great, but rolling the taxes back shouldn’t be the solution.

I’m impressed. This is one of the strangest opinions I’ve ever seen. What is special about “at use”? Presumably because it lets you avoid the question of whether everyone should get a free car. Does a monthly car payment count as “at use”? Why not if a monthly transit pass does?

The other replies point out that different forms of transit compete with each other, so the more cars we have, the fewer bikes and trains.

Because once an investment has been made in a car and roads or in a train line or whatever there should be no artificial distinctive for people to use it as they deem appropriate.

As others have said, you are describing a totally imaginary world where money is the only cost. “Artificial” is doing all the work. But the very investments you’re describing are “artificial”, and more than that, they require constant spending to maintain. Why should cost at point of use be the only artificial incentive? What about the environment created by those very investments? The quality of roads, the cleanliness of the train? Your distinction is contrived in service of your predetermined conclusion.

But when there are multiple competing forms of transit, or high externalities caused by use (or overuse) artificial disincentives are optimal. As an example, if you have access to both a car and a train, and the car pollutes less than the train, some artificial incentive to only use the car when necessary and to use the train otherwise is actually optimal.

You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.

Taking up space, degrading public infrastructure, polluting the air, and killing pedestrians are real ongoing costs of transportation. The cost does not magically end at vehicle purchase.

This is a curious form of fundamentalism. "All motion is good, and damn any effort to coordinate it."

Time is a cost though. You're looking only at monetary cost.

This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.

> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.

Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.

your reasoning falls apart because mass transit options are inherently faster due to the geometric-space efficiencies gained by their form factors. You just need to induce enough people to participate in it to cross a tipping point where it becomes financially viable to run regular service, e.g., in NYC taking a train is often the fastest.

Exactly. The janitor has every right to sit in gridlock beside the CEO. If either doesn't like it they can adjust things but realistically the CEO's got the most ability and incentive to do so.

These artificial price distortions wind up most benefiting the people who were in the best position to alter their behavior.

Driving your car incurs real externalities. Putting a price on it fixes the artificial extra incentive to drive, by making freeloaders pay up.

Excessive car use lowers mobility for EVERYONE. Restrictions to car use, lower speeds via traffic calming, removing car lanes and adding bike and bus lanes, all of this IMPROVES transportation times including for cars!

Yep, except for public holidays where I'm going by car I never spend time in traffic. In my small city I can e-bike everywhere on almost entirely separated bike paths and if the weather isn't good I can take the bus or subway. If all else fails there's still Uber and Bolt

Gas taxes (partially) pay for the roads. Get rid of those and you've just decreased your tax base, which means you're going to have to pay for it from another tax. It's just shifting the tax burden. We can argue about what's a better tax policy, if a certain tax is progressive or regressive and so on but wherever the money comes, somebody needs to pay for the roads.

NYC is one of about 2 places in the US that actually has usable public transit, barring certain outer boroughs where car ownership dominates. It's largely a hub and spoke model though so it's good for going into and out of Manhattan but not so good for, say, getting from Red Hook to Flushing so driving will dominate that kind of travel.

But that's why congestion pricing is targeted at Lower Manhattan and can't really spread beyond it. Like see how far you get trying congestion pricing in Houston or Dallas, let alone Bakersfield, Boise or Lexington (KY).

Economic incentives work. They're probably most responsible for the drop in smoking. Congestion pricing consistently changes people's behavior and every metric shows it. Some bus lines in NYC now move nearly 30% faster.

I don't know what island you're talking about and what happened but will generally agree that people are struggling all over. It's well-known that real wages have largely been stagnant for 40-50 years.

But that's not a problem caused by gas taxes. It's caused by capitalism.

> I grew up on a goddamn island

Growing up on a remote island is basically the opposite of New York in all regards except that Manhattan is technically also an island.

IMO fuel taxes should be higher if it means more people and companies buy hybrids and EVs.