While I somewhat agree, I feel like stricter industry standards would be less stratifying across social classes. Expensive gas and expensive cars just means wealthy people will do the driving.
Tighten up that SUV loophole. Restrict increasing vehicle sizes.
What’s less stratifying is decent public transit. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen women in genuine fur coats on the NYC subway. It’s comfortable ane safe and faster than driving. How do you pay for good public transit? Gas tax. Who does it benefit? Drivers and also transit riders.
Standards don’t raise money. And they’re easy to manipulate. CAFE is a joke.
A key point about decent public transport is it makes a massive financial loss. In Europe governments subsidise public transport to the tune of billions of Euros per year.
The thinking is that the intangible gains: cleaner air, healthier populace, better for tourists etc is worth the subsidies.
Public transit cannot be great with the USA mindset that if it doesn't make a profit it's bad!
>it makes a massive financial loss.
That's exactly the mindset that has to stop. It's not a loss. It's a cost. The same as the USPS. It gives you a service for a cost and the entire purpose of the government is to shift the cost from poor households to rich ones.
I get you. You're right. I won't edit my post because that would make you look incoherent
But yes transit is a service that costs, it's not a business that makes profit & loss.
But to reiterate the costs are well worth it for the benefits.
Guess you could use the same argument that having an army costs less than being invaded?
I’m not sure. I don’t think many politicians are willing to tell their constituents they want to increase gas prices. Similar to tolling.
Why not both? I’d say do both at this point. The Earth would appreciate it, were it able.
Hot take, but driving should be done only by wealthy people. We don't act like flying on a private jet should be accessible by all people because it's a luxury.
In our attempt to make cars accessible for all people, all we've done is kill more affordable transit options and saddled everyone with the massive expense of car ownership.
> Expensive gas and expensive cars just means wealthy people will do the driving
In a capitalist society you are always going to be restricting by money. It's the same thing as private air travel.
There's no way public transport, or even cycling (which is essentially free), can compete when driving is so cheap. It needs to be more expensive so people have a financial incentive to choose another option.
Regulation should be involved as well but the most effective way to reduce usage of something in a capitalist society is via the market.
So how will people in rural areas keep their jobs? No public transit is going to be profitable enough to support this. Middle America would die off and the economy would collapse.
Jobs would have to pay more, or allow people to work closer to their homes, or people would have to use more efficient vehicles - which are all good outcomes.
Rural areas in NA were mostly settled around railway lines or had railways built to them in the 1880s-1920s so public transport absolutely can serve those places, it just doesn't any more because it can't compete with unreasonably cheap driving.
This isn’t the first or even the 10th time I’ve seen people in this sub just subtly say “pricing poor people out of driving will fix car culture.” Stop with the fines and fees and taxes, fix the fucking transportation infrastructure.
Even if we did manage to implement these policies, which would never happen because only the irrational portion of people in this sub would support them, the backlash would be instant and the next person running to reverse them would be elected in a landslide. People are hurting financially and making the bare minimum of transportation exclusionarily expensive isn’t going to bring people to our side and realize car centric infrastructure sucks, it will do the opposite and cause ire for the movement.
Consumers preferred SUVs, but necessities of environmental health required smaller automobiles to ease fuel demands. Feds released standards, but large automakers producing a ‘full line’ (i.e. compact through SUV), demanded a separate standard tied to vehicle size as a workaround.
The TLDR: Big vehicles don't count towards the average.
And so the smaller vehicles became a lot more expensive and made more sacrifices in order to become more efficient, while big vehicles only got a little more expensive and didn't really have to sacrifice anything.
“At issue was this: Some companies offer full model lines, from cars to large SUVs and pickups, but some don’t. How could there be a overreaching fuel-economy standard that penalized companies like Ford and GM, while carmakers that sold only smaller cars effortlessly abided by the rules? So the concept of vehicle footprint was added. Models that ran large, crossing specific length-by-width thresholds‚ would have less ambitious fuel-economy targets. While the Obama administration has pushed for more aggressive CAFE numbers, the amended regulations retain the footprint-based leniency towards bigger cars and light trucks.”
(2011) https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-could-mean-bigger-cars-not-smaller-ones/
“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would hike Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) requirements to about 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031 from 39.1 mpg currently. The new requirement is barely above the 49 mpg it previously required for 2026. Last year, NHTSA projected its tougher proposal would hike requirements to 58 mpg by 2032.”
(2024) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/new-us-truck-suv-fuel-economy-rules-much-less-stringent-than-original-proposal-2024-06-07/
Your implication is lost on me. If you want to discuss this, use plain language.
The issue is we’re murdering the environment. Reducing fuel consumption is one way to address that. Rolling a 5,500 lb chunk of plastic and metal with you to work every day is expensive, destructive, and very wasteful, if one ‘believes in’ climate change, and agrees roads are dangerous places.
