Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities.
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
cyprien_g · 2h ago
Completely agree with you. I live in Montpellier, France, and we have had free public transportation for a year and a half, and it's very good. I definitely use my car less and take public transport more often.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
bluGill · 2h ago
> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
jewayne · 1h ago
I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?
mvieira38 · 1h ago
Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
mvieira38 · 1h ago
It's also false that transit prices are small, by the way, at least globally. Where I live (third world), taking the subway daily to and from work amounts to 14% of minimum wage
bluGill · 1h ago
Cars cost more than transit for most people. However transit is expensive no matter how you look at it. The money to run it much come from someplace.
mvieira38 · 36m ago
Yes, transit costs a total X. In the car regime everyone puts in a small amount towards public transit and roads and richer folk put high amounts towards cars, totalling X. In the public transit regime everyone puts in a medium amount towards roads and public transit, and a negligible amount of tradespeople and construction companies buy their work vehicles, totalling X.
You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true
bluGill · 14m ago
You shouldn't use X as your only variable as it sort of implies a fixed amount that is the same either way. However the systems are different and should have different costs.
mtalantikite · 1h ago
Here in NYC the transit fare is about 35% of the minimum hourly wage for a round trip. I'd guess it's still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car though.
ferguess_k · 1h ago
I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.
amanaplanacanal · 23m ago
You either surge the tax money on roads, or on public transit. Roads aren't free either.
MangoToupe · 1h ago
> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
bluGill · 1h ago
> Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
aqme28 · 1h ago
I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.
kccqzy · 1h ago
No it's absolutely not cheaper to drive your family into the city. You said owning+driving a car; did you really take into account ownership costs (maintenance, insurance etc) and driving costs (tolls, parking)? Just the cost of parking alone dwarfs the cost of the train.
colechristensen · 1h ago
Commuting as one person from Mountain View to SF was cheaper with a car including the total ownership cost of the car, nevermind the reasonable discount for "stuff I wand to do with my car other than commute".
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
bkettle · 1h ago
Riding Caltrain during peak hours is totally fine and not unpleasant at all, particularly with the new trains (I do it most days and am writing this comment while doing so)
colechristensen · 1h ago
I left California before the new trains were a thing, but peak hours going north starting in Mountain View meant standing room only tightly packed on the world's more unstable train cars.
ferguess_k · 1h ago
I think the biggest issue is cost. Also this is completely out of sense if the city doesn't have enough public transit. It's going to be outrageous in my city at least, and it already has a reasonably well public transit in NA.
komali2 · 2h ago
> and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
ferguess_k · 1h ago
Agree with dedicated bus lanes. But your attitude is problematic. You sounds like private cars are your enemies. Private car drivers, in a whole, are also public (just not public services). If you count them as your enemies, they will vote against you.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
mvieira38 · 2h ago
We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
jewayne · 1h ago
Actual Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems are in place all over the world, where there are physical barriers protecting the bus lane, and transit signal priority along the entire route. They work extremely well when they don't rely on motorists being on their best behavior.
amanaplanacanal · 21m ago
If they don't work where you live, it's because they are poorly designed.
dukoid · 2h ago
Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.
misja111 · 2h ago
I'm not sure if you're referring to the article, but that was about Ozone pollution.
In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
aaronmdjones · 1h ago
In the UK, VED is based on the vehicle's CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled under prescribed driving conditions. This means the registered keepers of EVs (and some hybrid ICE/EVs) pay nothing.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
connicpu · 1h ago
Some states in the US with large numbers of EV drivers are already kinda doing this. I now have to pay a flat EV tax on my registration, although it's still less than I'd pay annually in gas tax if I drove an ICE car.
lupusreal · 1h ago
Those taxes pay for road upkeep, as well as other state programs, but not carbon sequestration.
deepsun · 1h ago
Just tax fuel/electricity instead of car.
aaronmdjones · 58m ago
We also tax those already.
EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total.
hndamien · 51m ago
Tax them again!
