Down three posts on this Blog, (“Transportation Snow Job in March”) fellow columnist James Atticus Bowden takes on those daemons (aka, evil doers) who are hell bent on raising taxes to pay for transportation “improvements.”
Almost no one likes to pay taxes but almost all say they want to improved access and mobility.
Some who commented on Mr. Bowden’s post are not sure he has all the facts and relationships straight but everyone would agree that he is stirring up a lot of bile and spilling a lot of ink and bites on the issue of taxes and transport.
There is a way to get beyond this conflict, aggravation and waste of time / resources. To do this citizens must look beyond the “tax issue” and get to the root cause of the mobility and access problem. Instead of fighting over the contentious issue of “taxes for transportation” about which there are many strongly held opinions, Mr. Bowden might focus his efforts on getting across a more focused and generic message. It might go something like the following:
No amount of money, regardless of how it is raised or distributed will alleviate community-scale, subregional-scale or New Urban Region-scale mobility and access dysfunction unless there is Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns so that a balance between vehicular travel demand and transport system capacity can be achieved.
No transportation professional can argue with this position. Even those who have hallucinations about the access and mobility “solution” being to scatter urban land uses across the Countryside cannot argue with the need to achieve a balance between transport system capacity and the travel demand generated by the human settlement pattern.
A sharp point can be put on this issue by checking out Mr. Bowden’s current column at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com . In “The Truth Shall Set You Free” Mr. Bowden argues that the cause of declining family disposable income is that “government” is collecting too many taxes.
Again his focus on “the tax issue” has pushed him a few clicks off target.
The core issue is that citizens and their governments have evolved a settlement pattern that is very expensive to support. For this reason, “government” is spending huge sums to subsidize imported energy and in an attempt to secure foreign sources of petroleum.
Even more important is that the costs of all location-variable goods and services continues to rise at an increasing rate. Beyond direct mobility and access costs, these expenditures include “public / utility” services such as energy, communications, water supply, waste disposal, education and health care. Citizens demand these services. “Government” has no choice to raise taxes to pay for them. Enterprises and institutions also most raise rates, fees and prices to pay for dysfunctional settlement patterns.
The place to focus on the issue of functional settlement patterns and a fair allocation of location-variable cost is in ones own community and in ones own New Urban Region. Mr. Bowden has chosen to live in a village-scale urban agglomeration called the City of Poquoson. From afar and based on Mr. Bowden’s own descriptions, it appears that Poquoson has the potential to become an Alpha Village. A fair allocation of location-dependent goods and services would greatly benefit Mr. Bowden and his fellow Poquosonians. By shifting to user-fee based charges instead of advalorem, sales or income “taxes” he and his village-mates could take advantage of Poquoson’s more efficient and functional human settlement patterns.
Attacking either party in the current the political duopoly that caused the current governance dysfunction is not likely to change the underlying problems. Attacking these issues at the nation-state, state and municipal levels with a shotgun is not likely to get much attention.
Unless citizens understand the root cause of issues that impact them every day like Regional Rigor Mortis and the Shelter Crisis they will continue to support more taxes to “solve the problem. Until they understand the causes of traffic congestion, the lack of affordable and accessible housing and other indicators of dysfunctional human settlement patterns, they will just pressure governance practitioners to provide services and the costs (aka, taxes) will continue to go up.
PROPERTY DYNAMICS is coming soon to an Alpha Neighborhood near you. It could come to a potential Alpha Village like Poquoson.
EMR
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