"Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury."

"Car-related subsidies of all sorts are becoming harder to sustain. Their loss could reveal mass travel in single-occupancy cars to be a no-longer-affordable luxury."

Ostensibly about the non-profitability of Uber and Lyft, the article makes valuable points about the various ways we subsidize "vehicular solitude."

Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury (at The Economist)

Whether you drive yourself or hail a ride, solitary splendour will become more expensive

 ... Until they turn profits, ride-hailing firms will be vulnerable to a loss of investors’ patience. But drivers of private vehicles also receive plenty of implicit support. Drivers impose environmental hazards on others at no financial cost to themselves, from the health effects of local air pollution to the climate change resulting from carbon emissions. And then there is congestion. The right to use scarce road space is valuable. When it is given away, drivers overuse available roads, and clog them. The waste is colossal. An estimate by INRIX, a consulting firm, suggests that the value of time lost to traffic in 2018 in America alone reached $87bn.

Which leads us to the "t" word.

Removing the subsidy to drivers means pricing road space by levying tolls that increase with traffic. That would deter driving, and reduce congestion and other social costs of automobile use. Such charges are rarely popular with drivers. But governments’ enthusiasm for new, untolled roads has dimmed. And they do not help much with traffic. Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania and Matthew Turner of Brown University posit a “fundamental law of road congestion”: unless road space is priced appropriately, new capacity reduces the cost of driving, thereby inducing more of it, leading, eventually, to renewed congestion.

Of course the fundamental premise remains that we must live in a dispersed manner that requires the use of a private vehicle.

Congestion pricing would reduce the delay associated with multiple stops. Indeed, in a subsidy-free world car-pooling of all sorts would increase. On a once congestion-clogged highway in Northern Virginia, for example, the number of cars with multiple occupants has risen by 15% since the introduction in 2017 of tolls that vary with the level of congestion.

For decades, the striving working class has dreamed of the freedom to commute in the splendid isolation of a private car. “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure,” Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said. The real failure may be a widespread, persistent reluctance to grapple with the cost of travel in vehicular solitude—whether with or without the aid of an app.

"Let’s not demonize driving -- just stop subsidizing it."

For the thousand and first time ...

Let’s not demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it, by Joe Cortright (City Observatory)

At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving.

Our wonky perspective tells us that there are lots of problems that stem from the way we use cars: We price roads wrong, so people over use them. Cars are a major source of air pollution, including the carbon emissions that are causing climate change. Car crashes kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, injure many more, and cost us billions in medical costs and property damage. And building our cities to accommodate cars leads to sprawl that pushes us further apart from one another.

But the problem is not that cars (or the people who drive them) are evil, but that we use them too much, and in dangerous ways. And that’s because we’ve put in place incentives and infrastructure that encourage, or even require, us to do so. When we subsidize roads, socialize the costs of pollution, crashes and parking, and even legally require that our communities be built in ways that make it impossible to live without a car, we send people strong signals to buy and own cars and to drive—a lot. As a result, we drive too much, and frequently at unsafe speeds given the urban environment.

Conservatives to Padgett: "The heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies."

Narcissus, still gazing at that pesky erection.

Wanna know what's really funny?

The Padgett-led heavy trucking coalition seeks to sue the city of New Albany for failing to maintain city streets suitable for their interstate-grade vehicles.

And yet, when it comes to overall maintenance of roads in this nation, note the disparity.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees.

Whoa! That's a lot of TIF bonds.

But wait, because here's the punch line: In the article below, which explicates "asphalt socialism" in our autocentric nation, the air is being let out of the truckers' tires not by liberal leftist pinko fags, but by the Padgett Political Action Committee to Elect Republicans' very own beloved conservative element.

That's rich, indeed. The hypocrisy flies over their heads as quickly as the dump trucks speed down Spring.

I'm reprinting the entire article here, because it's just too good to excerpt.

House Republicans’ Asphalt Socialism, by Joe Cortright (The American Conservative)

The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund.

For years, many macro economists have been urging the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy by using its power to effectively print money in the form of a “helicopter drop”—simply crediting every American with a certain amount of extra dollars in their bank accounts. The idea has been suggested as a way to jump start consumer spending in a moribund or deflationary economy by economists of some stature, including Ben Bernanke and Milton Friedman. The idea was advanced as a way of accelerating the sluggish growth we’re currently experiencing in an article in Foreign Affairs. But while it might make theoretical sense to economist, it was simply politically impossible, because as The Economist intoned, the idea of a helicopter drop would be anathema to Republicans.

But when it comes to a helicopter drop for highways, there’s no such problem. Remarkably, the proposal to tap the Federal Reserve’s funds comes not from radical Keynesians, but from the Republicans in the very conservative House of Representatives. And apparently, the same people who preach personal responsibility in almost every other field of endeavor want to insulate automobile drivers from paying the costs of the roads they drive on. While they may espouse the virtues for the free market in almost everything else, this position makes them “asphalt socialists” when it comes to transportation.

The best estimates are that drivers now pay only a tiny fraction of the direct costs of building and operating roads, not to mention causing huge externalities in the form of crash-related injuries and deaths and pollution. As we’ve noted before, the heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees. And a report from TransitCenter and the Frontier Group recently detailed the $7.3 billion in parking tax subsidies drivers get every year as well.

(Even with these subsidies, however, increasing fuel efficiency and the decline in per capita driving have pushed down revenues for the Highway Trust Fund, and contributed to the current crisis.)

While this latest chapter of dysfunctional public finance and ideological hypocrisy is playing out at the federal level, it’s equally prevalent in the way states and localities treat driving, too. Local governments have parking requirements that drive up the cost and drive down the supply of housing to subsidize car ownership. In Seattle, parking requirements add something on the order of $250 a month to the price of a typical apartment.

The new transportation bill will favor cars in other ways, too. Local highway projects will get an 80 percent federal match, but transit projects will get only 50 percent. Meanwhile, important sources of funds for transit, pedestrian, and bicycle programs, including TIGER grants and the Transportation Alternatives Program, were cut or imperiled.

While advocates of the road system regularly cloak their arguments in the rhetoric of choice and the free market, our transportation system is actually characterized by heavy government intervention on behalf of private vehicles. Massive, taxpayer-supported subsidies effectively bribe people to drive, and insulate them from the financial consequences their choices impose on others.

Drivers want more roads—as long as they don’t actually have to pay for them. The fact that there’s no stomach for increasing the gas tax—even though gasoline prices have fallen by more than a dollar a gallon in the past year—shows that when put to the test of the marketplace, there’s actually little demand for more transportation.

The irony, of course, is that transportation is clearly one policy area where traditional free market principles would put a serious dent in the problems of traffic congestion, air pollution, and safety. If car users faced anything close to the actual costs of building and operating roads (and mitigating or preventing the injuries and pollution effects), we’d see much less driving, and much less demand for additional capacity.

Hopefully, it's not illegal for sense to cross the border, too.

Because even when translated, it's not difficult to understand.