Yeah, if I had to wait for public transportation to take me to work, I'd be waiting about 20 years. My city has a bus system, but it doesn't get within 10 miles of where I work. Not only that, but since I have kids, I need to be available to come get them at any time, mostly in case they get sick at school.
Gas is about € 1.70 /L, so about $ 2.2 per liter, or about $ 9.3 / gallon. Diesel is up to about € 1.5 / L now...
Around here, public transit is great if you need to go to New York City. Anywhere else? Well, tough shit. In order to get to my job by 9AM, I'd have to take a bus leaving around 6:15AM. The next bus doesn't show up until after 10AM. I basically have to have a car to get around, otherwise I'd be getting up so early and getting home so late I'd never have time to do anything else.
No kidding! Re: the broader argument upthread about using indirect fiscal policy or road charging as a method of discouraging car use, I have no personal dog in the fight as I'm not going to alter my car usage even if it does cost me a bit more. I can accomodate the extra marginal cost, even if it annoys me. But in a general sense, I'm amused by the fact that this policy is frequently put forward by otherwise leftward-leaning people. It seems a highly regressive way of influencing transport usage patterns to me: the only people it forces change upon are the poor or the otherwise cashflow-constricted. Even then, they'll cut back on other things first (servicing and maintenance to begin with, then illegal omissions like not having insurance, road tax, MOT certificates) in order to keep their cars on the road. You'll effectively criminalise a lot of otherwise generally law-abiding people (much the same way speed cameras do, but that's another argument). Everyone else will just pay the higher costs (or their company will) and still use their car. Of course, the higher you price the petrol tax, the greater the effect, so eventually it will seep into the modestly well-off, too. But the richest will always be able to afford to use their cars (and/or deduct the cost of running their car), so the end result is that the richest in society can use their cars without fear of traffic jams while everyone suffers with what will be an even more overburdened public transport network with greater relative levels of underfunding compared to demand. Car usage is really much more a cultural issue than a marginal cost issue. Punitive measures targetting marginal cost can't really effect the kind of cultural change being desired unless they're significantly more than just marginal, and that is politically very dangerous territory. If you really want to change transport usage, the tax system is not a bad way to do it, but it strikes me that it would be far more effective to increase the tax deductible benefits to working from home (paid for by a reduction in company car benefits, so it's a revenue neutral measure in net terms). Perhaps even have financial grants based on how many people an employer shifts from an office location to a home location (again, paid for by revenue-neutral reductions in other transport related costs). There are a huge number of office workers who simply shouldn't need to be in an office these days. Of course, employers will need ways of monitoring their productivity at home, but it's not really that difficult to do.
So far, the cheapest place to get gas 'round here is in town about twenty minutes from my house. One place is $3.39 and the other place is a few cents cheaper then that.
And what if public transport is non-existent, impractical or otherwise unavailable? What do those people do? What a ridiculous - and dare I suggest, Eurocentric - generalisation. See Holdfast's post above, which is an excellent response to such a laughable assertion.
You think it’s bad where you live? Try being without a car in Los Angeles. It’s like having your legs cut off.
We use to have the best capital city petrol prices in the country, but the govt changed the taxes and our duopoly in supermarkets has moved into servos and killed competition. The station closest to my house was at $1.46/l, though it is 4 - 8c cheaper less if you shop at the affiliated supermarket giant.
It's lolworthy to note that the high prices (in the UK) did lead to plummeting fuel sales generating £600million in lost taxes for the treasury.
Actually, in Europe drivers may come closer to paying their fair share. In the US the private automobile is subsidized hugely. First of all - gas taxes only cover half of highway construction and maintenance. There's ~$100 billion a year in subsidies. In California, user revenues covered 31% of road costs in 2007 (a subsidy of nearly $12 billion). That's just state and federal highways (and some major local roads) - your local city streets are subsidized even more. Here's a 1991 study from Milwaukee showing that nearly three-quarter of the property tax levy was an indirect subsidy to drivers (this is less of an issue since local roads are useful for all kinds of travel and goods movement). Now you might say that everyone has a car, but that's actually not true at all. In Milwaukee, according to the 2000 census, 21% of households didn't have a car. You can search the rest of the census data here. Even "car-centric" cities like Los Angeles have large populations without cars (16.5% in LA). But road costs aren't the only cost. If you live in the US, think about how often you have to pay for parking. Sure there are meters but most places you go have "free" parking. In fact, that free parking reflects a subsidy to drivers of much more than $100 billion a year! Traffic crashes in the US were estimated in the late 1990s to cost around $400 billion a year, and a third of those costs are external (paid for by everyone). The health care costs from air pollution are $50-80 billion a year, paid for by all of our insurance premiums/tax burdens. I won't talk about congestion, sometimes estimated to cost $10s of billion a year, because those costs are more difficult to quantify. So, in the US you're looking at subsidies of several hundred billion a year (perhaps as much as $500 billion) for drivers of private automobiles. Maybe if we subsidized public transit to the tune of several hundred billion a year (currently, transit likely gets a greater proportion of its revenue from direct user fees - somewhere between 20-50% depending on the city - when you factor in all of the associated costs with driving), people wouldn't have to complain about the terrible bus schedules around them...
Hmmm. So half of "construction and maintenance" comes from the taxes I pay, and the other half of "construction and maintenance" come from the taxes I pay. That seems fair, given that I use the road system. 46% of adult Americans don't pay taxes, your point? How many of that 16.5% eat food that arrived in the city by truck? Sound like the portion of their taxes that subsidize the road system was well employed. Okay, if the majority of people gave up their personal vehicles and began riding public transportation (ie buses), that mean that we would need many more buses, not just to carry the extra people on existing routes, but also to cover previously un-serviced areas, where buses never went before. And the buses would have to cover these areas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because America is a 24/7 society. So how exactly would air polution decrease in the slightest? And how much of that subsidy come from people who both have cars and also pay taxes, most? In Seattle it's only 23%. Largest percentage comes from property taxes, taxes from people who in some cases don't ride buses. -------------- PlixTixiplik, I have a motorcyle that gets 52 miles per gallon. I also have a Mazda 3 hatchback that gets 30 mpg. 3 days a week i do charity through my church, senior "meals on wheels." How am I supposed to do that from a bus? It's not unusual for there to be twenty-five bags of groceries in my car. The nearest (current) bus stop to my parents home is eight miles. That's a hell of a walk for people in their sixties. ")