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Oregon is pausing public transit projects after a Republican-led effort to put funding on the ballot (www.opb.org)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by Wuli1@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[-] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 0 points 4 weeks ago

[State Rep. Ed Diehl] doesn’t think people across the state should be paying for local services they don’t use.

“If the city of Salem wants mass transit, then the city of Salem can pay for mass transit,” he said.

Imagine replacing "mass transit" with "roads". It's short sighted to hold such individualistic opinions. Transit is being railed against due to a doubling of the tax to fund it, which does sound like a lot when you only talk about it being doubled.

Oregonians spend one tenth of a penny for every dollar of their income to pay the state’s current transit tax. The stalled increase would double that rate, to two tenths of a penny for every dollar of income.

With a median income of $80,000, this would mean the tax costs people $80 per year. Alternatively, make Phil Knight pay for it at the equivalent of 0.01% of his net worth.

[-] SippyCup@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 weeks ago

Meanwhile the public power utilities vote to award themselves more money at taxpayer expense be like "im sowwiee"

[-] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 0 points 4 weeks ago

Copy and pasting a relevant comment of mine from a while back. I crunched these numbers for a random county that made the math easy, but it's similar to any rural area.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm

Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it's $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.

Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.

Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that's ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.

[-] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

It's a sad thought that high speed rail costs roughly the same per mile to construct as an interstate.

this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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