Well okay, because it’s also a myth that only people who drive get value from roads.
Food does get trucked in somehow!
YSK that this varies significantly from country to country and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so stating this without identifying the specific area to which it pertains is misleading.
Does it? In which countries do drivers pay for the roads exclusively?
On the one hand most people in America have to drive, so they do to a certain extent, on the other hand people who own property work or purchase things such as food benefit from the road system even if they don’t drive as grocery stores in their communities get deliveries on roads and the such. Not a fan that our society requires cars for almost everything but knowing how tax dollars are collected and spend are only part of the story, it’s like saying that because you personally don’t want social security or single payer healthcare or public schools you wouldn’t benefit from its implementation; social security means that older people don’t become complete burdens on society dying in the street and the such, single payer healthcare would reduce costs for all medication and increase the number of doctors available to treat people because (one would hope) there would be less paperwork a doctor needed to do between patients at the very least, and public schools having an educated population eans cheaper services that require things like reading comprehension, be it entertainment, engineered goods, medical treatments, etc. You might not use any one or all of those yourself doesn’t mean you don’t benefit from them.
I never heard it was drivers who pay for the roads. I’ve always heard it’s taxes.
Maybe because some states use the gas tax to fund their DoT?
Yeah, I really think this is a common misconception…
Similarly, everyone benefits from roads, even if they don’t drive, even if they are a house hermit. What you thought you amazon package was just teleporting? Your life saving medicine? Your food?
Everyone also suffers noise pollution, air pollution, and risks such as getting hit as a pedestrian. Extensive overbuilding of roads and sprawl is also a signifcant strain on municipal budgets which could diminish the quality of other services due to funding constraints.
California has a tax on gasoline specifically for roads, which is 59 cents per gallon of gas, and it accounts for ~80% of the money they collect for road maintenance.
I mean, everyone that lives here knows the government isnt fixing the roads often enough to justify the immense funding they get for the roads. Many roads in my area might as well be gravel due to their state of disrepair. But they nontheless do collect taxes for road maintenance specifically from car drivers only. And theyre now considering moving to charging you per-mile imstead because diesel and electric cars don’t pay that tax right now, which should theoretically result in a lower charge for everyone, but we know that isnt gonna happen. As if they dont get enough money already. Highest taxes in the nation and still isnt enough, I guess.
I think you’d be properly surprised at how expensive road maintenance is. Particularly when the local government has to abide by federal regulations.
Indeed. When I last checked into it like 20+ years ago, an average road cost ~200 bucks per foot. Shit’s not cheap
The growth ponzi scheme in action.
Does California not add the same tax to diesel? Also in Illinois they make your ev car tag more expensive.
I’ve never heard anyone claim that only drivers pay for roads.
Many people think registration and gas taxes cover roadway expenses. Its why you see people complain “cyclists don’t pay their fair share for bike lanes”.
Ya, mostly just them throwing a hissy fit whenever a city wants to build any infrastructure for non-cars
Now you have content for tomorrow’s “the idea that X is Y is actually a myth…” post
The circle of social media life. Just as Bob intended.
It might be news to some but your mail, groceries, healthcare, emergency services, construction vehicles, tradesmen and myriad other essential services require roads regardless of whether you personally drive on them.
Plus, the implication that your taxes should only pay for services that you personally use, or even for services that you might use, is just plain uncivilized.
Some people have that situation, for example, where they can choose whether to pay for fire services, and if they don’t and their house catches fire, the fire department won’t do anything except protect neighboring houses that have paid for it.
It’s pretty backwards for modern sensibilities.
Ah, but facilities used to drive a car are private goods, in that they are rivalrous and potentially excludable. Only one car can occupy a given space at a time, and we can (and do) charge for their use. Education, on the other hand, is a public good, non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. They are not the same, and there are good reasons to fund one with tax money, and not the other.
