1. FYI: vegan eating saves planet
2. Gas taxes
From Nextdoor.com (like a Facebook for neighborhoods)
RE: SB 1 transportation gas/diesel tax
Gail Delihant from Rollingwood, Twin Lakes, Lake Natoma said:
Our gas will be going up 12 cents per gal and diesel 20 cents per gal in the very near future as this bill passed the legislature by a required 2/3rd vote along party lines just now. None of the money will be used to add lanes to your already crowded freeways - the money will be used for repairs to roads and bridges, bike lanes, public transit, parks. This tax will increase with inflation basically forever. If we have a recession - the tax will stay the same. Gas up tomorrow folks. It may be the cheapest gas you will buy this year!
I replied:
FYI, adding lanes to roads or freeways does not cure congestion because of something called "induced demand." This is roughly like the rule of garage shelves: the stuff you store expands to fill the shelves provided.
So adding lanes only temporarily relieves congestion. Ultimately, the traffic fills any new lanes and you're back to where you began. And no, the road builders don't return your millions spent on road widening. You're poor *and* congested now...;-(
What does relieve congestion? The Southern California Association of Governments mathematically modelled a variety of congestion relief strategies, up to and including double-decking the freeways. Only one remedy offered any significant, long term congestion relief: Mixed use: i.e. putting the shops, offices, residences, etc. all within the same neighborhood. That makes sense, too. If you can shop, work, go to school, etc. all in your neighborhood, you're less likely to meet a crowd on the connector street.
Mixed use is a very old pattern of city building, too. If you look at older neighborhoods, you'll see it all over the place. There are residences over retail in Old Folsom and Old Sacramento, in addition to a scattering of offices.
Sprawl builds everything as single use: all residences, all offices, all commerce, etc. No apartments above Safeway, for example. Everyone has to get in their car for every trip of significance, meeting on the collector street. Great for car dealers; not so good for others.
So...complaining about not building new freeway lanes is in the same category as the wishful thinking of one Carmichael resident I met at a planning meeting years ago. She wanted local governments to build a subway between her house (in Carmichael) and her work downtown--something that would make financial sense if the fare were $100K per trip.
Just FYI, heavy rail, like subways and high speed trains, is roughly ten times more expensive than light rail, which is roughly ten times more expensive than buses. A bus loses to rail when it reaches the limit of how many passengers it can carry. You can add cars to a train and still have only one driver, but not so with a bus....Or can you?
The city of Curitiba Brazil (roughly Sacramento's size) got money to build a subway, and decided instead to invent a mult-section bus (called "Speedybus" or Bus Rapid Transit [BRT]). The city owns the stops, and improved them to look like train stations. Stations handle handicap access, rather than buses, and provide a comfortable, out-of-the-weather spot for passengers to wait. (see an example here)
So Curitiba, in a third-world country got an extensive bus system that works (i.e. *makes* money). Private firms own the buses, the public owns the stops and regulates fares. Last time I checked, nearly a million and a half passengers board these buses daily. Just FYI, Brazil's per-capita GDP is about 1/5th the U.S.'s...so they are very poor, but can afford a very nice bus system. Yes, intelligent public policy can be worthwhile!
More Curitiba stories: Mayor Jaime Lerner came to a Valley Vision conference a few years ago and described how he cleaned up Curitiba's harbor. It was full of discarded junk that would be very expensive to clean up, but he agreed to pay the fishing fleet the same amount per pound of junk retrieved that they got for fish during the fishing season. The harbor was cleaned at a fraction of the cost of hiring a salvage operation.
Since Brazil is very poor, people live in barrios with roads too narrow to let in garbage truck's. Lerner brought bags of food in trucks that would trade bags of food for bags of trash, and cleaned up the barrios. He also began a mentorship program so that public employees train and mentor poor kids to maintain Curitiba.
