The Interstate Highways are an un-needed, dehumanizing social and economic drain on our country. I suggest we bulldoze, detonate, and otherwise remove these poorly conceived monstrosities from the era where accomplishment and progress were considered one and the same. People driving from place to place can do so on back roads. There is no need for a car to be a quick method of transportation.
If there is volume to warrant the presence of a highway, there is volume to warrant replacing that highway with more economical rail transport. If there isn't volume for rail, there isn't volume to justify the presence of the highway in the first place. Either way, it should be demolished.
We have spent the past hundred years investing in the fallacy of sustained personal mobility. It will take us twice that long to correct this mistake. Its not like this was even what people wanted in the first place. Do any of you remember National City Lines, where rubber tire manufacturers and automakers got together and bought up city transit so they could replace steel-wheeled trollies with rubber-tired busses?
Eisenhower got his inspiration from a certain Austrian named Adolf's grand plan for moving people and things through Germany during the war. Indeed, the highways were marketed as a defense spending measure! The highway as we know it is the work of the ****s. It should be destroyed.
One important client of interstate highways is shippers. Sure there are many truckloads on the highways that ought to be on rail. However, there are a huge number of loads that get split up as they cross the country.
You want to decimate a town? Just say that their single factory can only ship once it gets an entire truckload unloading in one place, instead of the current practice of putting together a load that will partially unload at several (or numerous) spots.
You want to eliminate just-in-time processes? Most of these shipper/consignee partners want a single carrier who will guarantee a delivery date and time, and take responsibility for the load from factory to destination. Rails are no good at this. Take the recent problems in ND. A truck can detour around the problem while trains are delayed.
Taxation for roads is an interesting problem. Heavy trucks do the most damage to the roads, so there are good philosophical arguments that trucks should pay more fuel and mileage taxes than they do (thus raising product prices). There are also good arguments that cheap shipping benefits everyone, so fuel and mileage taxes on trucks should be reduced or eliminated. The current system collects part of the cost to maintain roads from trucks, part from car users (gas tax), and part from the public (general fund/income tax). What is the best balance between these funding sources? Philosophically? I don't know. Practically? I want someone else to pay, so I want more of the balance to be in something I don't do much of.
When is it philosophically sound to promote behavioral changes through taxes? Right now, we try to encourage home ownership through the tax code, and it worked. But then, here in California, people said this discriminated against renters, so we have a small renter's tax credit, reducing the effect of those tax and interest deductions. California also raised the tax on tobacco products to promote child health. Makes sense, kind of, except now those programs are out of money on account of reduced smoking. Tribal stores also saw increased sales after the last tax hike, and will probably see even more for our most recent tax boost. I believe the same is going to happen if you try to use taxes to reduce people's driving. If you want to tax driving to raise money, then do it honestly: say you want more money, and here is how individuals and/or society will benefit from those funds, choose more than one way to accumulate the funds, and then make sure the public sees the promised effects.
What is a "good" tax, anyway? Probably it ought to be "fair" (whatever that means, but graduated income taxes and user taxes are usually looked at as good at this), easy/cheap to collect (like charitable organizations, you don't want to spend a high percentage of your take in collection expenses), and difficult to cheat (a major problem with income taxes, and benefit of real property taxes). So we use a combination of lots of taxing mechanisms to muddle through this issue, and I think that is probably a good idea.
One more point for GML: I often use back roads. From LA to Oroville is around 8 hours on the interstate (at least the part where the interstate runs), or 1.5-2 days taking "blue highways" (the blue lines on a map), depending on traffic. I probably use about twice as much gas on the slower routes. Is that what you want? Do you also want all those trucks running through town, increasing tragic interactions with pedestrians, bicycles, and buildings? (I didn't list cars, since you want to eliminate them).