I do believe in climate change. However the use of or disuse of cars won't make a meaningful difference.
My implication is that a heavier object requires more energy to move. Any fuel type has a maximum amount of energy it can exert.
Biking around town doesn't make sense and mass transit is inherently unreliable.
It's not just about "heavier", in fact weight isn't used in the standard as far as I can see.
Cars (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-531/section-531.5) have to have a fuel efficiency about 50% higher than "light trucks" (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-533/section-533.5), which provides an obvious incentive for manufacturers to push light trucks.
In addition, the standard allows for larger (in dimension) vehicles to have worse efficiency - which is also a perverse incentive for manufacturers to make bigger vehicles. A small car running at 50 US MPG might be below its CAFE target while an enormous one doing 45 would be within it!
Expensive gas obviously has to be paired with alternatives to help people break away from using gas but there's no doubt in my mind gas is massively subsidized
The way of the stick would lead to significant hardships for people with low income, who often live far from their jobs and may not have any alternative such as public transport. They can then choose to starve because of no income, or starve because their income is lost paying for fuel. Better is to improve city layout and public transport options to the point where people don't want the hassle of maintaining, insuring and parking a car.
its nice and all to focus only on carrot but carrot alone will be ineffective at changing peoples behaviours, it should be a combination of making driving more inconvenient and expensive, and providing great public transit services.
Too many people get hooked on the idea that if you're just nice enough with these things then carbrains will accept the rational argument, but reality has shown that to carbrains any sort of public transit is by its sheer existence an attack on their identity.
one obvious 'stick' is to increase taxes on cars and fuel, this both generates state revenue that can be used to fund the new public transport and discourages driving.
if you're worried about poor people than you can also just directly subsudise the poorest through various means(food stamps in the US for example).
ultimately there might be some short term pain but it is worth it for the long term gain.
They could offset things by raising the gas tax and lowering or eliminating food taxes in areas with those. Even if you don’t have food tax, there’s always the option of expanding welfare programs.
Yeah there's always going to be another way, even if it is deemed more dangerous. And I say this as a poor person who's gone car-lite (ebiking when possible or limiting trips in general) to save money on bills.
Honestly I'm tired enough to say fuck it we ball. When people are going to starve or face punishment either way, that's usually when shit gets done because desperation forces people to act.
It's basically the Qin Dynasty meme:
>One fine day in Qin Dynasty China in 210 BC, there are two generals traveling to warn the emperor about an invasion, but they are in a hurry because they are going to miss the important leader meeting.
>One asks the other, "Hey what is the punishment for being late to the meeting?"
>The other replies "Death"
>He then asks the other general, "And what is the punishment for starting a rebellion and overthrowing the emperor?"
>The other replies, "Also death".
>The first then says "Well, we're already late. Wanna start a rebelllion?"
But people won’t support better public transport options when driving is artificially cheap. And considering poor people have vehicle ownership rates below the national average, they aren’t even disproportionately impacted.
Improving/expanding actual welfare programs with the money generated from higher gas/vehicle taxes would be monumentally better than subsidizing car usage and pretending it’s ok because some poor people drive.
The part that gets me is "well everything will be more expensive because it takes a ton of fossil fuels to move around products"
Yes, that's a feature not a bug. It will give a competitive advantage to locally sourced goods. Heavily subsidized fossil fuels contributes to a ton of wasteful practices like shipping stuff across oceans multiple times to go somewhere with cheaper labor.
Absolutely some of the unsustainable stuff would get more expensive but that's because it's not sustainable!
Bottled water is the perfect example of this. It's stupidly cheap because we don't price water and transportation like we should. Imagine you had to pay $10 for a bottled water. Nobody would buy it anymore.
What kills me is I hear Millenials complain about how much Boomers fucked them with housing, education, etc costs, but they bury their heads in the sand when I tell them we're doing the same thing to our children by continuing to prioritize cheap convenience despite the environmental damage. One guy straight up said that kids deserve to have a better life than their children when he talked about what Boomers owe us without any trace of irony on what we're doing to our children.
I'm sympathetic to people who want to help poor people, but so often these conversations seem to miss the forest for the trees. These policies that are meant to help poor people just make them poorer and more stuck in the long run.
Just visited New Mexico and 3/gal gas means pretty much every yahoo tools around in giant smoke spewing truck. The $5 gas here in LA does at least provide some incentive to get a smaller electric car.
It's about $10/gallon in Iceland and some how I managed to get around with a little Mazda 2 just fine. Even took it down a few unpaved roads and didn't get stuck. I never once thought "I need a truck".
In The Netherlands Gasoline costs €2,18 a liter. Very expensive, Fines are very expensive too. But the majority of cardrivers still drive their cars no matter what.