A ton of public services use roads. Actually, literally all public services use roads. School buses use roads to bring children to school. The post office uses roads, as do firefighters and EMS. So does your electric service, waste collection, and water service
Yes, and? All of those public services rely on private goods to operate, e.g. vehicles, fuel, wages, et cetera. All of those are rolled in to the cost of providing the service, so there’s no reason that use of the basic vehicle infrastructure could not also be included. It would help eliminate deadweight loss, in fact.
I have no idea what sort of model you’re advocating for here
Fair. I’m advocating removing all subsidies for private motor vehicles, so that we have a user-pays system, including the cost of negative externalities, like pollution, carbon emissions, and human health impacts, through taxes and registration fees (or similar). This would price the true cost of transportion into goods and services, which would lead to an economically optimal amount of driving. Undoubtedly we’d choose to drive much less, which would have lots of knock-on benefits for individuals and local communities.
Buses exist.
Local buses are a public service run by a municipality or transit authority, generally, but are still a private good. They’re rivalrous (only one butt per seat), and excludable (can’t ride if you don’t pay). This is clearer with inter-city buses, which are operated by private corporations.
My property taxes go overwhelmingly to the school (well like 52 percent where nothing else is close to that big) and I’ll never have kids.
I like the kids educated that do exist though! Like damn we need them educated!
I don’t have kids why the hell should I pay for schools…wellml because I like living in an educated society, helló I’ll never bep upset I’m paying for (real actual scientifically and primary source-backed) education.
It’s economically inefficient. The true cost of transport should be naturally priced into the good or service, rather than artificially externalized. Supply-side subsidy by the government like this leads to higher-than-optimal use, which is the definition of deadweight loss. It costs us more to do things this way.
And, in this case, it’s not just taxpayers and consumers paying too much, there are catastrophic climate, social, environmental, and health effects from overuse of automobiles. If anything, government policy should work to eliminate these negative externalities by making drivers pay those costs, instead of imposing them on everybody else.
Saying “things you use go by car, neener neener” may sound profound, if you don’t examine the notion critically. It’s really just a thought-terminating cliché, though.
Eliminating cars in cities and reducing them in towns makes sense. It doesn’t for people that are spread out. I live 15 minutes from the nearest town(by car), with a 900f change in elevation. Not very doable for most people, and essentially impossible in winter.
That’s more than prolly fine, it is fine. If you can afford to pay the true cost of driving to enable that choice of location, I’ll not mind. But what is the net benefit to society to subsidize that choice? It reminds me of the joke about losing money on each sale, but making it up on volume.
Ok then the next time you break your leg make sure you limp a few miles to the nearest ambulance-train lmao
I love these nonsensical replies. They’re very validating.
Yeah your nonsensical comment would be validated by a nonsensical reply, wouldn’t it
If it’s not nonsense, then let’s examine the logic underlying your comment: A user-pays funding model for automobile infrastructure, with all costs internalized, means that there would no longer be any motor vehicles, and thus no ambulances. So, the implication is that driving is so costly that nobody would do it if they actually had to pay for it themselves.
If your insinuation is that the existence of subsidization is the be-all-end-all of whether a form of transportation is viable or nonviable, then we need only turn our gaze to every other form of transportation available to us which is subsidized to hell and back as well to see how nonsensical your comment is. The only form of overland transportation that doesn’t require substantial state and federal government subsidies is freight rail.
So here we are again, with no way to move people around because it’s too “inefficient” for you. Have fun on your walk to your ambulance train.
Hahahaha, ambulance trains! I would predict that ambulances would cost a bit more due to higher fuel and registration costs, but I’d come out ahead because an ambulance ride is rare, compared to the income and property taxes that I pay every year. Especially since the overwhelmingly-likely way that I might break my leg is getting hit by a car. (They’d also have better response times with fewer cars on the streets.)
So we’ve agreed that private cars are a net loss to society, i.e. they cost more to operate than drivers receive in benefits. (This conclusion must follow from the idea that a user-pays system is untenable, rather than either a wash or a benefit to drivers.) We can bear that as a society, even if it’s grossly unfair, as long as the economic good times last. But the good times aren’t lasting; lots of communities are structurally bankrupt due to infrastructure obligations, primarily due to accommodating motor vehicles.