My personal favorite Curitiba story is about their parks. Rather than develop floodplain behind levees, the city bought it, and turned it into park land (and, as a consequence have one of the highest park acreage-to-population ratios). The city was still too poor to mow all this land, so they brought in the municipal sheep (whose wool funds other programs). In the U.S, we build levees and maintain them forever...both less-than-optimum and costly! (But I promise you, the land speculators make a profit.)
I've taken some time here to point out: a) the obvious solution--widening roads--does not cure congestion, and b) sometimes intelligent public policy can actually enrich the population. They get good value for their tax dollars.
I'll agree the "bullet train" is both second-rate technology (compared to Hyperloop, or even planes) and money ill spent. Just because we do it badly, or it's less-than-optimum spending on one project doesn't mean it's all bad, though.
Will the road repairs save tires and suspensions, not to mention the cost of road-induced accidents? Give the state of my tires (and that I just replaced my shocks) I'm inclined to believe it will. In other words, it's *cheaper* to pay the tax than not.
One final thought: Have you seen those self-righteous bumper stickers on big trucks like "This truck pays $50,000 a year in road-use taxes" (implying "look upon this mighty sum and be grateful, ye peasants!"). But have you ever wondered how much damage big trucks do to roads, and whether they are paying their own way? (Hint: they do more than $50K in damage-- one 18-wheeler is equivalent to 9600 cars says http://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and..., and those cars pay more than $5 [$50K/9600] each for riding the roads). So we're actually subsidizing trucks even if they pay $50K in taxes.
Of course the new SB1 tax won't nearly recover the incredible petroleum subsidies ($5.3 trilion worldwide, says the IMF, or $600 billion annually in the U.S. says the World Resources Institute [in 1989!]), and any genuine fan of markets will tell you that subsidies distort consumer behavior so consumers of petroleum over-consume...but hey, what's a few trillion among petroleum plutocrats.
So we can continue to carp about taxes, but until we figure out whether we're getting our money's worth for shared expenses, we're just old guys telling the kids to get off our lawn. We'll have less-than-optimum government as long as our input remains less-than-optimum too.
Just sayin'...
2. Gas taxes
From Nextdoor.com (like a Facebook for neighborhoods)
RE: SB 1 transportation gas/diesel tax
Gail Delihant from Rollingwood, Twin Lakes, Lake Natoma said:
Our gas will be going up 12 cents per gal and diesel 20 cents per gal in the very near future as this bill passed the legislature by a required 2/3rd vote along party lines just now. None of the money will be used to add lanes to your already crowded freeways - the money will be used for repairs to roads and bridges, bike lanes, public transit, parks. This tax will increase with inflation basically forever. If we have a recession - the tax will stay the same. Gas up tomorrow folks. It may be the cheapest gas you will buy this year!
I replied:
FYI, adding lanes to roads or freeways does not cure congestion because of something called "induced demand." This is roughly like the rule of garage shelves: the stuff you store expands to fill the shelves provided.
So adding lanes only temporarily relieves congestion. Ultimately, the traffic fills any new lanes and you're back to where you began. And no, the road builders don't return your millions spent on road widening. You're poor *and* congested now...;-(
What does relieve congestion? The Southern California Association of Governments mathematically modelled a variety of congestion relief strategies, up to and including double-decking the freeways. Only one remedy offered any significant, long term congestion relief: Mixed use: i.e. putting the shops, offices, residences, etc. all within the same neighborhood. That makes sense, too. If you can shop, work, go to school, etc. all in your neighborhood, you're less likely to meet a crowd on the connector street.
Mixed use is a very old pattern of city building, too. If you look at older neighborhoods, you'll see it all over the place. There are residences over retail in Old Folsom and Old Sacramento, in addition to a scattering of offices.
Sprawl builds everything as single use: all residences, all offices, all commerce, etc. No apartments above Safeway, for example. Everyone has to get in their car for every trip of significance, meeting on the collector street. Great for car dealers; not so good for others.
