Subsidized car travel is a convenience for ordinary citizens; subsidized truck travel is an advantage conferred on businesses that move a lot of stuff by truck, making their goods unfairly cheap compared to more local alternatives, or alternatives moved by more efficient means like rail and sea.
Buying less stuff > spending tens of extra hours per week getting from place to place.
Yes air travel is subsidized, and if you look up ground transportation it's even worse. The Fed pays for insanely huge amounts of motor vehicle infrastructure for which ground shippers barely pay a small portion relative to their resource usage and negative externalities.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. Yes, subsidies have many beneficiaries; some are direct and some are indirect. You imply that it's ridiculous to call a policy a subsidy to its indirect beneficiaries--even if the paper industry indirectly benefits from the existence of the post office, it's silly to call the post office a subsidy to the paper industry.
I completely agree. And...
Drivers are the direct beneficiaries of driving infrastructure. Yes, driving infrastructure benefits other people too, e.g. through cheaper shipping, but the sole mechanism by which those benefits are realized is by making driving cheaper. Drivers are the direct beneficiaries, anyone else who benefits does so indirectly.
It's entirely reasonable to support subsidizing driving because you think it will have economic benefits in the form of, e.g., faster shipping (and I think some level of this has been absolutely necessary historically). But it's entirely unreasonable to claim that because your preferred subsidy has benefits, it shouldn't really be called a subsidy.
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