Free parking is actually bad, particularly in cities, though it's bad for reasons largely specific to cars.
> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.
> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.
Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?
I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.
> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).
I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.
> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.
> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.
Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?
I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.
> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).
I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.