Comment by bbor
11 hours ago
Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does
To be fair, it gets far more subsidies from the government in general by simple virtue of being a car, they're just A) longterm and thus assumed and B) less visible in general. So I'd say the connection between transit and controversial taxes is arbitrary, really--I'll grant you "convenient", but definitely not genuinely-so!
Portland car infrastructure in particular does get a little love from me just because of how damn impressive some of it is (namely the mountain passage to the west and the complex bridge interchanges on the east side) but it's still car infrastructure.
Road maintenance isn't a subsidy, it's a collective good that buses also benefit from along with many other types of human transport. This is separate from the cost to the government of running a bus system, which is exactly what large numbers of people really don't want to pay an additonal tax for and are therefore voting against.
If you only wanted to run buses, you would not build nearly as many roads as we do.
How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?
> by simple virtue of being a car
State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".
Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?
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Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric).
So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.
Good point about electric. Maybe a tax on tires would be more fair, but that would lead to some dangerous behavior.
Waymo and I pay a lot in state and federal taxes. Shouldn't that work out that we're paying for a shared resource we use even if the proportional accounting is not exact?
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