I also have no idea why you think city dwellers are the primary contributors per capita to the Highway Trust Fund which is funded via a tax on fuel (i.e. miles driven).
There’s been somewhat of a continuous cycle of movement with the upper class of America that goes something like this:
1. Move in to the latest newly constructed suburb with low taxes and fresh housing stock
2. Infrastructure ages, tax rates increase, housing standards evolve, the upper class moves to the next new suburb built on former farm land
3. The inner suburb declines, becomes low-income, companies leave, and infrastructure crumbles. Municipal debt piles up, sometimes the city goes bankrupt.
This is especially obvious in cities where regional growth didn’t continue upward forever.
I recommend reading up on Strong Towns’ growth ponzi scheme content.
2. Shift taxes off of building (which punishes development) and onto the passive holding of land (which discourages idle land speculation)
In other words, change man's laws, not nature's.
I’ve had this hypotheses for a long time that the car is, at least economically, only incidentally about mobility. In reality it’s a tool for obtaining leverage in the real estate market.
Without sprawl urban landlords would have a captive audience and would extract all surplus. See: the law of rent.
I have a related hypothesis that the car drove the mid century middle class explosion in the US and some other countries, not by providing car jobs or any of the other conventional mechanisms but by allowing people to escape the law of rent.
Telework does this today for those who can use it, allowing people to leave high cost cities where good jobs are concentrated. The car did that until we reached the scaling limits of sprawl.
Also why I am a huge fan of Georgist taxation. Unfortunately we are moving in the opposite direction, taxing productivity and investment and wealth instead of taxing land and rent.
This is just false. The biggest cost in the suburbs is education. In the city cores, education costs exactly the same or more (per capita) but police services are the biggest expense. You are confusing the expenses of commercial property (where nobody lives) with residential property. But people still live in those urban cores and the expenses they generate are substantial.
May I introduce you to the budget for the MTA that is larger than the GDP of several countries?
Cities are _expensive_. Especially dense cities like NYC.
> Those big, wide areas out towards the fringes? They generate next to no tax income and cost a lot to maintain.
And this is the biggest lie.
These suburbs? They generate most of the wealth in the US because the most affluent people live there. Buildings don't produce value, _people_ do.
But much cheaper per capita than everyone owning a car, an acre, traveling long distances for everything, and providing infrastructure etc. for all those people. MTA provides 6.5 million rides per day (!). Imagine that in daily car trips.
https://www.mta.info/document/194491
The difference is that people need to put their money together and build shared resources like the subway, and then then some think it's more expensive because taxes and expenditures are higher. But you don't need a car, gas, insurance, etc.; the store is two blocks away; there is much more of everything. It works really well and people pay lots of extra money to live in much smaller spaces in cities.
No, it's not. One ride on MTA costs around $20. The average US commute is 40 miles (both ways), so that $20 is actually more expensive than the IRS value for car depreciation.
> MTA provides 6.5 million rides per day (!).
Easily. Look at Houston, TX. Then compare the cost of real estate between Houston and NYC. I suggest to look at the average square footage of residences.
Make sure you don't cry when you realize how much NYC is screwing with your perception.
> But you don't need a car, gas, insurance, etc.
Why are you assuming that subway is cheaper than a car?
? The subway is $3 and the most expensive bus is I think $7.xx [0], and those are without bulk purchase (e.g., monthly passes) or discounts (seniors, etc.). Do you mean something like the Long Island Railroad? That goes out to the suburbs; it's not much part of NYC density.
> The average US commute is 40 miles (both ways)
Do you mean 80 mi total?
The IRS milage depreciation number and is now 70 cents/mile [1] and doesn't include insurance. I'm not sure it includes overall depreciation of the car's value due to age (i.e., excluding milage?).
40 mi daily would be $28/day, 80 mi $56/day.
> Easily. Look at Houston, TX. Then compare the cost of real estate between Houston and NYC. I suggest to look at the average square footage of residences.
Square footage in NYC is smaller, of course, which has the side effect of density. Overall people far prefer NYC to Houston (based on supply and demand and prices). I'm not sure what your point is beyond that? Do you mean Houston has as many commuters as NYC? Obviously that's not true.
LA might be an example of something approaching NYC scale without much public transit.
[0] https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls
[1] https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/blog/calculating-vehicle-depr...
It's a lie. The true cost is around $20, and with capital expenses of new construction, it's closer to $30. Although pricing the capital construction cost is always tricky.
You just don't see the true cost in the _ticket_ price, because productive citizens in suburbs are forced to subsidize inner-city transit through taxes.
You can compute the true cost of a ride by trivially dividing the total yearly budget by the total number of trips.
> Do you mean 80 mi total?
No, 40 miles of total driving within a day.
> Square footage in NYC is smaller, of course, which has the side effect of density. Overall people far prefer NYC to Houston
No. People don't so much _choose_ as are forced to stay in NYC by economics mercilessly crushing them into dense shoebox-sized apartments.