By that logic, we shouldn’t subsidize healthcare because it will incentivize people to get sick. You’re making the same case for EVs: we shouldn’t subsidize EVs because then people will buy and use them. But that outcome will be much better than the status quo, in which we’re contributing to the destruction of our own viable habitat with ICE vehicles. Just like subsidizing healthcare is an improvement over the current state, where people hold off seeking care until they are in a medical crisis and their case is hundreds of times more expensive.
Only if you believe having healthcare causes people to get sick.
What subsidizing healthcare does do is encourage people to go to the doctor when they are sick, providing a net benefit to society.
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As does subsidizing the switch to EVs, which helps us move away from fossil fuels and their carbon footprint.
I never said we shouldn’t incentivize the switch to EVs. I just said that people who choose to drive private vehicles should pay a larger portion of road maintenance than people who don’t. That goes for both EVs and ICEs.
Ah. Then we disagree. Just like people who don’t have kids benefit from public schools, people who don’t have cars benefit from roads and shouldn’t be able to push the cost of that benefit off on others.
I might be more inclined to agree with “everyone should pay the same amount for road maintenance whether they choose to drive or not” if all public transit was free to use.
As it stands, people who take a train pay more toward the cost of rail infrastructure (in the form of a train ticket) than people who don’t. So if we funded roads through general taxes but continued charging people who take transit we’d effectively be creating financial incentives for the least responsible forms of transportation.
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Ammonia is looking very promising for cargo ship fuel, though, but that’s a very different use case. 
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I would agree completely that, in parallel to funding infrastructure for EVs, we need to fund and subsidize more and better public transportation. I live in an area that supposedly has excellent public transportation (for the US West Coast) and yet it’s infeasible for me to use it to commute.
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No worries:
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Daily Caller huh? Something something, stopped clocks…
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The grid should be managed publicly, I think, and that needs serious upgrading, but power generation doesn’t necessarily need to be monopolized, and in many places isn’t. I think separating those is valuable.
@LurksNoMore Ammonia is also one of the most promising ways of transporting hydrogen (by ship, over land pipelines are likely better), and hydrogen really is more promising than battery electric for trucks as well as ships. Also, for replacing fossil fuels for generating high heat in industrial processes, and for direct use in some industrial processes for reduction.
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Also, we should keep in mind that road wear scales approximately with the fourth power of weight, not linearly. So a single semi truck, weighing in at let’s say 50,000 pounds (10k lbs/axle, about 4x as much as an SUV) would cause 256x as much road wear as an SUV per mile driven. It does not use anywhere near that much fuel, of course, which means our current system of relying on fuel taxes already means the average vehicle is subsidizing the heaviest gas-guzzlers and commercial vehicles.
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That’s an issue, but it’s partially offset by the fact that commercial vehicles in California already do pay an additional fee based on weight. And those fees can be significant. One of my co-workers got rid of a large truck (classified as a commercial vehicle even though he had it for personal use) for that reason.
Fortunately large commercial vehicles tend to not do a whole lot of traveling on smaller residential roads, so at the neighborhood level road wear tends to be driven by personal vehicles, not commercial traffic.
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