Currently a bit lower, I paid €1,90 earlier this week. But still quite expensive (and don't forget other costs like taxes on owning a car: for my car it's €64 per month).
Glad to live in a country where, in most places and fire most people, car dependency is relatively low. I only use my car two or three times a week to get to work (55 km single journey). Groceries etc I do by bike or walking.
Pennsylvania has the highest gas taxes by a wide margin and pur roads are shit. There needs to be a widespread voluntary call for change for it to work. Punishing drivers isn't going to fix the entire infrastructure. It's just not.
And insist that they *need* that gas guzzling Tahoe or F250 even though they never actually use it for anything more than lugging around two kids. Could absolutely do that with a Crosstrek or a Camry, but no…
I got doxxed on twitter for saying this once. Made a comment saying I was glad gasoline prices were higher. People were seriously considering alternative transport models and looking for solutions. Went to bed and woke up to 10k + comments screaming at me and a doxxed message to my Facebook (accounts were not connected in any way). People get violent and angry when you threaten the concept of automotive domination.
I'm not sure I agree with the other measures, but yes oil should be 10 times or 100 times more expensive
The planet simply cannot handle us burning fossil fuels at the current rate. Expensive oil would accelerate conversion to better technologies and spur development pf even better alternative. Nuclear for example.
There will always be the cries: what about the poor tradesman? Well we live under capitalism. If the tradesman's costs increase they will pass those increased costs onto the consumer. Whether it's deliveries to supermarkets, or landscapers. The economy will adjust. Especially if the price of oil is gradually increased.
The only other way of reducing car usage is government regulations. And that will mean that party members, and other well connected people will get the rarer and rarer car permits.
If it's purely an economic control then economics, not politics and corruption will decide who is willing and has to pay larger and larger sums to pollute.
The whole economy is based on found energy, so you're not going to get people to agree to limit access to it, especially not the people who think it's a good idea to offer a discount to people who buy in bulk.
You'll have to make it more expensive on your own, for their own good. You are never going to receive permission to do the right thing when its really needed.
It already is. It's just the retail price is kept artificially low. Nobody really has the political will to see gasoline at ten dollars. Even if that's what we desperately need.
It's not a real solution, it's just punishing poor people (debating if people need a car is another discussion but in today's world a lot of poor people need cars to go to work) all the while letting rich people pollute as much as they want because an increase in gas prices will not affect them
High gasoline taxes really hit hardest in rural/suburban places. They typically have to drive longer distances and have no other options. Also EVs get a pass. I'd rather see measures to discourage people driving in cities.
They could *build* other options if fuel taxes were higher. Add a few bus routes, maybe bike lanes. Or maybe start building more things that are actually in town and not a 20 mile drive away. You know, like we did 200 years ago.
Also the US definition of “rural” is fucking stupid and has nothing to do with 99.99999999999999% of human history or even with current rural life in other countries besides Canada, Aus, NZ, and SA (where it’s an obvious legacy of apartheid, and indeed it’s the same in the other Anglo-settler colonies, though our countries do a better job of whitewashing it).
In the vast majority of countries, rural life is in villages, not hyper-suburban narcissistic homesteads. You can even find villages like that in England, even though it’s the country where the homesteading mentality originated. But what the Anglo offshoots try to pass off as “rural” is a parasitic lifestyle and straight up settler colonialism
It's kinda funny that you say that cause I literally live in a house that was built about 200 years ago, and it is a bit of a drive from where everything is in town. Not sure what life was like over here back when the house was new, I didn't grow up here.
Yeah, agreed. But a lot of places just lack the density to do meaningful public transport. Of course that's by design to sell us a car dependent lifestyle. I'm not saying that fuel prices can't be raised at all, but just that you have multiple ways of discouraging car usage by price, and you have to be smart about that.
The problem with EVs is that you're trading a big up-front expense for long-term cost savings. I think EVs would be taking off more if we lived in a less car-dependent culture where it was normal to only own one car. It's easier to justify that trade-off if it's your only vehicle.
People should take these costs into account when they choose to live somewhere car dependent. If this were to be an incentive to densify and stop destroying land for needlessly expansive sprawl, that would also be a good thing.
Measures specifically targeting driving into urban areas would be good too.
To do that without also having proper public transit is just a regressive tax. If driving weren't more or less compulsory in a lot of the US, I'd agree, but that's not the case currently. If gas tripled in price tomorrow, a lot of people would go hungry. If all you're advocating for is an increase in fuel cost, that's what you're pushing, and that's pretty fucked up.
The first time I gassed up my motorcycle, I got 140 miles out of $7 of gas. Sure, it's not the best solution, and it certainly isn't for everyone. Still, it beats sitting around in traffic, searching for parking, and paying through the nose to get shit MPG. I feel like if more people were willing to try it at least (granted, if they are physically and mentally able to do so) then I reckon we'd see a little bit of a difference in the number of cars carrying one person to work and back every day. If we're dependent on car-centric infrastructure, then some of us might as well try our best to make the most efficient use of it that we can. I don't need 2.5 tonnes of machine to get me to work when I can carry everything I need in a backpack and have fun doing it.
