Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Union City is the state of New Jersey? That is news to New Jersey. So you are saying you made a false assumption, I never made the claim that anything under 60k was sprawl. Glad we cleared that up.
You said Union City was a sprawling suburb. Are you now saying it's not?
So you are incapable of understanding the difference between what a city and state are or you do and you are just trying to make a strawman argument, either way it is a fail on your part. So I am moving on.
This gives you a quick general idea what I am talking about. If you want to know more about this topic, I can definitely give you some good books to read on this subject.
If you think those three area are all there is to New Jersey, then you have never driven around in this state. It is basically one giant suburb.
ROTFL. You have your location listed as Brooklyn, NY/Bayonne, NJ, so you MUST know better. Bayonne itself is a small port/industrial city with a density of just under 11,000 per square mile. Its form is urban, not suburban. Pull up an aerial map of the area, and it is quite clear NJ is quite urban throughout Hudson County, as is the eastern half of Essex County, Union County, and parts of Passaic county. There's no shortage of suburban development, of course, and there's a continuous corridor of suburban development near the I-95/I-295 corridor all the way to Wilmington, Delaware, and another along the shore. But by no means is the entire state "one giant suburb".
Gas taxes are collected and used to fund mass transit systems in all 50 states. Number 2 isn't really a conspiracy. Everyone knows municipalities bought up private public transportation operators as they were going out of businesses.
How you pay for it is really a matter of skinning the cat. San Francisco uses parking and hotel taxes to subsidize transit. Most new suburbs use Mello-Roos, which is basically a property tax levied within a tax district that is used to pay for roads, schools, parks, etc, as well as the ongoing maintenance of said infrastructure. Increasingly older communities are adopting Mello-Roos taxes as well.
State gas taxes can not be used in 30 of 50 states to fund transit. See table 1-4 here for state/local sources of transit funding:
If you want to talk about mass transit allocation of the federal highway fund, fine. It's $6 billion a year for the entire country. At that point, you're arguing semantics though, because even if all of that money went to highways, it would barely put a dent in highway subsidies, and when you look at the external expenditures that additional federal and state highways create, the subsidy on roads is no less than the subsidy of transit.
Looking at the forest instead of the trees tells us a lot more. Large metros are the chief recipients of mass transit dollars. If you were to look at federal tax revenue generated from large metros vs. the federal expenditures they receive, that is where the real subsidy resides.
Chicago metro generates about $24 billion more per year than it receives. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to 4 times the federal mass transit budget. Most of this ($17 billion) is generated by three counties (Lake, Cook, and DuPage) that are extremely reliant upon mass transit. All of the CTA is located in Cook Co and the bulk of commuter rail traffic occurs in these three counties. That is the true subsidy.
In a metro like Indianapolis (a bit under 2 million), they were subsidizing the federal govt to the tune of 1.5 billion per year even though they were in the midst of building a brand new billion dollar airport and an extensive highway project for that airport.
The other thing you're completely overlooking is that those taxes transit uses to "skin a cat" are used by states and local govts to build roads too. Property tax allocations, general funds, a portion of sales taxes, parking and hotel taxes, etc. Roads are no more (or less) subsidized than transit, again, when you factor in all of the external costs associated with road construction.
ROTFL. You have your location listed as Brooklyn, NY/Bayonne, NJ, so you MUST know better. Bayonne itself is a small port/industrial city with a density of just under 11,000 per square mile. Its form is urban, not suburban. Pull up an aerial map of the area, and it is quite clear NJ is quite urban throughout Hudson County, as is the eastern half of Essex County, Union County, and parts of Passaic county. There's no shortage of suburban development, of course, and there's a continuous corridor of suburban development near the I-95/I-295 corridor all the way to Wilmington, Delaware, and another along the shore. But by no means is the entire state "one giant suburb".
I never said New Jersey didn't have more urban areas, the state itself as a whole is a giant suburb.
I never said New Jersey didn't have more urban areas, the state itself as a whole is a giant suburb.
No. That's not what you said. That's actually completely contradictory to what you said. You said New Jersey was nothing but sprawling suburbs.
So which is it? It can't be nothing but sprawling suburbs and have urban areas. Those are mutually exclusive. Maybe you don't know that just because some place is incorporated doesn't mean it isn't part of the State. New York City, for example, is actually IN the State of New York. Did you know that, or did you think it was outside of it because it's incorporated or for some other reason? I can't know what you mean, only what you say. Since you're continually contradicting yourself, it's hard for other people to understand.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
