Debates on the expansion of public transit, the construction of cycling infrastructure, and restrictions on cars to create walkable communities inevitably come back to the question of public spending. The general discourse on these topics assumes that to make any of these choices would be costly because government would have to subsidize these alternatives, but the truth is the reverse: the quicker governments can get us out of cars and constrain auto-centric development, the more money it will save.
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| Anyone who refuses to accept that our society spends huge sums on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry either doesn't understand or refuses to accept the facts. |
Public transit not only involves public investment, but its operation tends to require an operating subsidy — the percentage of the trip cost not covered by fares. Those opposed to greater transit investment seize on this as an argument against transit — as evidence that it is inherently uneconomical and unworkable — but that ignores the massive public investment that was necessary to construct the infrastructure for automobility, and the ongoing subsidies that make it possible.
Suburbs, roads, highways, cars, oil and gas — these are just are few of the highly subsidized pieces that make auto-centric cities possible, yet we rarely recognize them as being subsidized.
Read the Radical Urbanist story by Paris Marx - “Cars Gets Billions in Hidden Subsidies.”
