I bet they will…

This, has always been so true.

“The problem with sidewalk space is that you can only walk so far. Enter rapid transit. Subways and other dedicated right-of-way transit options leverage the sidewalk economy, making it possible for people to opt out of the scarcity of the auto-road economy.”

I dig that thought btw. Very interesting a good way to think of transit as a “sidewalk/transit” economy.

It really doesn’t matter how much you want to use transit to get to work (or how much you’d really rather drive, for that matter); your employer pretty much makes the choice of mode for you when they decide where to set up shop.

Btw, for a genuine free-market (and pro-transit) view of transportation, I recommend the “Transit Sleuth” blog at:

http://adronbhall.com/blogs/my_transportation_obsession

As far as I have been able to discern (from regularly reading Streetsblog), the main hurdles to congestion pricing in New York are not technical.

Pro-congestion charging groups face some stiff political opposition. The same sort of opposition this type of proposal would face in L.A.

Regarding your statement about retail sales tax – these taxes ARE, in fact, heavily tied to transportation. Where transportation subsidies go (generally), retail sales follow. Witness the big box store – conveniently located next to a highway exit. Witness the withering of more traditional downtown cores – as automobile throughput is built into every local road, shunting customers onto the highway system.

As far as freight distributors and other region-focused industrial users go, location near the center of their region–which usually is the original CBD–is ideal. For Los Angeles this would be the DTLA-Vernon-Commerce corridor, which despite crumbling buildings and streets still has sky-high occupancy rates. Would the Fruit Market or the Flower Market, which primarily sell to Southern California, make sense anywhere else but Downtown? The Fashion District?

Uh … your little presentation only shows that in 2001 some source of highway dollars was not spent.

Calculating the costs of the automobile network is tricky to do. However, nearly any way you slice it, user fees do not come close to paying for the total cost of maintaining and expanding the auto transportation network.

So I don’t think you’ve debunked anything, homie.

Fred is making an argument that, if anything, private railways were just what libertarians claim to want. The association of automobiles with “freedom”, “consumer choice”, and “the marketplace” are, in fact, total fictions. Our automobile system is as socialist as the trains were in East Berlin.

Wrong. An awful lot of commercial carriers are in the business of distributing goods within urban areas. A relatively central location minimizes average trip length–which, in an environment of $4+ diesel, is vitally important.
We both are cheating. I said “city centers” where I believe congestion and use charges would be both the greatest and most variable. You said “urban areas” which indeed are the termini for the vast majority of commercial transport.

In support of my position “Urban Area” doesn’t seem a particularly useful metric given the near universal necessity to use UA roads to get anywhere while avoiding the center city lane miles is both possible and likely desireable.

They’re there to get you to the mall and back, and they do that by design, not by accident.