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Originally Posted by honte
I believe I side with Chicago3rd's overall notion here, if not some of the details... I think increased taxes on the toll roads will hurt the working poor, and as conditions continue to erode in the US, the middle class. Why? Because of proximity of affordable housing to jobs and the fact that in many cases mass transit is simply not workable.
If I live in Dalton and have to get to work near O'Hare, how efficient is it for me to take mass transit? Not so much, especially if I have a life to live with a family to raise etc. The high price of gas is already taking a disproportionate toll on the working poor due to simple percentages of their income levels.
Sure, we can effect change from the "bottom" up, but is this really a fair way to proceed? Just like we are supposedly now making a change on Wall Street (yeah, sure), only after thousands of unnamed Americans got duped into mortgages they can't afford. Not a good process at all, quite wrong if you ask me.
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I can sympathize with many of these arguments, but taken to a logical conclusion it means we're obligated to subsidize the transport costs of the working class regardless of their residence-workplace imbalance and mode choice decisions.
I'll extrapolate this logic further, just to be a bit provocative (not argumentative). The fellow going from Dalton to O'Hare really would have benefited from the Crosstown I-494, why not resurrect that plan to improve job accessibility for the working poor? Congestion impacts all drivers, but even moreso the one with long trips like our exemplar, here. If the working poor are impacted the most by congestion due to long trip lengths, aren't we then obligated to widen roads and build parallel routes to alleviate that impact?
Why stop there, why not use all the subsidy money spent for transit reconstruction and literally buy cars for the working poor? The ~$30 million spent to reconstruct each of the Pink Line stations serving only ~1,000 commuters a day could have purchased 5,000+ used cars to give or sell at subsidized price. Or, $30 million buys a heck of a lot of gasoline, or subsidized insurance, and so forth.
Where do we draw the line? I still maintain trying to have everyone pay their fair share is the most sound underlying philosophy for this. Land use policy has an important role, as there is a feedback loop between regional mode choice and land use patterns. The Canadian model, wherein Toronto rapid transit (steeply priced at $2.75) still draws significantly higher utilization than CTA while still obtaining greater than 80% cost recovery from fare revenue should be highly instructive. Both driving
and transit are underpriced in the USA.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ch. G
Thank god the real estate market demands its at least twenty dollars or there'd be even more of them littering the Loop than there already are.
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I think it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Higher parking prices (as driven by market demand) increase the underlying value of land dedicated to parking, meaning higher parking prices increase the pressure for there to be parking lots. If parking were cheap, there would indeed be an increase the quantity demanded but the road network couldn't handle it, and the high number of people heading to the destination would cause the land to be valued higher with some sort of commercial improvement., thereby limiting the supply of parking. There actually is a market equilibrium based on the demand to be at a certain location at a certain time and the available system capacity to get people there (roads+transit). Government policy can impact this somewhat, and tinker with the geographic distribution, but can't really alter the underlying supply/demand fundamentals in the short run. For example, back when the city forbade parking garages/lots in the Loop proper it just pushed these into the surrounding areas of West Loop, River North, South Loop, and so on, because the demand for parking near the Loop existed regardless of government policy and it became economical to bulldoze buildings on the Loop periphery to provide a supply of available parking. By doing so, however, the city did improve the competitiveness of transit for loop-bound trips, thus bolstering it's mode share somewhat. Things bottomed out through the 80s and 90s after the city allowed huge parking garages in the loop starting around '85 or '86, thereby gifting the current generation both the loss of countless historic structures on the Loop periphery
and striking a major blow to transit ridership that has only been clawed back over the last few years (on rail only, bus has yet to recover) - helped along by gas prices bottoming out after '83 or so which improved auto competitiveness with transit at the margins.