Ah Max, that discreet charm of the tyranny of the majority.
Methinks, that people like what they are familiar with and dislike what is unfamiliar to them. Some 50 or so years ago, trolleys were most familiar and nad hard working GM exec knew it would be hard sell to persuade people to voluntarily abandon that familar mode of transportation and switch to the unfamilar automobile. So instead of relying on "democratic" mechanisms such as voting, these brave execs took a more radical step, and pulled the rug of familiarity from under the people's feet by dismantling the trolley system, and thus pushing them into the brave new world of automotive progress.
Well, what was good for America (and GM) back then, could be good for it now. Perhaps people need some armstwisting to lift their fat arses from their car seats and start using alternatives. That would help their cardiovascular system too.
In other words, the question is not whether social engineering, but whose social engineering.
>MBS: whomever's been selling you those passes to drive from Baltimore to
>Towson, stop paying the SOB.
>
>
And then face the MVA gestapo? I'm not ready for that.
But more seriously, the lack of public transit alternatives in B'more has been identified as one of the reasons of high unemplyment rates among urban blacks - most jobs are in the burbs and without a car it's difficult to get there. Having a car in B'more, otoh, means paying astronomical insurance rates, so it's a catch 22. You cannot get a job because you do not have a car, you do not have a car because you cannot afford insurance, and you cannot afford insurance because you do not have a job.
As to the squirrels, my own driving record so far has been exemplary (no dead animals on my conscience, that is, other than those I ate) - but driving through the countryside in Pennsylvania or upstate New York can be a sickening experience - as roads are virtually paved with roadkill, anything from squirrels to deer. As I was driving from York, PA last weekend I saw a decapitated deer on the roadside - that makes me wonder if some miscreant deliberately run over the deer to get the "trophy" or opportunistically stopped by the already run-over animal and sawed its head off.
MBS:
>it's all the same distributionally. Also, "luxury"
>is a little odd as a description of a mass-consumption
>item.
Of course private means of transportation is a luxury item - just as a private hospital room is. Which insurance will pay for the later? So why should my taxes subsidize someone's luxury of listening to Michael Bolton while getting to work? If someone wants that, then let's him pay for it.
I think that the problem with car subsidies become particularly serious when we take into account administrative fragmentation at the local level. For example, much of the road system and parking in B'more (and I presume, DC) is designed for commuters - yet most commuters live outside the city's jurisidiction and thus do not pay city taxes. So the city that has already financial problem in effect subsidizes the luxury of suburban commuters. Some employers, like Johns Hopkins, can be even as obnoxious as to ask for an exemption from city parking tax, on the grounds of their "nonprofit" (and that's in big quotation marks) status. Since most JHU employees commute (e.g. in my dept, only 3 including myself, out of some 50 people live in the city) - that is asking the city for a welfare handout for wealthy suburbanites.
wojtek