[sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time."

[Zvi Leve]

Making it more expensive to /own/ a car is not necessarily a good 
incentive! If the cost of acquiring and registering a car are very high 
relative to the costs of actually using it (for example $100,000 to buy 
a vehicle, $1000 annual vehicle registration fees and $1/liter for 
petrol), this will just encourage people to use their cars even more! 
Once people make the high initial investment of acquiring a vehicle (and 
they will make that effort if there is not a reasonable alternative) 
they will be certain to want to get their money's worth....

Owning cars is not necessarily the problem (and in fact owning a new car 
creates less pollution than owning an older car), it is how we choose to 
use our cars that causes the problems. It is the variable costs 
associated with using the vehicle (fuel taxes, tolls, parking fees, 
etc.) which give more appropriate price signals.

Don't forget that China is actively leveraging their auto-industry to 
'grow' the national economy, much as the US did before. It worked for 
the US (and to a certain extent the other industrialized countries as 
well), so why should China be expected to be any different? From an 
over-all economic perspective their are very strong incentives to 
produce as many cars as possible.

Zvi

Todd Edelman wrote:
> BUT BUT BUT as Lee said it COULD stimulate car ownership, so the thing to
> do is make it bloody difficult to own a car, relatively speaking, with
> stick and carrot approach, with high taxes for private cars. BUT yeah I
> dont know this could just get more people into carism so...
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