I attribute most of if not all of the following on that you seem to have a very limited and skewed idea of what the United States is actually like. Almost all of your posts insinuate that, because it worked in Europe, it'll work here without consequence. I can appreciate your participation as an intellectual exercise but in terms of practicality what you propose comes off like exactly what it is- someone on the outside, looking in, and saying "You should be trying this."
But the US STILL doesnt agree even with the idea of doing this.
So the fact that gasoline prices
have tripled in the last decade and continue to rise at rates too swiftly for a lot of people to afford suggests the US doesn't recognize that oil a.) is becoming more scarce and b.) should potentially be more expensive? It
is more expensive... what better way is there to accomplish the task of saying it should be more expensive, Christ.
, as I said above. This is not a new problem. The arabs caused a world economic crash by breaking the US monopoly and raising prices 30-40 years ago. The US ignored this warning.
The argument is that suddenly spiking gas prices through the roof in the US by making US citizens pay what people who live on an infinitesimal fraction of the land mass in the UK pay would cause a disruption to not only the economy but to our society in general that would take decades to fix. Your response to this is "Fuck it, it happened in the 70's?" We do our best to
avoid anarchy here regardless of whether or not it happened before.
Isnt that just what is needed if you have limited transport? Visiting a choice of stores is the luxury.
See, again, this is what I mean about a disconnect for you, not living anywhere near a US city. I'm not talking about Banana Republic and BMW Dealerships- I'm talking about places that provide the essentials. There
are no such stores in the peripherals of that particular town. If you have a family of four, work on the North side where the pay is higher and live on the south side,
but have no car? You've got a very, very difficult life in that everything is difficult for you- from paying bills to getting places on time, to doing simple things like grocery shopping (
not a "luxury" like a summers drive from London to Aylesbury in an Aston Martin.)
which will no longer be best paying taking into account transport...
You're speaking very casually about up-ending an economy and you're speaking about it as though businesses and infrastructure just magically change once they're entrenched in a citys development. Again, the example given was a standard American city,
not a super wealthy international tourist destination with impressive landmarks and the Queen.
Funnily enough people and freight actually do drive right across europe just as they drive right across the US. People have a legal right to live in any EU state they fancy and move freely between them, just like the US.
This seems like a pretty thick thing to suggest.
BBC NEWS | UK | UK commute 'longest in Europe'
The
longest commute in Europe is in Britain. 8.5 fucking miles. To get to my mother's house on the outskirts of my hometown (where housing is nicer yet more affordable) to
any retail destination (food, clothes, really anything) is 10.2 miles. To get to "choice grocery stores" is even further. To get the finest of the fine (a Wal-Mart) you have to drive almost 20 miles.
BTS | October 2003 - Volume 3, Issue 4
The average American commuter travels almost double what the average UK resident travels just to get to work. That doesn't include what you're deeming luxuries like paying bills, washing laundry, and and getting food to eat. And god forbid anyone should ever be able to afford the gas to go off the beaten path and visit a shopping mall once in a while.
You've insinuated that people just jaunt across Europe in a whimsical free for all and I'm sure
there are people who do. They, however, are the exception and not the rule. People aren't
commuting in mass numbers, on a daily basis, from Britain to Italy or France or Germany... not that that's relevant to what I said before anyway, since no one in the US commutes that far either. I bring it up because you make it sound like you don't understand that the US is a larger land mass than the UK... like because people go to the EU from the UK, it's the same size. That isn't the case... otherwise, I'm going to add on Canada and Mexico to this conversation since commerce (and people for that matter) travel back and forth between the US and those countries equally as freely. North America is twice the size of Europe.
So in summation; our drive times are longer, the distance we drive on a regular basis to get to work is further, and our infrastructure isn't designed for the radical change you suggest or for the European model you don't seem to grasp isn't applicable here.
Again, I do appreciate this as an intellectual exercise, but there are nuances and complexities to issues like this that no doubt escape someone without any first hand knowledge of our society. Certain propositions and suggestions come off as almost... ignorant when presented from that perspective. This is "I could fix that in ten minutes" syndrome and all I can say is that if it
really were so simple as you've suggested, we wouldn't be facing the issues we are.
JSZ