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Notes -
Buying a car is not literally mandated, but it's the only way to get around after zoning, parking minimums, lots of big roads with no alternative infrastructure, etc. (Actually in some cases, cars are literally the only legal way to get certain places--there's no sidewalk, bike lane, or transit, and the surrounding land is all roads or inaccessible).
Whether or not this incredibly vague statement is true, it still remains that "some people find that cars have more utility than costs" doesn't mean anything. The extent to which cars are subsidized could easily vary by quite a lot. If they were subsidized less then fewer people would use them. The reverse is also true.
That isn't what I said. I very specifically used some important words.
I think the burden is on you to prove they are "subsidized". Just saying "oh but costs!" doesn't cut it - everything has costs, every decision in a society has some costs. If you want to fundamentally reform US society so that it does not rely on car ownership, I think it's on you to prove these costs are higher than it is obvious. I think you didn't do that and didn't even seriously try to - that's what I tried to show. Just picking obvious and known to all facts like "cars need roads" and "some people dislike driving" is not nearly going to cut it - it's not even a good first step to cutting it. All these things - like roads, etc. - are already priced in, and the utility of the car is still way above costs. If you want to argue real costs are higher, you need to show it, not just vaguely hint at it.
US society was fundamentally reformed by at least the magnitude I would propose, starting after WW2. Are you interested in proving these changes (which, in many cases, my "radical" changes simply seek to undo) were a net positive? In my opinion, anyone who wants substantial government interference and subsidy is responsible for showing that those interventions are justified. Your argument is just status quo bias.
The costs of cars and car dependence aren't hard to find. Car pollution likely contributes to asthma (also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218136/ as another example, cars produce NO2 and contribute to ozone). Several thousand Americans are killed due to being hit by cars while walking or cycling every year (https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians). User fees only cover roughly half of road costs, etc.
Status quo bias is good. Status quo has been formed as a result of massive amount of choices and preferences of millions over millions of people. If you want to declare all of them were wrong - damn well I'll ask some proof for it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
That link talks about general pollution. There are many sources of NO2, which will not go away if you remove passenger cars. Moreover, in the same source, the leaders among asthma problems were not exactly the countries you'd pick as leaders in car usage: Peru, Nigeria, Colombia, China. Maybe generally bad pollution policies and bad medical care contribute much more to the problem?
You can see pedestrian deaths a) mainly occur in dense, urban environments - ones that you propose should become a model and b) has been steadily declining since 70s, even unadjusted by population - are we using much less cars than then? There is a certain bump after 2010, but it's hard to argue we didn't use much cars from 70s to 2010s and then suddenly started using a lot of them. Also, guess what, more than half of the cases have alcohol involved. I think with the development of technology, this number will further go down, but will never be zero, because if somebody drunk want to jump in front of a bus, there's not much that can stop them. But I don't think anybody can seriously argue it is a good argument for eliminating private cars - no more than thousands of Americans dying from drowning is an argument for banning pools.
You forget here private drivers aren't the only ones who use roads. How do you think bread and milk gets to your grocery store?
Also, I don't see how that calculation - which includes commuter parking tax benefits, government costs and imaginary uncompensated damages - can be taken at face value. I could prove arbitrary cost to anything this way. Say, I made a law to tax hats at 50%, but shoes at 0%, and then claim that if I taxed shoes at 50% too, that would cost billions to people that walk (which is true), so then I claim all these billions is a subsidy for walking. This would be an insane argument - absence of potential taxation is not the same as expense. Otherwise, as there is no natural limit for taxes, anything can be attributed any arbitrarily high cost by just pointing out it's not taxed by that number yet, even though it could be.
Oh, I see. You're not even trying to make a good argument. You're just saying whatever comes to mind. Well this is pointless then.
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