The reasons for this are complicated and nuanced though.
Governments think they push the financial burden of transport maintenance on the people (and its a good tool to register and control people too, but thats not a strong consideration I wouldn’t wager), so they fervently cut spending on public transport and curtail cycling infrastructure in favour of cars.
But roads themselves operate at a crazy financial loss and are one of the reasons governments are in crazy debt (which nobody wants to acknowledge).
This is because road maintenance is significantly more expensive than building new roads. Which means that road use becomes heavily subsidised (much more than trains cost per user) but the cost of vehicle ownership, despite that heavy subsidy, is still enormous and one of the largest expenses an average person can have.
Blocking a bus route has a large knock on effect, same for trains, and nobody is taking a bicycle away from you either.
Is it? People love to have personal sovereignty over their transportation, given the choice.
"The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) is a rule of thumb which states that the damage to the road caused by a motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load. This law was discovered in the course of a series of scientific experiments in the United States in the late 1950s and was decisive for the development of standard construction methods in road construction."
"Example: Car (total weight 2 tonnes, 2 axles): load per axle: 1 tonnes vs Truck (total weight 30 tonnes, 3 axles): load per axle: 10 tonnes. [...] The resulting damage differential between truck and car is 15,000 to 1"
PS: this is something electric car proponents don't talk much about
I hope trucks transporting fuel for ICEs get equal treatment.
- Train capacity is much, much higher. You couldn't have the density of France, the Netherlands or even NYC without most people travelling by train. LA struggles with 1/10th of the density.
In fact in the UK you would be forced to aggregate all fuel and road tax and offset it against road maintenance because there is no direct correlation to be made, as tax is “one big bucket”.
The majority of the planet are going from one point of interest to another at a relative constant rate- but yes people are spread further and further- ironically this is helped by requiring huge parking space everywhere anyone needs to go, and needing huge houses so you can park multiple cars outside. Its a self-reinforcing problem.
(This is most evident when comparing cities like Malmö in Sweden with Orlando, FL. Malmö has a higher total population but approximately 1/20th the road surface- yet in Orlando I kept bumping into the same people everywhere I went because we’d all drive to the same Restaurants and Shops; and despite that happening we had to drive 20-25 minutes to get there! Weird coincidence or natural concentration points? Someone smarter than me would have to say).
Just to be clear, there's no specific "road tax" in the UK - it was abolished in 1937. Instead general taxation (e.g. income tax) pays for roads.
Your point about places becoming further apart has been made by Cory Doctorow who refers to it as "geometry hates cars".
Edit: found the Cory link - you might find it interesting, but I suspect it's detailing what you already know
https://thewaroncars.org/transcript-episode-79-the-end-of-ub...
While this is _technically_ correct, most powered vehicles on UK roads have to pay Vehicle Excise Duty, which is popularly known as "road tax".
Of course, with the 4th power weight relationship with road damage, ordinary cars are not really causing much damage compared to buses and trucks, so maybe it's better to state that we're subsidising logistics companies.
Problem? It is THE BEST solution we have. Any suggested alternatives are worse and less convenient.
Yes, it gets cold in the winter in Sweden- and I sometimes have to wear rainware. But the lack of noise, huge highways and being able to walk if necessary is such a crazy feeling of freedom that you can't possibly imagine.
I literally mean, you cannot imagine.
Being able to drink a beer, and then walk with a friend in the evening with my bike in hand, being able to park anywhere at any time, and being able to replace/fix my bike with no money (or, even buy a new bike without crazy paperwork or registration or licensing for my ability to drive it).
Not having anxiety about paying for parking, fuel or ensuring that I have a place to park, not to mention the lack of abusive road-rage folks.
I've lived in other places, and I've visited supposed "car-utopias" where everything is built to "great" standards and honestly the quality of life is just many orders of magnitude inferior. I've never been to the US and stayed in a nice quiet house without it being 30 minutes drive (in stop/start traffic and with aggressive drivers who cut you off) from anything of any value.
So, no, it's not the best option. It's the best option you can think of.
I'm in Canada, not the US, so maybe it's slightly different. But where I live seems quiet. Comparable to the country at worst, where I lived on a through-road to a beach. It's a suburb but I could walk to a grocery store in like 10 minutes, if that counts as something of value.
> in stop/start traffic and with aggressive drivers who cut you off
The stop and go can be bad during rush-hour near major highways, true. But aggressive drivers sounds like a one off bad experience, or lack of experience driving. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but they're an exception not the norm.
> So, no, it's not the best option. It's the best option you can think of.
I'd argue a general solution is better than one that only works for some people.
I wouldn't consider a 25 minute commute while being exposed to freezing rain or heatstroke weather to be the best in any way.
Before I could afford to live in the city, I had A 40 minute commute when the roads weren't closed from snow. That's basically impossible on a bike.
Corporations demanding payment for everything at whatever margin they want is little different than taxation without representation and local cops shaking people down for money at random; just different legal semantics
Without competition you are talking about a monopoly and it is your government that is responsible for mitigating its effects. The government that you elected.
The mechanisms are all there, they just need to be used+embraced.
There is inherently competition with entropy and just getting ourselves out of bed to deal with everything
Corporations and brands and tax codes are just culture war distractions on top of the raw physical competition; middle ages like words of power
The competition is with the physics that binds us to Earth; does it? Or are we just to distracted by rhetorical competition between legal constructs to embrace the levers of science
Rhetorical competition wrt to markets type blather is only seeking internal consistency with an arbitrary rhetorical framework. Not pushing the boundaries of engineering based on science.
Yall can have AI agents simulate Bloomberg terminals so actual physical scientists can focus on the necessities ground truth work you take for granted
Passenger rail also makes sense because the same economies of scale can help drive the prices down, and with enough coverage you get enough freedom of movement for 95% of people, with cars and other road transit bridging the last mile. Lots of countries do this very successfully, it's just not a glamorous business.
Specifically because of massive government investment in road infrastructure in preference of railways. This would be about like the government deciding to funds DCs directly...