156
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
156 points (94.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
9580 readers
699 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Cars normally have a state level annual registration and various gas taxes that are slated to be used for road maintenance. So, that's actually somewhat true. That said, the cost of maintaining roads for cars far exceeds the amount of money generated by the current gas taxes.
What it also leaves out is that the primary cost of road maintenance is potholes and resurfacing. Protected bike lanes have barely any of those costs since what causes the damage is the weight of the cars.
It also leaves out that people who use their bikes for errands and work commuting generate commercial activity (and the taxes from it). Those taxes don't have to repave the bike lane over and over like a road, so it's much closer to pure profit for the city.
People in many communities around the world use bicycles for most of their daily errands. This includes grocery shopping, taking kids to activities, moving goods for work, and so on. They use trailers and Bakfiet style (https://bakfiets.nl/en-en) bikes, many of which are now electric assist so you can haul lots of material (or kids - I've seen 6 seaters for K-3 aged kids) at city scale distances.
For reference, the number I have seen is that for city roads, 70% comes from local taxes (property tax generally) on average. Potential cyclists are already more than paying for a fully equipped cycling infrastructure, it is just being used to subsidize driving and lock them into that
Protected bike lanes also keep regular car traffic moving more smoothly. By reducing the lanes, which reduces the ability of the (left lane speeder), who tailgates everyone thinking that the red-light ahead of them would have been green if they were driving faster. Single lane roads with turn lanes, keep traffic moving at a regular speed pace, which in many cases is better than a two lane road with zig-zagging cars.
As a public transit user, and a small car driver, I appreciate the smooth 20 > 40mph single lane roads with protected bike lanes, makes sense to me.
Well couldn't you just say the car taxes and such pay their way on the car road and the bikers "pay" for the bike lanes (which needs much less maintenance)? Just a rhetorical question, I'm guessing the people who make this argument never think this far.
Haha, you don't have to tell me, I live in Copenhagen and do that myself :)
There's no specific taxes on cyclists to help pay for the lanes I think is the reasoning. But it's silly regardless, by cycling you help improve streets in other ways - reducing need for maintenance, reducing traffic, freeing up parking etc. Cyclists and pedestrians are good for cars, too. It's just driving a car makes most people irrationally angry for some reason so all the benefits are lost on them.
I would love to get to Copenhagen. I spent a month in Berlin last summer and the sheer volume of cyclists stunned me. Compared to the last time I was there the rate of cycling was through the roof.
So many people were moving things on bikes and it was great. The city has also strongly discouraged downtown driving along Unter den Linden so even during work days it has lots of empty street at times. It has made the city much nicer to walk around in.
I've been trying to move to Europe for a couple of years now. Once I work out family issues I'll be there like a shot. It's a much more humanist place to be and I am ready for that kind of life.
You'll likely see even more bikes in Copenhagen haha! :D
Moving to Denmark is not easy though, especially if you're not in the EU. But it is possible.
I have seen some footage and the numbers on bike use in Copenhagen. You're kicking it out of the park.
I applied to Københavns Universitet, but didn't get the interview. So far my best luck has been Germany and Finland for faculty appointments. I'll get over there soon.
I wonder what tax could be limited to just bikers? Like all bike sales in the city? A tag system? Bike tolls? Personally property taxes of places connected by the lanes make the most sense to me. If its from a public transport stop maybe include that in that transport cost structure?
I don't think any specific tax is needed. Road maintenance is just an expense that should be paid through regular taxes.
Regular as in income,salesS/VAT, property?
Yea basically
Great writeup!
Only butting in to say that fiets is the singular, fietsen is the plural, so it's bakfiets not bakfiet.