Obama wants to raise gas pricesFollow

Fair enough. Hypocrisy, IOKIYAR.

Looks like you were at least trying to put together a sentence there.

He can claim whatever he likes in the aftermath, I have a smug sense of satisfaction that one of us which is not me is a dumbass.

Interesting, never seen that usage before. I'll rescind that comment then. Hey, at least I finally learned something from Moe!

Actually that's not entirely fair. Thanks Eske, Moe didn't technically help.



Edited, Mar 11th 2011 7:43pm by bsphil

I assume you meant that they don't commute using cars as much as Americans.

So... Do you think that gas prices in Europe are higher because Europeans don't drive cars as much, or do you think Europeans don't drive cars as much because the gas prices are higher?



If it cost you 4 times as much for gas, would you be forced to change how you travel, or change where you live in relation to where you work and/or go to school?

Edited, Mar 11th 2011 6:03pm by gbaji

No, Europe has traditionally been well served by public transportation because it developed naturally alongside the automobile there prior to today's modern fuel prices & taxes.

*Chuckle*

It's just simply more dense.

Europeans generally don't commute the distance Americans do, from my understanding. I drive around 60 miles per day at an absolute minimum. My commute really isn't the worst of the worst, but it's pretty annoying.

It's just a different form of freedom of mobility: the sort where one very well packed trunk can take you anywhere on trains and busses. My sister spent a year studying in France. Most Western Europeans seem to speak 4-5 languages fluently as a minimum, and travel around lots. My sister made friends who dragged her for weekends and weeks in Portugal, bussing through Spain and eating in cheap and cheerful courtyards, tramping and drinking through Ireland. Swimming and sunbaking in the Greek islands. She went skiing in Switzerland, and has a $300 a head meal in one of France's most exclusive restaurants for her 21st. (she said the style wasn't really what she liked in food.)

She maintained good grades, but not what she could have achieved if she'd spent all the time studying. Instead she gave much attention to the movable cultural and social feast that is Western Europe and matured as an adult 5 years worth in a years time.

Europe's public transport is flooded with tourists as well as locals. There's enough of it running often enough to and from the right places to be useful.

Yes. I said as much. What I'm getting at is that the type of transportation that is available and/or encouraged by the government tends to also influence where people live and thus the density of the resulting communities. Mass transit works best in high density areas, so by encouraging mass transit, the government is also encouraging people to live in high density areas.

Cars are most cost effective when people live in lower density areas. Thus, by discouraging the use of cars (by say increasing the cost of gas), the government is also discouraging people from living in less dense areas. There's an obvious social engineering component to this.

Edited, Mar 14th 2011 2:20pm by gbaji

We've had this discussion before. The government doesn't "pay" for those things though. The people who live in those communities do. Suburban communities are a net positive in terms of government money collected versus government money spent. The developments, including most of the laying of asphalt are paid for by private money. Including paying for the street lights, the water mains, electricity and cable, and a ton of other stuff that the government wouldn't be able to afford to run. The excess goes back to the dense mass-transit ruled areas that the government taxes maintain.

Guess what? Those areas are run down, high noise, high crime, and largely horrible places to live. I could sit here and complain that so much of the money that I pay to live where I live also gets siphoned off to pay for the dilapidated streets and services and schools in those poorer areas, but I'm not a libertarian. However, it does bother me when people complain in the other direction as though my community is taking away from those we pay to support, or when others want to take yet more money from people like me to force yet more people to live in the communities at the other end of the siphon.


It's that siphon process which eliminates the ranges in between and makes upward mobility harder.

Bait and switch Joph. I was talking about forming communities. Specifically high density urban versus lower density suburban. It's not the interstate highways that make those communities form one way or the other, but the surface streets (and local freeways) and infrastructure choices which do.

In terms of how people move from one community to another, the arguments for highways versus rails is legitimate. But in terms of how people move about within a community, that's a different matter. We were discussing commute differences between Europe and the US. That's not about where towns are relative to each other at all.



You don't agree that by artificially increasing gas prices, the government will discourage private car ownership and use, and that this will increase the reliance of the population on mass transit to get from place to place? You don't agree that this will cause communities to form into more dense forms where most of the places you need to get to are within walking or bus/light-rail distance?

And you don't agree that this has obvious social engineering aspects? Really? Seems like those liberal blinders are on nice and tight.

I wasn't aware that simply running an interstate highway through an area counted as "encouraging" the building of a community there. Wow! There should be suburbs everywhere then, what with the government encouraging everyone to build communities all along those stretches of highway!

Er. No. There aren't, are there?



Pot to Kettle, right? You're funny when you backpedal.




If we restrict ourselves to major highways? Absolutely not. There's no reason why connecting highways between towns would impact the makeup of the towns themselves, and certainly not the building layout, building types, inter-city transportation methodologies, or any of the things we normally use to differentiate an urban versus suburban environment.


I was responding to a statement that populations tend to be more dense in Europe, thus reducing the need to own a car. That's not about whether there's a highway or rail line connecting your town to the next one. That's about how close most people are to the places they go most of the time. Those are two completely different aspects to this issue and you know it. Or at least you should know it.



Show me were tax dollars are being collected from the densely packed urban communities to pay for the roadways and infrastructure in the suburbs, and you'll have a point.

Oh wait! You don't. Because the money flow goes the other way around.

Joph. You realize that your current argument requires that my argument be true, right? You aren't actually arguing against the idea that government funding for various types of transportation affect the makeup of the communities those transportation dollars affect, you're just making some bizarre attempt to argue where the funding is going currently.


Um. Doesn't matter. I don't think that tightly packed urban environments are good places for humans to live. I think it creates crime, and makes people more dependent on social services. Thus, I oppose the use of transportation dollars in ways that encourage those sorts of communities. I'm frankly not sure how or why you think arguing about how much money we pay to build highways in any way weakens my position here.


You do this sort of weird logic all the time btw. Same deal with the "I'm not going to argue *for* funding for NPR, but shift to arguing that oil companies get funding too!" thing. You don't argue for your position or against mine, but just pick some side thing you think I will argue against you on and try to make that the focus of discussion. I don't care whether or not more money goes to highways than fast rail and light rail projects. I *want* there to be more on highways and big wide suburban streets. Or have you failed to get this?