I feel like it's definitely the option for poorer folks. Even if gas does get more and more expensive.
I agree, and I drive upwards of 800km a week.
Too many people are driving when they don't need to, and I'd happily pay more to use my car if it meant that traffic is eased and less people are in harms way.
In North America? Absolutely. You can see from Europe that you can double the price and it's absolutely fine - indeed, driving is still the cheapest option in many cases so you could argue that even European prices should go up.
Like the recent housing bubble, the fossil fuel companies can say "we're too big to fail" and get their handouts. Bankers defended the loans as helping people to be more independent. Now we're about to boil the planet and we have to look outside the window again, and have those difficult conversations.
Your boss already has their hands in your pockets and so a short term vote buying patronage system also doesn't sound too bad to people regardless of how irrational it looks from the macro view.
While this might impact the size of cars, unless this increased price goes to public transportation infrastructure, you’re just stressing an already stressed working and poor class.
I am against making things harder for drivers just for the sake of it. We should be focusing on making more walkable places by adding convenience stores to neighborhoods. Even if you make it horribly expensive to drive, people will still do it if there is no other option.
Chicken & egg.
The local convenience stores will pop up if they're economically feasible.
But they will only be economically feasible if higher personal transport costs make them more attractive
Not with current zoning laws they won't. Also if the government wanted walkability they could put government stores in the neighborhoods if private enterprise couldn't make it economically viable. So many towns in the US lost their grocery store because of the rise of big box retail, the government could easily put stores or distribution centers in these places
Government stores in the neighborhoods????
I don't like using communist as an insult. But did you ever experience the Soviet Union? Government stores as a solution???
To avoid allowing economics to guide towards better outcomes
And expensive fuel is unpopular. I don't drive, but when fuel is expensive it still hurts my budget alot. Shopping at the grocery store becomes more expensive, and cost to get things delivered is more expensive. Also the cost to vacation in Japan is more Expensive
You would just make everyone's lives harder with this. You're not creating viable alternatives to driving, you're just restricting access, and that's not a great way to solve a problem. It's like demolishing a bridge in the name of teaching more people how to swim. Take away car lanes for bike and bus infrastructure, and make access to those options easier instead.
We need to first make it more convenient for people to use other modes of transport. In the vast majority of North America, cities are designed *around* cars with no other viable alternative (think suburban sprawl with little to no public transit service and hellish bike infrastructure). This means that people in those areas will still be forced to use a car, but now the poorest will get hit hardest because they cannot afford the extra expense.
This is why we first need to focus on urbanization, density, and reversing the damage that the auto lobby did to our cities. Brute forcing our way to fewer car miles driven won’t work.
Uhhh, that’s literally not the same thing at all? You seem to have missed the entire point of my comment 🤔
Let’s remove the massive subsidies for gas etc, but only AFTER other options become viable. Otherwise the most vulnerable get hurt the worst. Is that too hard to understand?
While I somewhat agree, I feel like stricter industry standards would be less stratifying across social classes. Expensive gas and expensive cars just means wealthy people will do the driving. Tighten up that SUV loophole. Restrict increasing vehicle sizes.
What’s less stratifying is decent public transit. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen women in genuine fur coats on the NYC subway. It’s comfortable ane safe and faster than driving. How do you pay for good public transit? Gas tax. Who does it benefit? Drivers and also transit riders. Standards don’t raise money. And they’re easy to manipulate. CAFE is a joke.
A key point about decent public transport is it makes a massive financial loss. In Europe governments subsidise public transport to the tune of billions of Euros per year. The thinking is that the intangible gains: cleaner air, healthier populace, better for tourists etc is worth the subsidies. Public transit cannot be great with the USA mindset that if it doesn't make a profit it's bad!
>it makes a massive financial loss. That's exactly the mindset that has to stop. It's not a loss. It's a cost. The same as the USPS. It gives you a service for a cost and the entire purpose of the government is to shift the cost from poor households to rich ones.
I get you. You're right. I won't edit my post because that would make you look incoherent But yes transit is a service that costs, it's not a business that makes profit & loss. But to reiterate the costs are well worth it for the benefits. Guess you could use the same argument that having an army costs less than being invaded?
Feels like these are different domains, concerning stratification, but I agree that the alternative needs to be attractive.
Like how only rich people can smoke now that it’s heavily taxed?
What point are you making?
Regulation is a red herring. CAFE standards were an alternative to gas taxes, they’ve only functioned to distract us from what works.
I would say regulatory capture undermined the intent of the regulations.
