The toll isn't
likely to be a significant burden to wealthy people, and it is so
morally offencive to assert that rich folks in a hurry have more
pressing needs than poor folks in a hurry.
It is time for pay-per-view on the highway. I wouldn't sob too much
about the injustice to the poor re: tolls. They are already getting
screwed in a huge way vis-a-vis our national, state & local "free"
transportation policies. If you look at the stats from vtpi.org or
even the Us Dept of Energy, you'll find that the poor just don't
drive that much compared to the rich. Furthermore, of the miles they
do travel, a much larger percentage of their travel is on local
streets, as opposed to the rich who, on a daily basis, flee to the
suburbs via federally funded limited access roads. So tolls, won't
affect the poor anywhere near as much as conventional wisdom might
indicate. The wannabe egalitarian system of "free" highways is paid
for by everyone, yet, as the stats show, the poor can't access them
anyway. In the end, by making people pay more for these destructive
highways, they will use them less, and the impacts of pollution and
community division will be lessened. (And yes, these highways can be,
and have been, taken down.)
The upshot: The US highway system is already elitist in the most extreme.
Doubled? How about roughly 1/5-1/4 of that increase (23%, not Mike's
100% assertion)? (And how is that directly related to the editorial anyway?)
I said doubled, and I meant doubled. Go to the US DOE's
Transportation Energy Data Book:
http://cta.ornl.gov/data/chapter8.shtml and click on the spreadsheet
for Table 8.2. You'll find this little tidbit:
VMT/cap 1970: 5440
VMT/cap 2002: 9903
Now to project out to 2005 numbers, one might multiply that by the
average annual increase between 1992 & 2002 (1.2%) I come up with:
VMT/cap 2005: 10264
Ok, ok, so if you'd like to quibble about less than 6% when we are
talking of an order between 90 and 100%, please, feel free to wrap
yourself around that axle.
from _Wisconsin Energy Statistics 2004_:
Average annual miles per auto, Wisconsin/US
1970 10,980 / 9,892
...
2002 13,545 / 12,203
Of course, we are talking about two different data sets. You speak of
miles per auto. I speak of miles/capita. That becomes especially
meaningful when one realizes that *vehicles*/cap (more or less car
ownership per person) has gone up by +/- 75%, having gone from 0.481
in 1970 to 0.766 in 2002 (more today no doubt, but I'm tired of doing
my fractions). This should point out the major error in getting
wrapped around the axle about minutiae, and in the process missing
the big point: Overall energy consumption.
So VMT/cap has doubled (yeah, yeah, Bob, *nearly*), and vehicle
ownership has gone up by, approx 75% (yeah, yeah, you do the math,
Bob). And here's the big one that gets the hybrid people livid with
extreme protestation: most of the energy consumed in the average
automobile's lifecycle (yes, SUVs and hybrids alike) is consumed by
the time it arrives on the showroom floor; so if car ownership is
going up, while mileage goes up incrementally, we are actually losing
ground. Add to that the drastic decrease in carpooling, and Bob, I'd
say we have a problem. And it is a hell of a lot bigger than my math
skills. So I'll let you do all the math bringing those stats together.
Now that you've failed so miserably to debunk my main contention,
I'll put this out there for you to try to debunk. In the end, our
per capita energy consumption, for transportation purposes, has
*more* than doubled since 1970.
I think there is a saying, something about forests & trees....
Lessons not learned....
Analysis paralysis....
Etc, et cetera, et cetera....
(fwiw, same table shows that average gasoline economy went from 13+ to
22+ in that time period)
But you'll note that my point was the lesson learned in the 70s &
80s, not the time period you show, which brings us all the way from
the 70s to the 2000s. Of course we all know gas mileage has been
going down more recently. That wasn't the case back in the 80s. So
you might want to check your own math.
-Mike
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