Cliptin said:
My basic issue with the problem as it stands right now is that I'm being asked to fund something that I will not use.
Here we have a perfect example of the way that most people misunderstand basic economics. It ain't like that
at all Cliptin.
On the face of things, that seems like a perfectly sensible point of view; something to balance up against Mercutio's argument that we all of us fund lots of things that we don't use: we all help pay for hospitals but many of us are not sick, we all help pay for schools but many of us don't have children, and so on.
However, we need not resort to Mercutio's argument (which is in itself quite valid nonetheless) to refute it, as it rests on a gross distortion of the economic facts of life. For every passenger that travels by
road, you (the taxpayer), pay too, and pay a great deal more than you pay for rail passengers. You are
already paying for road construction and maintenence, hospital care for people who injured in road accidents, health care for people who have pollution-related respiritory problems, massive police coverage (much more than rail needs), inflated land values because so large a part of our cities is taken up with unproductive pavement, even a number of quite obscure but in total financially significant expenses that result directly from road travel: for example, increased storm water and flood control costs because pavement has much faster run-off than forest or grass or housing, and increased water quality management expenses because the run-off contains a much higher number of particles. I mention this last 'obscure' cost not because it is in itself an enormous burden, but because it helps to highlight the enormous ramifications of our dependance on the motor car: motor vechicles push up the cost of all sorts of things that on first sight seem to be totally unrelated.
But there is more. You are
already paying the higher interest rates that are a direct consequence of your country's dependance on imported products to support the motor car - fuel is the most obvious of these but by no means the only one. Every imported product affects your balance of payments and thus the national debt, and the higher the debt rises the higher your central bank has to raise interest rates in order to attract enough foreign capital to fund that debt. And (more controversially, this one, but quite possibly equally true) you are
already paying for the world's most expensive military force, and a good deal of US military spending is (according to many observers) required in order to guarantee continued US access to foreign petroleum products. (Other car-dependant nations take other approaches to this same problem - in Europe it is common to spend the money on more diplomacy and more aid, as opposed to more fighter planes - but they still spend money in the hope of maintaining access to foreign oil, just spend it a different way.) And you are
already paying higher life insurance and medical insurance premiums because of the high rate of car accidents, the health effects of air pollution, and the increased stress levels that car drivers suffer as compared to public transport users (the stress leads, of course, to a greater number of heart attacks, strokes, and so on - and these all cost you money). And you are
already paying for a small but no doubt measurable decrease in national produtivity because of the lost production of those expensively-trained and highly skilled people who are killed or crippled early in their lives and never go on to make a contribution to the nation. Not to mention the vast numbers of people who spend their working lives dragging crash victims out of cars and trying to repair the damage - hell, there is
real work for our doctors and physiotherapists and mechanics to do.
I could go on, but it's late and there are already enough items for which you are already paying listed above to easily outweigh the very low cost of a decent public transport network. The point of rail systems is that they
save you money. Lots of money.