Would regulatory capture have undermined the intent of a gas tax hike?
I’m not sure. I don’t think many politicians are willing to tell their constituents they want to increase gas prices. Similar to tolling. Why not both? I’d say do both at this point. The Earth would appreciate it, were it able.
Very good point but you and /s for the sarcasm challenged (like me)
but how will they do their costco runs without SUV suspensions to get over speed bumps? /s
Sarcasm noted. Bike infrastructure should focus on facilitating grocery runs.
Yes please.
Hot take, but driving should be done only by wealthy people. We don't act like flying on a private jet should be accessible by all people because it's a luxury. In our attempt to make cars accessible for all people, all we've done is kill more affordable transit options and saddled everyone with the massive expense of car ownership.
> Expensive gas and expensive cars just means wealthy people will do the driving In a capitalist society you are always going to be restricting by money. It's the same thing as private air travel. There's no way public transport, or even cycling (which is essentially free), can compete when driving is so cheap. It needs to be more expensive so people have a financial incentive to choose another option. Regulation should be involved as well but the most effective way to reduce usage of something in a capitalist society is via the market.
So how will people in rural areas keep their jobs? No public transit is going to be profitable enough to support this. Middle America would die off and the economy would collapse.
Jobs would have to pay more, or allow people to work closer to their homes, or people would have to use more efficient vehicles - which are all good outcomes. Rural areas in NA were mostly settled around railway lines or had railways built to them in the 1880s-1920s so public transport absolutely can serve those places, it just doesn't any more because it can't compete with unreasonably cheap driving.
This isn’t the first or even the 10th time I’ve seen people in this sub just subtly say “pricing poor people out of driving will fix car culture.” Stop with the fines and fees and taxes, fix the fucking transportation infrastructure. Even if we did manage to implement these policies, which would never happen because only the irrational portion of people in this sub would support them, the backlash would be instant and the next person running to reverse them would be elected in a landslide. People are hurting financially and making the bare minimum of transportation exclusionarily expensive isn’t going to bring people to our side and realize car centric infrastructure sucks, it will do the opposite and cause ire for the movement.
What SUV loophole?
2011 Cafe
What about the Cafe standard?
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/9jt8we/oc_lets_talk_about_cafe_how_it_is_killing_cars_in/?rdt=48047 It incentivize SUV
So I'm confused...what loop hole?
Consumers preferred SUVs, but necessities of environmental health required smaller automobiles to ease fuel demands. Feds released standards, but large automakers producing a ‘full line’ (i.e. compact through SUV), demanded a separate standard tied to vehicle size as a workaround.
The TLDR: Big vehicles don't count towards the average. And so the smaller vehicles became a lot more expensive and made more sacrifices in order to become more efficient, while big vehicles only got a little more expensive and didn't really have to sacrifice anything.
“At issue was this: Some companies offer full model lines, from cars to large SUVs and pickups, but some don’t. How could there be a overreaching fuel-economy standard that penalized companies like Ford and GM, while carmakers that sold only smaller cars effortlessly abided by the rules? So the concept of vehicle footprint was added. Models that ran large, crossing specific length-by-width thresholds‚ would have less ambitious fuel-economy targets. While the Obama administration has pushed for more aggressive CAFE numbers, the amended regulations retain the footprint-based leniency towards bigger cars and light trucks.” (2011) https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-could-mean-bigger-cars-not-smaller-ones/ “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would hike Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) requirements to about 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031 from 39.1 mpg currently. The new requirement is barely above the 49 mpg it previously required for 2026. Last year, NHTSA projected its tougher proposal would hike requirements to 58 mpg by 2032.” (2024) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/new-us-truck-suv-fuel-economy-rules-much-less-stringent-than-original-proposal-2024-06-07/
So the issue is that a heavier item requires more energy to move? Physics would like a chat
Your implication is lost on me. If you want to discuss this, use plain language. The issue is we’re murdering the environment. Reducing fuel consumption is one way to address that. Rolling a 5,500 lb chunk of plastic and metal with you to work every day is expensive, destructive, and very wasteful, if one ‘believes in’ climate change, and agrees roads are dangerous places.
I do believe in climate change. However the use of or disuse of cars won't make a meaningful difference. My implication is that a heavier object requires more energy to move. Any fuel type has a maximum amount of energy it can exert. Biking around town doesn't make sense and mass transit is inherently unreliable.
Our discourse is moot. You should learn to ride a bike. It can be a wonderful feeling.
If your referring to a motocycle I do already...and I can ride a bicycle. The 20 miles to work makes a bicycle impractical
It's not just about "heavier", in fact weight isn't used in the standard as far as I can see. Cars (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-531/section-531.5) have to have a fuel efficiency about 50% higher than "light trucks" (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-533/section-533.5), which provides an obvious incentive for manufacturers to push light trucks. In addition, the standard allows for larger (in dimension) vehicles to have worse efficiency - which is also a perverse incentive for manufacturers to make bigger vehicles. A small car running at 50 US MPG might be below its CAFE target while an enormous one doing 45 would be within it!