SilverElfin · 1h ago
Why single out cars? I may like using cars to get to destinations. Maybe you walk but do other things that have various environmental impacts like having kids or buying trendy clothes or pick something else. It seems unfair to let some people externalize their life’s costs but charge others.
lucb1e · 1h ago
Nobody said to not apply the same elsewhere...
bevr1337 · 1h ago
> There is existing technology to extract co2
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
lupusreal · 1h ago
> As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
dfxm12 · 2h ago
Auto industry is pretty powerful, worldwide, but also particularly locally around Switzerland. I mean powerful enough to shape people's opinions and sway regulations.
pkulak · 1h ago
That is crazy to me that the country with a national identity built around trains also has a powerful car lobby. You really can’t escape it.
Vegenoid · 12m ago
Automobiles are extremely seductive. They offer a lot of benefit to an individual. The trouble comes when everyone is using cars, at which point their advantages to the individual are substantially diminished, and their harms to the populace substantially magnified. A thing like this is tough to stop, because by the time you really want to stop it, it's entrenched.
SkiFire13 · 2h ago
Because drivers are still a majority of the population, so this would be wildly unpopular
dfxm12 · 2h ago
Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.
sofixa · 2h ago
Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.
lclc · 1h ago
Yes, how horrible when people get to have a say. Where will this end? In the case of Switzerland, it's ending up as one of the wealthiest countries, with a median wealth of $182,248 per adult.
Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?
Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).
dkiebd · 1h ago
I completely reject the notion that direct democracy is bad because Politicians Know Better. It’s borderline if not completely authoritarian and frankly disgusting.
Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.
Avicebron · 1h ago
This issue with direct democracies is that the they can get out of hand pretty fast unless your population is somewhat homogenous and reasonable. Aka Switzerland. If you're too young to remember twitch plays Pokémon, that's direct democracy and it was wild.
A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.
dotancohen · 1h ago
Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.
Why do you double down on this when I specifically disregarded that aspect of your comment from my post?
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?
bondarchuk · 10m ago
Because I (different person btw) was curious about whether it was true, that's all, no further "agenda". There's some discussion on the talk page btw about whether or not it is indeed attributable to direct democracy btw.
rented_mule · 4m ago
> And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes
Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
komali2 · 2h ago
It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.
Geneva Metro area has a million people. Still could be a majority of people using public transit. If true, I suspect it's not the vast majority though Switzerland as a whole is still majority car commuters I think.
MangoToupe · 1h ago
I'm not sure I trust either consumers or market effects well enough to rationally move away from car usage.
theappsecguy · 2h ago
This is a very naive take. For one, we don't do this because a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country, good luck living without a car in Texas.
dukoid · 9m ago
I am not arguing against cars. I am just arguing against the "right" to pollute the environment without taking responsibility for adequate cleanup.
lucb1e · 1h ago
> a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
smsm42 · 1h ago
Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
bkettle · 1h ago
> So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
pkulak · 1h ago
That 61 cents doesn’t even come close to covering road maintenance, let alone pollution and every other negative externality of personal car use.
amanaplanacanal · 28m ago
I'm not familiar with how things are done in Europe, but in the US fuel taxes aren't enough to pay for road maintenance, let alone new construction and externalities like pollution. New construction is typically mostly done with federal grants (newly printed money) and pollution we all just breathe.
carlhjerpe · 1h ago
It is a different product, across the world. In Sweden you can't buy anything below 95 octane whereas I've seen 89 in Australia and 87 seems to be common in USA according to Claude.
Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap
striking · 1h ago
> An octane rating, or octane number, is a standard measure of a fuel's ability to withstand compression in an internal combustion engine without causing engine knocking. The higher the octane number, the more compression the fuel can withstand before detonating. Octane rating does not relate directly to the power output or the energy content of the fuel per unit mass or volume, but simply indicates the resistance to detonating under pressure without a spark.
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
carlhjerpe · 1h ago
It means we can run higher compression in our engines without engine knock, which means we can run our turbos and timing harder on a smaller dispacement engine without ruining it, meaning more efficient engines.
Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8
American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.
striking · 56m ago
I'd love to know which new big block naturally aspirated American cars don't recommend premium fuel. I think the low octane fuel is really only there for the older cars (and for folks who don't understand octane ratings).
carlhjerpe · 44m ago
Recommendations only do so much, 80% of sales are crap fuel.
Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.
roflmaostc · 2h ago
I live in Lausanne and also noticed that the air looks quite hazy these days.
But the MeteoSwiss weather app does not indicate any high levels of bad air quality.
Notably, ozone shows a value of 90µm/m^3 around Geneva. The article states 180µm/m^3.
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
AshamedCaptain · 3h ago
For the record this is already par for the course for all the French cities surrounding Geneve.
paulette449 · 2h ago
Yes, true here in Lyon, 2hrs away from Geneva.
docdeek · 2h ago
Is it true in Lyon? I was under the impression that there was a special ticket to buy on peak pollution days but it was not free.
elashri · 2h ago
Ironically the small French cities next to Geneva are served by the TPG, the operator of busses in Geneva. And they don't have good coverage because of that.
They are the only public transportation available.
thmsths · 2h ago
How effective do they expect a measure like this to be? Once a car and its insurance are paid for, the marginal cost of a single trip is quite low. I seriously wonder how many people woke up that day and thought "instead of driving I will take the train today because they are waiving the $3 fee" not many I bet. If we want to encourage people to take public transports we need to keep them competitive against the car at all times not one random week per year.
Kapura · 2h ago
Maybe you don't see it, but many folks would value the pro-social benefit as being worth more than the marginal costs of driving a car. Like, for instance, if you're living through a spike in pollution, you may be motivated to do your part to help.
bluGill · 2h ago
It might be enough to get someone to try transit and see that it actually does work. If you are used to driving everywhere and have never used transit then you won't actually know how it works. Routes, timing, transfers, missing the bus... - there are a lot of things that are different about using transit, none of it hard, but all of it needs to be learned. Free transit may be enough to get you to try it once (exactly once!), and if transit works that will be enough that you become willing to figure out how to buy the fare in the future.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
stetrain · 1h ago
I think there is also a PR factor beyond the market economics of the $3 discount. Announcing the free transit alongside the pollution spike will get more people to read about it and consider whether they should make the choice to help with the pollution spike by taking transit.
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
bkettle · 1h ago
When I actually calculate the gas cost for a trip in a car, I am usually surprised at how large it can be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3 actually is less than the gas cost for many affected commutes.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
colechristensen · 1h ago
The $3 -> wouldn't motivate a lot of people, it's more like the cherry on top of asking folks nicely to drive less.
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
tokioyoyo · 1h ago
Cultural differences. Think of pandemic days, and how each country/city operated. Despite having almost no official lockdowns, Tokyo operated in self-induced lockdown style as people didn’t really want to exacerbate the problem. It was kind of the opposite in other places.
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
komali2 · 2h ago
This is excellent, but I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
dkiebd · 1h ago
> I always wonder at the way cities seem to bend over backwards for the worst technology for moving people ever invented, and don't dare do anything that deprioritizing the use of this technology.
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
bkettle · 1h ago
The rest of the comment gives some pretty nice examples of how bad cars are from a land use perspective alone
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment. Especially given that Geneva labor market skews heavily towards specialized office jobs like diplomats, banking and pharma where most time is spent in front of the PC and on Teams/Zoom calls anyway.
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
mvieira38 · 31m ago
Well put. Easy pollution-reducing policies are all under our noses but governments chicken out of implementing them for whatever reason. Office workers having at least one mandated day of remote work would be a godsend, and it's very noticeable post-pandemic how much nicer the cities where this is unofficially implemented are on fridays
ferguess_k · 1h ago
> OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
insane_dreamer · 2h ago
Not sure it will make a difference to people's travel habits; I think those inclined to take public transport already do so.
But it does highlight the fact that we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.), so why not public transport?
ferguess_k · 1h ago
What do you mean "subsidizing private transport"? I'm sorry but "your tax" also includes the tax paid by people who drive private cars. And since most public transit companies don't break even anyway (at least in Canada), it is the private drivers that are paying for the public.
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total.
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?
Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).
Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.
A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?
Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
https://opendata.tpg.ch/pages/accueil/
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8
American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1270-dece...
Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
They are the only public transportation available.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
Here, I found some street parking for cars: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Quai+Turrettini/@46.205451...
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
But it does highlight the fact that we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.), so why not public transport?