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Govt cant be trusted to collect money and use it for its intended purpose, not to mention they have to deficit spend just to provide the inadequate services that they do. Govt road construction and maintenance are hotbeds of cronyism, and corruption, and lethal to boot.
Privatization is the only sane answer here.
Govt cant be trusted to collect money and use it for its intended purpose, not to mention they have to deficit spend just to provide the inadequate services that they do. Govt road construction and maintenance are hotbeds of cronyism, and corruption, and lethal to boot.
Privatization is the only sane answer here.
Because there is no cronyism and corruption in the private sector.......{sarcasm}
If you consider all of the direct and indirect tax revenue it's easily covered. For example the sales tax aon vehicle could be equal to the fuel tax if it's bought and sold three times. That is before you get into the discussion about how it benefits nearly any economic activity.
Plenty of intelligent people have studied this and came to the same conclusion, transportation-related taxes and fees simply come nowhere close to covering the cost of the roads.
But roads act as an "economic-stimulus" in the same way that a factory or sports-team acts as an economic-stimulus. Without roads, it would be hard for people to get to work, and it would be hard for them to get to Wal-mart and McDonalds. So cities will dip into the general fund to pay for roads, to help local-businesses and boost the local-economy, which in turn produces other economic-activity which can then be taxed.
On top of that, good roads also boost property-values(people with money want to live where there are roads), which then produces greater revenue from property-taxes. So "on-net" the roads earn the city far more than they cost.
The problem is, people who don't drive end up paying a disproportionate share of the roads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thecoalman
I didn't include it in my reply to you but what I posted previously is you would use a formula that would include the weight of a vehicle. I'm also well aware the trucking industry is paying no where near what they should be paying but 40K cars is over exaggeration to say the least. Most of the estimates I've seen put it between 10 to 20 times for equal amount of cars by weight. e.g a truck weighing 80K would be doing 10 to 20 times the damage of 20 cars that weigh 4K each but have a total of 80K.
As you increase the weight of a vehicle the damage it causes rises exponentially. There is a debate over the exact amount. According to this article it is 10,000 passenger cars.
This link only shows up to 18,000 pounds. But the 18,000 pound semi-truck itself does about 410 times as much damage to the road as a passenger car. So I would assume an 80k fully-loaded semi would do quite a bit more.
It also assumes that a passenger car weighs 4,000 pounds. Which is more in the realm of mini-van than standard sedan.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thecoalman
This would also increase the cost of goods but those costs would be paid for by all consumers. Less truck traffic means less damage to the roads and those that remain would be paying a lot more for the damage they are doing. There is less of burden on the motoring public because the damage trucks are doing is shifted to all consumers whether they drive or not.
Didn't think about that did you?
I think about everything, and that is exactly what I want, rofl.
The question is, how does subsidizing driving affect behavior? Basically, if people who drive had to pay more, they would drive less. If you had to pay a toll every time you left your house, you would rarely leave. I'm trying to drive up costs to change behavior.
Currently the cost of driving is artificially-low because the government is subsidizing the roads. If drivers had to directly pay the full price of the roads, they wouldn't drive nearly as much.
Last edited by Redshadowz; 04-23-2019 at 12:50 PM..
The key would be to make it UNIVERSAL. Every highway, road, street, tunnel, bridge, and even alley-way would be tolled. The Scandinavians has long had 'universalism' as a key element of the Nordic economic model. To recycle an analogy from another thread, if a program is not universal, those who don't buy in end up being like a beetle in an ant colony, causing nothing but problems. What do you think?
Adding another bloated bureaucracy, plus another bloated infrastructure that has to be maintained is not anyone's best interest.
Tolls are unnecessary.
Revenues can be raise by either increasing the gasoline tax, or by taxing mileage, which is more appropriate for hybrid and electric vehicles.
Tolls alone are not going to pay for the $3.7 TRILLION repair bill to federal highways and bridges.
That does not include roads and bridges maintained by States, counties or municipalities.
Tolls are also ineffective. Anyone who's driven on I-80 or I-76 knows this. Like I told the lady at the toll-both on I-76, I should charge you for every pot-hole I hit or had to dodge.
It's too bad that there aren't already ways we get charged for the roads we use. Like a tax or something
There is, it's called the fuel tax. About 18 cents for the feds, it was last raised in the 90's. It varies by state. On average the federal and state tax combined is a little more than 50 cents per gallon with . Nearly all of that money is used for road construction/maintenance but it pays for other things like mass transit.
We need another way to fund roads, primarily because electric cars and others fueled by something different than gasoline/diesel pay $0.
We also need to tax walking and bicycling. Sidewalks and bike Lanes should not be free for the public to use.
Disabled and mother's pushing strollers pay extra for their inefficiency.
I had actually thought about this as I wrote my post. I walk 2-3 miles almost every day through the downtown of nearby Bellevue, WA. We do want to encourage people to get out of their cars and onto transit, or even better yet, to walk.
With smartphone tech, we could actually pay people for walking. You walk a mile, you get a $10 credit via the same system that charges the car driver. We could also ding people for poor walking habits, such as walking on the right side of the sidewalk, or jay-walking. I would benefit from that, as I have a bad habit of often jay-walking.
Adding another bloated bureaucracy, plus another bloated infrastructure that has to be maintained is not anyone's best interest.
Tolls are unnecessary.
Revenues can be raise by either increasing the gasoline tax, or by taxing mileage, which is more appropriate for hybrid and electric vehicles.
Tolls alone are not going to pay for the $3.7 TRILLION repair bill to federal highways and bridges.
That does not include roads and bridges maintained by States, counties or municipalities.
Tolls are also ineffective. Anyone who's driven on I-80 or I-76 knows this. Like I told the lady at the toll-both on I-76, I should charge you for every pot-hole I hit or had to dodge.
You need to come out and visit Seattle some time. We do not have toll booths. The tolls are paid via transponder. You get a 'Good to Go' and you are automatically charged. It's easy, it's automatic, and it's high tech. This is the whole basis for the idea!
BTW, I should have mentioned this earlier. Here in the Seattle area, we not long ago replaced a major bridge that crosses Lake Washington from Seattle to the East Side suburbs (where I live). It's about 8 miles long, as far as I know, the longest in the world.
The old bridge was built in 1963, at a cost of $202 million (in 2019 dollars). It was tolled until the bridge was paid off in 1979, at which time the tolls were dropped.
The new bridge added HOV and bike lanes, which increased the cost to $4.6 billion. So the new bridge cost roughly 22 times as much as the old bridge, and presumably will be tolled forever. The tolls are collected via transponder, or if you don't have one, they take a picture of your license plate and send you a bill in the mail.
It's modern, it's high tech, and it's already here. We could do the same thing for every road and street in the US!
No, we can't. Local and state roads are built and funded by the respective government owners with a portion of funding coming from Fed DOT. Fed DOT cannot manage such a behemoth of a program you are suggesting, nor do we want them to do it. You put too much faith in the Fed Gov's ability. Also you have no idea the cost that would be incurred to set up transponder recievers for every road in America.
Managing federal road projects is already a nightmare due to multiple agency red tape. Your idea would not get past go.
Another amazing thread by our resident auto-hater and big govt/taxes lover Travis t.
Take a look at the poll results, Travis. 90% of us don't want your ideas forced down our throats.
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