re: #146 jantjepietje

The problem with increasing gasoline taxes is that it hits the people who can least afford it, even if more efficient cars are produced quickly (and I doubt there is anything simple out there, or the Japanese or Europeans would have already done it.)
The problem is, many people cannot afford new cars, and often, they live a distance from where they work where housing is cheaper. Increasing taxes would make it so their standard of living would decline, maybe to where they could no longer afford to commute to where jobs are.

This is one of the problems with trying to decrease transportation fuel use in the US. We are geographically spread out to take advantage of cheaper land. This spread reduces the efficiency of mass transit, which requires a high density of people traveling on the same line. If you don’t have people commuting between the same two points (roughly), the efficiency is terrible. A bus or train is only more efficient if it is carrying many people. An SUV with 10 people is more efficient than a bus with 2.

Add to that the fact that in the US work hours vary, and the problem gets bigger.

Increasing transportation costs will drive up living costs near work (supply and demand) while decreasing the value of real estate further out. Imagine the outer suburb belt (like the 495 belt around Boston) suddenly losing most of its value because people cannot commute to work, and get an idea of the problem.

Of course, the 495 belt is populated because there are a lot of jobs there; companies took advantage of cheaper land. But they’d have to move as well, increasing business costs. The housing and businesses are too spread out for efficient mass transit.

But there is an interesting possibility, and that is the direct production of fuels using biosolar. Basically, organisms in solar panels that produce molecules that can be used as fuel. These take up as much carbon dioxide as they release (more actually). And several companies are working on them now. This would allow us to continue with our spread out development, while decreasing our “carbon footprint”. And the fuels could be made to work in existing cars, or only require minor changes.