Goon Arguments for Automobile Priority

After someone can be made to recognize that a corridor where cars occupy 99% of the space, and have (effective) priority at all conflict points, and admits that cars are being prioritized, they will then attempt to justify that priority. After several years arguing with goons on Twitter, this usually consists of series of disputable claims:

The Gas Tax Pays for It!

Delusion. The Federal gas is used to pay for the Federal Aid Highway System (US Interstates and US Highways), which (IIRC) represent about 1% of road miles. Secondly, the Highway Trust Fund (which receives gas tax revenues) has been bust since 2008, and has been bailed out six times using revenue from the General Fund, which comes (mostly) from income tax. 

The State Gas Tax Pays for It!

Dream on. The state gas tax is largely used to provide the 'match' share the Feds require the states kick in on US Interstates and Highways. The Feds pay for 80-90% of it, but still require the states to kick in 10-20%. The rest of the states gas tax gets used to pay for State Highways. 

Developers Choose to Do it!

Nice try. Every talk to a developer, who'd like to cut three inches off the width of the road, so they could save themselves a million dollars? The specifics of how subdivisions get built (road width, pavement thickness) is highly specified by city ordinance. 

Cities Choose that for Their Roads!

Again, pre-emption. Most of the wide roads in cities are highways, and the state owns them***. And the state has its own standards for state highways, and those standards are highly focused on moving automobiles at highway speeds. 

Sidewalk, Curb, Gutter, the park-strip and 'Safety Area' are Multi-modal!

Bunkum. Curb and gutter exist to funnel water aware from the road, to ensure that water flowing off the road doesn't undermine the roadbase*  that supports the asphalt. Even if you didn't need to have a sidewalk, a road would still need to build it. And the 'Safety Area' between the right-most travel lane and the curb and gutter, which gets used for bike lanes? Its for car safety. Older highway manuals will still give it the proper name, which is "recovery space", and "obstacle free zone" and it was intended to give an out of control car time to recover before it ran off the roadway and crashed. In urban areas, it's been coopted for on-street parking, resulting in lots of crashes. The 'park strip' is also a misnomer, because it's actually where obstacles get put--telephone poles, traffic cabinets, bus stops, and sometimes some grass and small, bedraggled trees**. These things would be fine to have in the 'safety area', except cars. So for your standard arterial, that's four lanes of auto traffic, one turn lane, two 'recovery space' areas, curb and gutter, the park strip, and two 5' sidewalks. Which means 95% of space is getting devoted to cars. 

Curbs exist to Protect Pedestrians!

Nonsense. I drive an SUV and I drive over the curb every time I try to parallel park. For an out of control car, a curb is barely a speedbump. Bollards, now those protect pedestrians. I can offer no better evidence than 7-11, which clear understand that stopping a moving car requires a massive metal pole reinforced with concrete, embedded four feet into the ground. 

*roadbase: specialized compacted soil that can hold up heavy weights. Often a mix of crushed rock, gravel, pea gravel, sand, and maybe some clay. Largely free of organic matter (which is why street trees die). 

**Not by accident. Trees get planted in roadbase, which is basically free of any kind of nutrient, so they don't grow. Which is fine for highway enginneers anyway, as they  don't want roots disrupting the road base. (Many state codes require cities to put trees in concrete boxes to constrain roots. And as trees are as large above as they are below, a 5'x'5 concrete boxes creates a 5'x5' canopy above. 

***Constitutionally, the Feds can't own roads. So the game is that the state owns the roads (even US Interstates), but the Feds pay for the construction.