To be abundantly clear -- that's NOT a diss on people who choose to live in rural communities. Many of whom run meticulously efficient households. I admire yall, I respect yall.
I'm talking about public resources at the macro level.
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To be abundantly clear -- that's NOT a diss on people who choose to live in rural communities. Many of whom run meticulously efficient households. I admire yall, I respect yall.
I'm talking about public resources at the macro level.
Actually - when I pull my property tax receipts, then add in the taxes on the gasoline purchased annually - I'm already paying about a $0.04 a mile tax on each of the three vehicles I own and operate - on my vehicle alone I put 25,000 miles annually due to the rural setting I live inOriginally Posted by Champ967
Remember less than 15% of the people tote the bucket for over 85% of the population - always have an always will
''Don't be a bad dagh..."
As you know, I'm generally ok with that. (To a point ...)
But this started off as as discussion on parking. I'm not convinced that automobile owners are owed fully-subsidized, free-to-use automobile storage (and more broadly, automobile infrastructure) simply because they chose to live an auto-dependent life. It's just not a cost-effective use of resources.
(To be clear, I'm also automobile dependent. But you wont catch me grousing about parking.)
Free? LOL! There's nothing free about it. Taxes, fees, registrations, tolls, highway taxes, in this case state taxes for the "university", and more taxes, pay for that "free-to-use" automobile infrastructure. Back to the overall discussion point....it may or may not be the most "efficient" method of transportation, but it's certainly NOT FREE!
yes, that's exactly what we were discussing.
But because those things are heavily subsidized (and which even the "fiscally responsible" party continues to support), true market efficiency is not realized. It's still possible that that infrastructure is indeed worth it to some people and not to others (who don't use or benefit from it).
Rurally speaking developed roads were first established for military purposes by in large -
Then it was farm-to-market -
Then it shifted to school bus access and mail delivery (how and why most parish/county roads were developed) in conjunction with farm-to-market -
Most "local non-state & federal" roads are not "owned" by the local governing entity (even though- most are dedicated servitudes still owned by original land owners/developers) even though maintenance is supported by tax payer funding
In the not to distant past (early 1900s) the property owner was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the road on his property - if he did not keep it up he could be subject to fines or even jail time - but he could charge users a "fee/toll" for passage
Roads and the history of them are very interesting - especially since I'm basically the care-taker of over 880 miles of them in our parish road system
''Don't be a bad dagh..."
Roads = general public good
Paved, free-to-use roads = diminishing returns, public subsidies hide true life-cycle costs
Free parking = entitlement program
Last edited by Champ967; 08-28-2020 at 03:48 PM.
Is the parking around our athletic fields "free" parking?
I mean, it's all kind of fake money, right? If an alumnus buys a ticket, they're giving money to the school. If the school is maintaining the parking lot, it's all going to the same place (no matter how the accounting looks). Right?
Since access to stadium parking for football (& to a lesser extent basketball) is dictated by your LTAC donation, at some level you're paying for parking. So it's not free.
By "free parking" I mean free to use. I'd speculate that the true cost of such a paved lot remains obscured behind the sort of funny-money you describe. (Which means the price of something else, be it tickets or concessions has to be inflated accordingly to absorb it.) And I'd make the case that even a paid LTAC lot -- wherein the LTAC fees fully covered the lot's true life-cycle costs -- may still be an inefficient use of finite campus real estate.
Land has value. Automobile storage (esp. paved surface lots) will rarely provide greater than negligible return on the value of that land. Where land is abundant (ie. rural) and market value is low, it's a wash. But when land is scarce, be it on a campus or a city's limits, the returns almost immediately turn negative when you set aside land for parking. It's waste. When govt does it, it's an entitlement. When the private sector does it, it's a market inefficiency. When local ordinances require private landowners to provide it, it's both.
I get that providers of parking (be it Tech or Walgreens or what have you) believe they're responding to market demand. But there's a growing body of research indicating that parking lots do as much CREATE the demand for parking as respond to it. It's the same phenomenon you see when an urban highway is expanded, ostensibly to alleviate congestion -- it just fills up again. The highway didnt MEET demand; it stimulated it. Same with so many other free-to-use services. Pornhub doesnt meet the unmet demand for porn so much as it creates new addicts. Facebook doesnt meet the latent demand for quackery; it creates new nutjobs. Free-to-use parking, similarly, doesnt exist so people can park. Rather, people park because free-to-use parking exists. People drive places because they know it will be free to park when they get there. People buy cars and choose car-dependent lifestyles precisely because our roads and parking lots APPEAR free to use.
As HD and Tenacious et al correctly point out ... it's not really free. We hide the real costs of auto-infrastructure behind funny-money, be it LTAC fees, tuition hikes, the price of goods at the Target, bond-issues, gasoline taxes, etc. And that's without even touching on the item that started this conversation. The loss of human safety is by far the biggest cost in an auto-dependent society. In any conflict between an automobile and a human body, the car ALWAYS wins. As olddog75 noted, people will have to cross a six lane highway on foot. Why? Because we dont even conceive of any scenario other than single-family automobiles by which people will attend an athletic event. (Or go anyplace at all.)
Why is the live construction feed not on?
Has it been on since the storm? I know there were a lot of outages in the area.
I don’t think it has been on since the storm. Hope it returns soon!
No, the feeds been on after the storm. Pretty sure I checked in on it yesterday. But its down today.
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