INCENTIVES ARE IN THE WRONG PLACES Even if public transportation were to be made cheap, reliable, attractive, and safe across the board, the problem would not be solved. Improving public transportation systems is a very important factor in tipping the balance away from private use of automobiles and towards public use of large-volume vehicles, but is actually just one factor in a sea of misaligned incentives. People are pushed towards using private automobiles by a slew of incentives at all levels, which need to be exposed and removed. How can we envision a Green New Deal for Transportation that incentivizes more sustainable mechanisms for future transportation?
mandating that each building be accessible via public transportation. The reality is it wasn’t until 2017 that every single major city in the United States mandated a minimum number of parking spaces per building, in some respect, with Buffalo, New York being the first to remove this policy.39 The total number of parking spaces needed in an entire city to satisfy these requirements are staggering, and necessitate blocking off a huge proportion of land to be used only for parking. This forces the city to sprawl outwards, further exaggerating the need to drive. Put concisely, by Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, “minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars.�40
Minimum parking requirements force cities to sprawl. They exist almost ubiquitously across the urban American landscape. Cities mandate that each building must have a minimum number of parking spaces, usually dependent on the purpose of the building. Philadelphia for example, mandates that educational facilities must have one parking space per 1,000 square feet, hospitals must have one parking space for every four beds, and religious assemblies must have one parking space for every ten seats.38 Unsurprisingly, there is a lack of a parallel
Roads are a socialized risk that benefit drivers. A less direct but just as potent way in which citizens are incentivized to use private vehicles is the current way in which infrastructure is funded. With the exception of occasional tolls, roads and highways are largely free to use. Their construction and maintenance are paid for with tax dollars and are mostly independent of use. The federal gasoline tax attempts to remedy this problem, but less than half of road expenditures are covered using revenues from this tax.41 Subsidizing the use of roads and highways lowers the cost of owning and 18
