Maybe Real Solutions and No More Damned Band Aid Fixes?

I think I'm voting for Texas on that note.  I'm sitting in Centralia, Washington enjoying a great breakfast at the Olympic Club and I overhear a conversation on this topic.  An older group of couples are sitting at a table near me discussing a wreck that they where in (not an accident, user error again, as is the case 98% of the time) down in Texas.

The roads are designed for fast throughput.  Mind you not for throughput peak, but for a throughput at high speed near 40-60mph.  This makes the roads extra dangerous.  In addition to that in Texas the drivers are generally more hostile, it is Texas and it IS freaking hot there.  This makes the drivers more aggressive on more dangerous roads.  Now throw on top of that the fact that almost the entire nation exceeds speed limits 90% of the time.  Some people only exceed the limits by 5-10mph, another 10-20% (I forget the exact stat) exceed the speed limit 10-30mph over the posted limit.  Now all of these issues, aren't really issues except here in the US.  It is American drivers that make these conditions a problem, in Germany and Japan these conditions are not a problem.  This is one place where America has a SERIOUS problem of not learning from a superior utilization of roadways by our German and Japanese allies.

The Germans and Japanese commonly have people travel in excess of 100mph, Germany even has areas that approach 150mph.  Of course they go by kilometers but I'll stick to miles per hour for clarity of my US readers.

So the icing on the cake that makes the above mentioned items dangerous is our incompetent training, our lackluster licensing, and the gregarious idea that roads should be provided "free" to the masses.  Speeding is obviously not an issue, fast roads aren't an issue, lots of cars aren't an issue to safety.  These facts are proven by Japan and Germany daily.  No matter how many propaganda idiot films the feds, state, police, state troopers, and sheriff offices put together, they sugar coat the fact that speed isn't the underlying cause of wrecks, it is the lack of American driver ability that causes speed to be dangerous for Americans, not speed to be dangerous.

It really pisses me off the stupid approaches to this we have.  In the US we haven't done anything about licensing, we still act like anyone and everyone should be allowed to drive, and the list of idiotic policy and rules goes on as long as I could ramble (that is hours by the way).  The overall incompetent approach to this in the US leaves us as the most dangerous bunch of idiots plunking around in automobiles of all truly developed nations (just use Germany, Japan, or even England as a prime example).  We could easily resolve the majority of traffic incidents by fixing our licensing and training issues we have here.

Another Topic - Auto Dependence

This all leads me to another topic though.  How can we become more strict with licensing and training without incurring massive expenses and stifling the economy by imposing limits on incompetent or dangerous drivers in our current system?  Everyone, even the idiots who get in wrecks on a REGULAR basis continue to drive and need to drive to exist.  Everything, almost, in this nation is reliant upon some form of personal private transport.  This reliance is what puts us in the situation where we CAN'T technically do anything about licensing and training.  We CAN'T change the "free" policy on the roads without a slow and massive overhaul of the current funding system.

Even though we've shot ourselves in the foot.  Wait, forget that, we've shot ourselves in the leg, a good solid shot too - blew out all sorts of needed muscle and bone.  That is a proper analogy for what we've done to ourselves.  A shot in the foot is nothing.  A shot in the foot was when we where plummeting toward this independence after WWII.  We could have bandaged it and healed, but instead we left it un-bandaged and kept screwing around with bad policy and bad economic activity subsidized and manipulated by the Federal and State Governments.

Slowly we're fixing these problems, by force of Government action versus logically designed and built economic infrastructure and architecture.  If the record holds steady, we'll fix these problems and build another zillion for ourselves, but we're at least trying.

Solutions

The solution to these issues isn't to dump massive of public money into these problems.  The solution is not to patch the potholes and build new roads.  The solution is NOT to stop building and just maintain things.  The solution is far simpler yet much more important than that.  A quick list of how and in which way we could start fixing these problems without the heavy hand of Federal and even State Government encroaching into our lives.

  • People need to get involved in their local communities.  Go to public hearings, go to meetings, go watch and make sure you approve of our Government leaders when they're acting on things.  We end up with all types of pork and waste because we, the people of this great nation, sit on our butts and watch stupid crap like American Idol.  Then we fuss when gas prices hit $4.00+ a gallon.  IT'S OUR FREAKING FAULT WE AREN'T READY FOR IT!
  • People need to take back the activities the Government has taken from us.  We need to handle our roads on a local level.  We NEED to take back those federal dollars that are drained from us for our own infrastructure.  The money going to them and then back to us is insane, we're talking billions, with easily billions more wasted figuring out who they'll send it back to.

On to a quick rambling about this problem of the Feds dictating how funds will be used that we pay them.

For all you that don't watch or understand the functional tax events that occur for every dollar.  This math is for those of you who think, "raise taxes" to pay for something is a solution.  Simple math:  You pay a $1.00 in taxes.  After the depreciating double interest hit it takes by paying it back to the entity that mandates the dollar, it's worth about $0.75-0.80 cents.  So now the Govern has about 75-80 cents to work with.  It then has to pay for bureaucratic overhead and figure out what to do with that money.  That takes at least 10-15 cents out of every dollar.  So by the time we see that dollar, of course pending it goes to transportation, we're left with about 60-70 cents out of every dollar we pay in that will be used for transportation.  We HAVE to have more state control over this funding.  It does NOT need to go via the federal income tax but instead either needs to stay in state, or better yet a market driven means of collecting funds for transportation needs to be found.  A few solutions could be:

  • Setup a profit bearing growth based trust to collect, by choice roadway fees and provide licensing.
  • Setup a non-profit bearing growth based trust or entity to collect, by choice roadway fees and provide licensing.

What I mean "by choice" above is that one should have a choice of what preferred mode of transportation they want to utilize and pay for.  If this were the case a TON more people would decide to pay the $150 bucks a year for light rail expansion vs. the $300-400 dollars a year needed for roadway expansion and maintenance.  Then of course one could walk and not pay into the fund at all, but of course would not be licensed to drive or use publicly available infrastructure.  If they lived close in with an address that is close to sidewalks and such they'd pay for that.

A system that managed this is a more functional, direct, and market based way, where decisions could and would actually be based on usage, need, and desire, is vastly more American and would also provide a truly moral manner of funding without stealing from taxpayers.  In addition it would provide a much more directly decision based funding model.  The payments into the system would reflect what people actually want, and could reasonably, within economic expectation pay for.

This would also meet what Republicans "say" they want and also what the Democrats "say" they want.  Republicans pretend it's all about our choices, because they think everyone wants to drive, Democrats pretend it's all about our choices, because they think they need to provide us those choices.  In reality we could have auto, transit, and NEW technologies to provide transport if things were back in the markets hands.

I'm done rambling for now, but the beginnings of a solution are at hand.  We can't cut our tendons though after we've done so much damage by shooting ourselves in the leg.  We have to make sure we in the US, manage our system appropriately and without social force being utilized.

Cheers to success, boos for failure.  I'll have more on this later.