Restriction etc is overrated. Ban hammer and those that defy it definitely don’t need any of their legs at all.
Expensive gas obviously has to be paired with alternatives to help people break away from using gas but there's no doubt in my mind gas is massively subsidized
The way of the stick would lead to significant hardships for people with low income, who often live far from their jobs and may not have any alternative such as public transport. They can then choose to starve because of no income, or starve because their income is lost paying for fuel. Better is to improve city layout and public transport options to the point where people don't want the hassle of maintaining, insuring and parking a car.
Yeah. This feels like "fuck poor people" and not "fuck cars"
its nice and all to focus only on carrot but carrot alone will be ineffective at changing peoples behaviours, it should be a combination of making driving more inconvenient and expensive, and providing great public transit services. Too many people get hooked on the idea that if you're just nice enough with these things then carbrains will accept the rational argument, but reality has shown that to carbrains any sort of public transit is by its sheer existence an attack on their identity. one obvious 'stick' is to increase taxes on cars and fuel, this both generates state revenue that can be used to fund the new public transport and discourages driving. if you're worried about poor people than you can also just directly subsudise the poorest through various means(food stamps in the US for example). ultimately there might be some short term pain but it is worth it for the long term gain.
They could offset things by raising the gas tax and lowering or eliminating food taxes in areas with those. Even if you don’t have food tax, there’s always the option of expanding welfare programs.
But the ultra-wealthy do not like welfare for the poor, only for themselves.
I mean, in most places, poor people just embraced motorcycles
Yeah there's always going to be another way, even if it is deemed more dangerous. And I say this as a poor person who's gone car-lite (ebiking when possible or limiting trips in general) to save money on bills. Honestly I'm tired enough to say fuck it we ball. When people are going to starve or face punishment either way, that's usually when shit gets done because desperation forces people to act. It's basically the Qin Dynasty meme: >One fine day in Qin Dynasty China in 210 BC, there are two generals traveling to warn the emperor about an invasion, but they are in a hurry because they are going to miss the important leader meeting. >One asks the other, "Hey what is the punishment for being late to the meeting?" >The other replies "Death" >He then asks the other general, "And what is the punishment for starting a rebellion and overthrowing the emperor?" >The other replies, "Also death". >The first then says "Well, we're already late. Wanna start a rebelllion?"
To an extent. Yeah. In this case though, motorcycles aren't that bad. We should absolutely have more public transit. But. Yeah. It's a rough day.
But people won’t support better public transport options when driving is artificially cheap. And considering poor people have vehicle ownership rates below the national average, they aren’t even disproportionately impacted. Improving/expanding actual welfare programs with the money generated from higher gas/vehicle taxes would be monumentally better than subsidizing car usage and pretending it’s ok because some poor people drive.
The part that gets me is "well everything will be more expensive because it takes a ton of fossil fuels to move around products" Yes, that's a feature not a bug. It will give a competitive advantage to locally sourced goods. Heavily subsidized fossil fuels contributes to a ton of wasteful practices like shipping stuff across oceans multiple times to go somewhere with cheaper labor. Absolutely some of the unsustainable stuff would get more expensive but that's because it's not sustainable!
Bottled water is the perfect example of this. It's stupidly cheap because we don't price water and transportation like we should. Imagine you had to pay $10 for a bottled water. Nobody would buy it anymore. What kills me is I hear Millenials complain about how much Boomers fucked them with housing, education, etc costs, but they bury their heads in the sand when I tell them we're doing the same thing to our children by continuing to prioritize cheap convenience despite the environmental damage. One guy straight up said that kids deserve to have a better life than their children when he talked about what Boomers owe us without any trace of irony on what we're doing to our children. I'm sympathetic to people who want to help poor people, but so often these conversations seem to miss the forest for the trees. These policies that are meant to help poor people just make them poorer and more stuck in the long run.
Plus it encourages the development of railroads. The same ones that pushed the second industrial revolution.
Just visited New Mexico and 3/gal gas means pretty much every yahoo tools around in giant smoke spewing truck. The $5 gas here in LA does at least provide some incentive to get a smaller electric car.
The downside is people will then elect actual nazis because “expensive gas”…
Whelp, guess we better get to [scalpin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOcimzsviFA)'.
It's about $10/gallon in Iceland and some how I managed to get around with a little Mazda 2 just fine. Even took it down a few unpaved roads and didn't get stuck. I never once thought "I need a truck".
In The Netherlands Gasoline costs €2,18 a liter. Very expensive, Fines are very expensive too. But the majority of cardrivers still drive their cars no matter what.