So...complaining about not building new freeway lanes is in the same category as the wishful thinking of one Carmichael resident I met at a planning meeting years ago. She wanted local governments to build a subway between her house (in Carmichael) and her work downtown--something that would make financial sense if the fare were $100K per trip.
Just FYI, heavy rail, like subways and high speed trains, is roughly ten times more expensive than light rail, which is roughly ten times more expensive than buses. A bus loses to rail when it reaches the limit of how many passengers it can carry. You can add cars to a train and still have only one driver, but not so with a bus....Or can you?
The city of Curitiba Brazil (roughly Sacramento's size) got money to build a subway, and decided instead to invent a mult-section bus (called "Speedybus" or Bus Rapid Transit [BRT]). The city owns the stops, and improved them to look like train stations. Stations handle handicap access, rather than buses, and provide a comfortable, out-of-the-weather spot for passengers to wait. (see an example here)
So Curitiba, in a third-world country got an extensive bus system that works (i.e. *makes* money). Private firms own the buses, the public owns the stops and regulates fares. Last time I checked, nearly a million and a half passengers board these buses daily. Just FYI, Brazil's per-capita GDP is about 1/5th the U.S.'s...so they are very poor, but can afford a very nice bus system. Yes, intelligent public policy can be worthwhile!
More Curitiba stories: Mayor Jaime Lerner came to a Valley Vision conference a few years ago and described how he cleaned up Curitiba's harbor. It was full of discarded junk that would be very expensive to clean up, but he agreed to pay the fishing fleet the same amount per pound of junk retrieved that they got for fish during the fishing season. The harbor was cleaned at a fraction of the cost of hiring a salvage operation.
Since Brazil is very poor, people live in barrios with roads too narrow to let in garbage truck's. Lerner brought bags of food in trucks that would trade bags of food for bags of trash, and cleaned up the barrios. He also began a mentorship program so that public employees train and mentor poor kids to maintain Curitiba.
My personal favorite Curitiba story is about their parks. Rather than develop floodplain behind levees, the city bought it, and turned it into park land (and, as a consequence have one of the highest park acreage-to-population ratios). The city was still too poor to mow all this land, so they brought in the municipal sheep (whose wool funds other programs). In the U.S, we build levees and maintain them forever...both less-than-optimum and costly! (But I promise you, the land speculators make a profit.)
I've taken some time here to point out: a) the obvious solution--widening roads--does not cure congestion, and b) sometimes intelligent public policy can actually enrich the population. They get good value for their tax dollars.
I'll agree the "bullet train" is both second-rate technology (compared to Hyperloop, or even planes) and money ill spent. Just because we do it badly, or it's less-than-optimum spending on one project doesn't mean it's all bad, though.
Will the road repairs save tires and suspensions, not to mention the cost of road-induced accidents? Give the state of my tires (and that I just replaced my shocks) I'm inclined to believe it will. In other words, it's *cheaper* to pay the tax than not.
One final thought: Have you seen those self-righteous bumper stickers on big trucks like "This truck pays $50,000 a year in road-use taxes" (implying "look upon this mighty sum and be grateful, ye peasants!"). But have you ever wondered how much damage big trucks do to roads, and whether they are paying their own way? (Hint: they do more than $50K in damage-- one 18-wheeler is equivalent to 9600 cars says http://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and..., and those cars pay more than $5 [$50K/9600] each for riding the roads). So we're actually subsidizing trucks even if they pay $50K in taxes.
Of course the new SB1 tax won't nearly recover the incredible petroleum subsidies ($5.3 trilion worldwide, says the IMF, or $600 billion annually in the U.S. says the World Resources Institute [in 1989!]), and any genuine fan of markets will tell you that subsidies distort consumer behavior so consumers of petroleum over-consume...but hey, what's a few trillion among petroleum plutocrats.
So we can continue to carp about taxes, but until we figure out whether we're getting our money's worth for shared expenses, we're just old guys telling the kids to get off our lawn. We'll have less-than-optimum government as long as our input remains less-than-optimum too.
Just sayin'...
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