Subsidy of Drivers Redux

From Streetsblog:

....Road space is scarce -- that is, not unlimited. It therefore has a positive value, which should be reflected in a market price. If it isn’t -- if prices are fixed at zero (as is the case with most roads) -- then a shortage will result. This is well understood; if the president attempted to fix the price of any other good at a below market rate, libertarians would cry foul and immediately argue that shortages would result. Yet when free roads produce congestion, they conclude that the best solution is to spend taxpayer money on more roads.

...backdoor subsidies to driving have been rampant. An example -- most communities have rules establishing minimum parking requirements for new construction. Cheap and plentiful parking is a significant subsidy to driving, and such parking requirements make it difficult or impossible to build more compact and walkable streetscapes.

... government has intervened heavily to create the road network so beloved by libertarians, and the country continues to bear heavy costs as a result. Any clear-eyed examination of costs and benefits will indicate that the time to rebalance investments away from highways and toward transit is long overdue.

Voinovich Advocates for Gas Tax Hike

The highway trust fund is going broke.

I seem to remember that Voinovich has said he will not run for the Senate again. If that is true, then it seems that he is now free to say what he really thinks.

Roads Are Subsidized Too

...with their taxes. All transportation is subsidized by taxpayers:

...no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.
...
So that’s a 16% cost recovery ratio for your basic non-toll highway. For constrast, Metrorail recovers about 81% of its costs (operating only; not construction).

Property Taxes Due

If you are a property owner in Hamilton County, then you just recieved your annual invoice from Robert A. Goering. I'm posting this information for non-property owners, so they can see what we pay, and what it is spent on. For an in-city $100,000 house, the breakdown is something like below.

Item Funded	Dollars	Percent of Total Tax
Schools	450.00	16.8
City of Cincinnati	2075.00	77.8
Vocational School County Gen Fund	20.00	0.75
County Voted Bond Debt	1.25	0.05
Drake Hospital	6.80	0.25
Indegent Hospital	22.00	0.82
Mental Health	17.44	0.65
Mental Retardation	29.40	1.10
Park District	8.06	0.30
Crime Info Center	1.10	0.04
Children Services	19.75	0.74
Senior Services	10.00	0.38
Zoo	3.36	0.13
Museum Center	1.62	0.06
Total Property Tax	2667.22	2.6% of home value

Call me a liberal Democrat, but the amounts seem reasonable to me. $450 for public schools. $2000 for streets, garbage collection, police and all the other things the City provides? Of course they also get income tax, and the county also gets a sales tax.

And certainly, many people live in houses, condos and apartments that are worth more than $100,000, and the tax is increased proportionally.

Is the County Voted Bond Debt the Stadium projects?