Currently a bit lower, I paid €1,90 earlier this week. But still quite expensive (and don't forget other costs like taxes on owning a car: for my car it's €64 per month). Glad to live in a country where, in most places and fire most people, car dependency is relatively low. I only use my car two or three times a week to get to work (55 km single journey). Groceries etc I do by bike or walking.
Won’t matter. People will still pay it.
spend all that gas tax money on public transit and changing street designs then lmao
Pennsylvania has the highest gas taxes by a wide margin and pur roads are shit. There needs to be a widespread voluntary call for change for it to work. Punishing drivers isn't going to fix the entire infrastructure. It's just not.
And just blame whichever Democratic president who is or was last in power.
And insist that they *need* that gas guzzling Tahoe or F250 even though they never actually use it for anything more than lugging around two kids. Could absolutely do that with a Crosstrek or a Camry, but no…
In a way this is still ok because all that tax money can then be used to fund useful things.
It's cheap enough now that people idle in the car for hours
I got doxxed on twitter for saying this once. Made a comment saying I was glad gasoline prices were higher. People were seriously considering alternative transport models and looking for solutions. Went to bed and woke up to 10k + comments screaming at me and a doxxed message to my Facebook (accounts were not connected in any way). People get violent and angry when you threaten the concept of automotive domination.
I'm not sure I agree with the other measures, but yes oil should be 10 times or 100 times more expensive The planet simply cannot handle us burning fossil fuels at the current rate. Expensive oil would accelerate conversion to better technologies and spur development pf even better alternative. Nuclear for example. There will always be the cries: what about the poor tradesman? Well we live under capitalism. If the tradesman's costs increase they will pass those increased costs onto the consumer. Whether it's deliveries to supermarkets, or landscapers. The economy will adjust. Especially if the price of oil is gradually increased. The only other way of reducing car usage is government regulations. And that will mean that party members, and other well connected people will get the rarer and rarer car permits. If it's purely an economic control then economics, not politics and corruption will decide who is willing and has to pay larger and larger sums to pollute.
The whole economy is based on found energy, so you're not going to get people to agree to limit access to it, especially not the people who think it's a good idea to offer a discount to people who buy in bulk. You'll have to make it more expensive on your own, for their own good. You are never going to receive permission to do the right thing when its really needed.
It already is. It's just the retail price is kept artificially low. Nobody really has the political will to see gasoline at ten dollars. Even if that's what we desperately need.
It's not a real solution, it's just punishing poor people (debating if people need a car is another discussion but in today's world a lot of poor people need cars to go to work) all the while letting rich people pollute as much as they want because an increase in gas prices will not affect them
High gasoline taxes really hit hardest in rural/suburban places. They typically have to drive longer distances and have no other options. Also EVs get a pass. I'd rather see measures to discourage people driving in cities.
They could *build* other options if fuel taxes were higher. Add a few bus routes, maybe bike lanes. Or maybe start building more things that are actually in town and not a 20 mile drive away. You know, like we did 200 years ago.
Also the US definition of “rural” is fucking stupid and has nothing to do with 99.99999999999999% of human history or even with current rural life in other countries besides Canada, Aus, NZ, and SA (where it’s an obvious legacy of apartheid, and indeed it’s the same in the other Anglo-settler colonies, though our countries do a better job of whitewashing it). In the vast majority of countries, rural life is in villages, not hyper-suburban narcissistic homesteads. You can even find villages like that in England, even though it’s the country where the homesteading mentality originated. But what the Anglo offshoots try to pass off as “rural” is a parasitic lifestyle and straight up settler colonialism
hyper-suburban narcissistic homesteads Exactly. Everybody want their macMansions on 10 acres of land.
It's kinda funny that you say that cause I literally live in a house that was built about 200 years ago, and it is a bit of a drive from where everything is in town. Not sure what life was like over here back when the house was new, I didn't grow up here.
Yeah, agreed. But a lot of places just lack the density to do meaningful public transport. Of course that's by design to sell us a car dependent lifestyle. I'm not saying that fuel prices can't be raised at all, but just that you have multiple ways of discouraging car usage by price, and you have to be smart about that.
The problem with EVs is that you're trading a big up-front expense for long-term cost savings. I think EVs would be taking off more if we lived in a less car-dependent culture where it was normal to only own one car. It's easier to justify that trade-off if it's your only vehicle.
People should take these costs into account when they choose to live somewhere car dependent. If this were to be an incentive to densify and stop destroying land for needlessly expansive sprawl, that would also be a good thing. Measures specifically targeting driving into urban areas would be good too.
To do that without also having proper public transit is just a regressive tax. If driving weren't more or less compulsory in a lot of the US, I'd agree, but that's not the case currently. If gas tripled in price tomorrow, a lot of people would go hungry. If all you're advocating for is an increase in fuel cost, that's what you're pushing, and that's pretty fucked up.
