The oil companies aren't to blame for high gas prices, and I have no problem with their profits. Oil is a good business to be in right now, because worldwide demand is higher than ever. Our government's policies regarding exploration, drilling, and refining within our country have more to do with current prices than the actions of the oil companies.

We are certainly in the realm of politics now. I'll say a couple of things on this however. One is that after the oil crisis in the 70's, when oil became cheaper again, rather than pass those new lower costs on to the consumer, the real price of gasoline only dropped slightly, and the oil companies took home record profits (sound familiar?). The free market only functions as it should when people are paying attention and can take corporations to task when they act against the consumer's interest. Thus, prices stayed unnaturally high all the way until today.

But frankly, that's mostly irrelevant, because I'm not really on an anti-oil-company crusade, but rather hope to expose the real costs of our automobile centric culture.

I'd like to hear more about the policies that make domestic production of oil, because the main ones I know about are environmental. Frankly, the environment is a key place where the free market stumbles quite dangerously, because even people with similar data will frequently come up with wildly different valuation for various forms of environmental damage. This is further complicated by the difficulty in predicting unintended consequences -- and their attendant costs -- down the road.

I'm not a tree hugger. Saving "the environment" has little to do with some starry eyed desire to save the little bunnies for their own sake, but rather is all about ensuring that fitness for the entire range of human activies is maintained. Aesthetic considerations are a component of this calculus, but so are things like the quality of the air, the toxicity of ground water, biodiversity, etc. All of these issues represent a quality of life consideration for human beings.

I am of the opinion that these costs are underrepresented in the cost of automobile use. For this reason, I haven't got a problem with mechanisms that seek to bring those costs more into line with what I think is realistic.

Then, we have the issue of taxes making gas more expensive than it should be, which brings us back on topic. "Tax" is indeed a loaded word, and for good reason.

Not really a good reason. It all boils down to "Why should I pay for ?" I think that anti-tax crusaders consistently minimize the network effects of society and espouse an unrealistic vision of self-sufficiency.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not blase about the potential for waste. I work for the government, and see it every day. But that's not a problem with taxation itself, but a problem of administration. Hating taxes because some of the tax dollars are misspent is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We don't need to address the problem by taxing it, either through higher taxes on oil/gasoline or through new user fees, such as highway tolls.

The same argument 20 or 30 years ago would have ensured that today you most certainly would not have sufficient funding for infrastructure. As a matter of fact, you can look at the current statistics regarding the saftey of our roads and bridges and come away thinking maybe we ought to have been paying a bit more. Is it possible that the money was there but was frittered away but government inefficiency? Perhaps, but again, I think the solution to that is better mechanisms for monitoring expenditure, not throwing out the whole system.

That's the reason taxpayers balk at new taxes for anything,

I disagree. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction based on an unreasonable view of what taxes really are, and what they represent.

Of course, we're getting into the politics of "which things should be included in the list of government's legitimate functions," but I think that's necessary in order to address the transportation issue.

It most certainly is necessary. It also gets into the realm of how to get people to pay for something that's in their best interests, even though they don't know it is. Frankly, people don't understand the real costs of proceeding in the way that we are. The fact that bad air leads to more asthma (etc.) which leads to higher health care costs in 30 years is too remote an issue for people to consider when they have to get to work NOW, TODAY. It's the government's job to think ahead, because people won't. But our electoral system hamstrings anyone who might have a vision that will take more than a couple of years to make happen.

Whereas I would support cutting current government expenditures in other areas to pay for a rail system in Tennessee...

Which ones?

Everyone could be in complete agreement on what to do to reach the goal, but if we can't agree on how to pay for it, it doesn't matter.

Quite true. And I think enlisting private industry is acually a really necessary component, incidentally. There are ways in which the market can support these kinds of initiatives, but only if the political will exists, and it doesn't, ever.

So, where, specifically, is the inequity?

Largely it's based on personal priorities, acutally. I get fucked more than someone who places no value on green space and clean air, simply by nature of my higher valuation of those things. We all get fucked later when everyone's health care costs are higher because of toxified air and water. I recognize that a middle ground needs to be reached in attaching a value to things whose intrinsic value isn't representative of their true value. I also recognize that I'm already making an assumption. To many, the value of an acre of land with trees on it is quite simply what the market will pay for that acre of land in that spot. Again, I think that the current situation is closer to that view, and places an unrealistically low value on a complicated resource chain whose intrinsic value is low, but which ties into a much larger set of costs, some subjective, and some that are just extremely difficult to calculate accurately.

in a free society, how do we tell citizens (as individuals or organizations) that they can't lobby?

I don't think that you can tell them that they can't. I actually do disagree with the extent to which business interests are treated as people. It presumes that the company is acting in the interests of it's employees, but in the current world, that can't be assumed at all. Thus, groups that are largely made up not of the employees of companies, but of companies themselves, ought not to be treated as citizen voices. A group of shareholders is not the same as a citizen and so I don't consider their speech as constitutionally protected, much less their monetary contributions.

I think transparency helps, in that at least people who are paying attention can begin raising issues, and term limits may well help also, though it complicates the issue I raised earlier, regarding the ability to champion complex, long-term projects.

Quite honestly, I think we're approaching a situation where our entire method of government is ill-equipped to cope with these issues. The notion of a representative democracy requires us to delegate far too much power to an individual who embodies far too much compromise.

This is more a gut feeling than a fully reasoned position at the moment, but I have the sense that technology will enable and require us to decentralize the decision-making authority we bestow in elected officials presently. The mechanics of this are no doubt debatable, but I feel that systemic changes are in order.

Most of our neighborhoods (old and new) don't even bother with sidewalks.

Here too, and it's a fucking travesty. What comes first, places to walk to or a sidewalk to get there by? Answer : Sidewalks, because the government can think ahead and provide a mechanism (sidewalk infrastructure) that industry wouldn't have the capacity or up-front incentive to provide. This notion scales up.

RE: America’s Traffic Congestion Problem: Toward a Framework for Nationwide Reform