At 10:16 AM 8/30/2006, George J. Perkins wrote:
I wonder if mass transit and public transportation simply don't lend themselves to the liaise faire perspective?
No , it doesn't. But then neither does the status quo for transportation in this country - private vehicles on public thoroughfares.
If we really wanted to compare the benefits/costs of all possible means of transportation, we'd first need to remove all the gasoline taxes that fund federal, state, and county roads, as well as that portion of the property tax (or, in some states, general sales tax) that funds local roads. We'd also need to eliminate the general revenue funding that pays for police to enforce road rules, and the funding for emergency medical services to take away the bodies when drivers don't obey the rules, etc. etc. But I digress.
If we required the land developers (or the auto manufacturers, or pick your segment of the "free" market) to take on the whole cost of building and maintaining the transportation system. It's been that way before - the first bedroom suburbs in this country resulted from land developers building, operating, and maintaining a privately financed public transit system in order to make their land accessible to the public so that they would buy it. And did those developers build roads and sell cars along with homes? No, they built streetcar lines, because in the absence of government subsidies for a different mode (cars), the streetcars were way cheaper and more efficient.
chuck _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