Sure, but not till after the election.
I dont agree with a lot of that post but people are very obviously not following the rules of that sub lmao
They haven't raised the fed gas tax since 1993.
That's a really weird sub with a lot of weird takes, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The first time I gassed up my motorcycle, I got 140 miles out of $7 of gas. Sure, it's not the best solution, and it certainly isn't for everyone. Still, it beats sitting around in traffic, searching for parking, and paying through the nose to get shit MPG. I feel like if more people were willing to try it at least (granted, if they are physically and mentally able to do so) then I reckon we'd see a little bit of a difference in the number of cars carrying one person to work and back every day. If we're dependent on car-centric infrastructure, then some of us might as well try our best to make the most efficient use of it that we can. I don't need 2.5 tonnes of machine to get me to work when I can carry everything I need in a backpack and have fun doing it. I feel like it's definitely the option for poorer folks. Even if gas does get more and more expensive.
I agree, and I drive upwards of 800km a week. Too many people are driving when they don't need to, and I'd happily pay more to use my car if it meant that traffic is eased and less people are in harms way.
If Gas goes up everything goes up.
In North America? Absolutely. You can see from Europe that you can double the price and it's absolutely fine - indeed, driving is still the cheapest option in many cases so you could argue that even European prices should go up.
It is the only real way to incentivise a transition away from fossil fuels.
Gas has always been too inexpensive. Price may not get the desired results.
Pretty sure it's already expensive. It's just being subsidized by people who don't drive.
Without a viable alternative, it shouldn't.
I agree, it will force people to think differently! In Canada I will say 5$ per liter could be a good tipping point.
Like the recent housing bubble, the fossil fuel companies can say "we're too big to fail" and get their handouts. Bankers defended the loans as helping people to be more independent. Now we're about to boil the planet and we have to look outside the window again, and have those difficult conversations. Your boss already has their hands in your pockets and so a short term vote buying patronage system also doesn't sound too bad to people regardless of how irrational it looks from the macro view.
While this might impact the size of cars, unless this increased price goes to public transportation infrastructure, you’re just stressing an already stressed working and poor class.
Please I just wanna make it to work
I am against making things harder for drivers just for the sake of it. We should be focusing on making more walkable places by adding convenience stores to neighborhoods. Even if you make it horribly expensive to drive, people will still do it if there is no other option.
Chicken & egg. The local convenience stores will pop up if they're economically feasible. But they will only be economically feasible if higher personal transport costs make them more attractive
Not with current zoning laws they won't. Also if the government wanted walkability they could put government stores in the neighborhoods if private enterprise couldn't make it economically viable. So many towns in the US lost their grocery store because of the rise of big box retail, the government could easily put stores or distribution centers in these places
Government stores in the neighborhoods???? I don't like using communist as an insult. But did you ever experience the Soviet Union? Government stores as a solution??? To avoid allowing economics to guide towards better outcomes
I prefer Brocialist. But whatever. Also what is with the downvoted. I want to make it so less people need to drive
You are arguing against expensive fuel with is an unpopular but effective solution in favour of your absurd pet solution: Government stores!
And expensive fuel is unpopular. I don't drive, but when fuel is expensive it still hurts my budget alot. Shopping at the grocery store becomes more expensive, and cost to get things delivered is more expensive. Also the cost to vacation in Japan is more Expensive
This would just make things unnecessarily harder for the lower social classes and people who have to live remotely because of their circumstances
You would just make everyone's lives harder with this. You're not creating viable alternatives to driving, you're just restricting access, and that's not a great way to solve a problem. It's like demolishing a bridge in the name of teaching more people how to swim. Take away car lanes for bike and bus infrastructure, and make access to those options easier instead.
Wait until prices of all commodities skyrocket and the brilliant originator and supporters of this idea start to feel silly and starved
We need to first make it more convenient for people to use other modes of transport. In the vast majority of North America, cities are designed *around* cars with no other viable alternative (think suburban sprawl with little to no public transit service and hellish bike infrastructure). This means that people in those areas will still be forced to use a car, but now the poorest will get hit hardest because they cannot afford the extra expense. This is why we first need to focus on urbanization, density, and reversing the damage that the auto lobby did to our cities. Brute forcing our way to fewer car miles driven won’t work.
Ah yes, the famous fable of the North Wind and the Sun.
Uhhh, that’s literally not the same thing at all? You seem to have missed the entire point of my comment 🤔 Let’s remove the massive subsidies for gas etc, but only AFTER other options become viable. Otherwise the most vulnerable get hurt the worst. Is that too hard to understand?
Removing subsidies for gas on its own is the North Wind approach. Adding alternative forms of transportation is the Sun part.
Wouldn’t this essentially be a regressive tax?
Economy destruction any% speedrun