> Jordan:
>
>
> This is chicken-and-egg time: you have to have the
> infrastructure in place before you raise the tax, because
> raising the tax is an immediate hardship on those who you
> want to switch. In the US, we've pretty much found that
> there's an insensitivity to raising the cost of driving --
> but this is only because there is no alternative in most
> cases, so those at the bottom stop eating enough. That's a
> lousy idea, IMHO.
It is chicken and egg indeed in the other direction as well - people ear not using public transit because it is much cheaper to drive. To give you some examples: if drive from Baltimore to Harrisburg (my frequent commute route) I spend about $7 on gas both ways (approximately 180 miles). If I take Greyhound bus (the only transit available on this route) it will cost me $43 round trip. If I wanted to take a train to Philly that would be $80 round trip and still under $10 if I drove.
Now if take a heavily subsidized MARC train to DC, the round trip is $14 (approximately 92 miles) which is less than driving if I consider parking fees in DC ($20 a day or more). It does not take a PhD in economics to figure out how I (or for that matter anyone with even half a brain) travel to Harrisburg and how I travel do DC.
It simply does not make economic sense to take transit in this country and the reason is quite simple - driving is subsidized at a much higher rate than transit. Therefore, if the policy goal is to reduce emissions, traffic congestion or making transport more efficient and less costly, it makes perfect sense to increase cost of driving via gasoline tax - which is the most efficient way of toll collection - and subsidizing transit at a much higher rate thus lowering its cost.
To those who say that "infrastructure is not there" - this is simply not true. The infrastructure is either already there but underutilized (cf existing light rail and bus lines in many cities) because of insufficient demand, or can be put in place almost instantly. Greyhound can add buses to its routes in an instant if there is demand, and so can rail carriers and municipal transit companies. Extending the existing rail systems may take a bit longer but that is not fundamentally different than expanding the road system. In fact, it is more efficient vis a vis highways by the factor 1:4 (for each mile of a freeway one can build four miles of tracks).
Wojtek