Walking and biking require no subsidies, by the way. One might argue that bike lanes are a subsidy, but they aren’t needed on streets with fewer, slower cars. Bike lanes are motor vehicle infrastructure.
Road != car road
Don’t tell the /fuckcars people that. They’ll get absolutely livid and start calling you names.
I don’t think that’s true.
You don’t think this would merit a “carbrain”? I’ve seen it thrown at much less.
Because they throw their little tantys and go “fuck your bikes me and my car pay for that road!!!”
They made the gasoline tax raidable. In other words, they can use it for stuff other than road maintenance.They can pull from it without much oversight.It is also a way to raise taxes without the necessary votes to actually raise taxes.Nevermind, looks like they fixed it since I left.
Not a good take. People don’t have to be driving to benefit from roads. Deliveries, emergency access, routing for utilities
This is also a poor take. “Benefit” is not a binary state. What if we treated, say, water the same way? That is, you pay the local water utility a connection fee, and the water is free. There’d be no penalty, no incentive not to have a waterfall feature in your front yard fed by the tap. What would happen to water usage?
The same thing that happens with “free” use of roads and streets—the tragedy of the commons. They fill to overcapacity daily.
Taxes go to schools, libraries, fire and police, lots of things you might never use. I think gas taxes usually go towards road maintenance (or they should).
Not directed at you, OP, but there seems to be a lot of anti-tax stuff lately that I’ve seen posted, and not one of them brought up how much taxes go to support a military operation. They always seem to lean towards pointing out how much of their money goes to social programs that they don’t use or want. They ought to compare the price of a school vs. a missile.
Eh gas tax basically just covers Healthcare externalities from all the pollution. If you are in a country with private health care its even worse - drivers aren’t even covering the lung disease they are giving you!
You should also know that most vehicles do little to no damage to the roadway. 99%+ of the damage comes from heavy truck and bus traffic.
Almost like we should pay vehicle registration based on gross weight and distance driven.
Love to see a source on that as it’s counter to what I’ve heard.
It’s a well-known rule of matsci
The tldr;
“Therefore, the resulting stress difference between truck and car is 15,000 to 1.”
yea, that figure comes to my mind when it is said larger cars consume more gasoline, so they pay more gas taxes, therefore that compensate road damage, but the proportion is way off
on other note, i like to think 1000 light scratches do less damage to the skin than one very energetic
It’s not uncommon for roads to have load limits (ie 70% rated axle capacity) for certain times of the year, when the subgrade is more susceptible to damage. Like during spring frost thaw. A fully loaded vehicle would essentially sink breaking the asphalt bond and everything in the subgrade.
Counter to what you’ve heard? Like it’s the light car traffic doing the damage?
Edit: To clarify- when I say damage I mean to the roadway surface and not the surrounding infrastructure.
Even the surrounding infrastructure.
Cars are designed to take the damage of a crash and dissipate the energy, transport trucks aren’t. Then there’s the momentum issue.
One truck crashing into a bridge is way more damage than a bunch of cars.
Then the price for fuel use would drop, but the cost for running large vehicles would increase dramatically to make up for the difference. Which will be passed on to consumers. Possible kill transit in some areas that already get questioned on cost. I’m more for spreading the cost over everyone using the road than giving more excuse for price increases on everything.
No wonder Michigan has the worst roads. The state has one of the highest truck weight limits in the country.
There is also a weather factor there. Freeze/thaw cycles and water intrusion are big factors in pothole creation.
Damn, your mom needs to be carried by truck?
But you pay more when you have a big car. In Germany anyway.
A persistent myth that drivers pay for roads through gas taxes and tolls pervades all discussions on transportation funding, limiting the conversation not just about how we pay for transportation but also what our transportation system looks like.
You’re repeating the exact misconception TFA addresses. Your large vehicle fee is a vanishingly small proportion of upkeep.
The total amount of money that’s spent on roads and driving in car-oriented cultures is absolutely fucking astounding when you add it all up. Counting only “highways” is just the tip of the iceberg.
right, highways are a tiny % of the budget. Most of the costs to a car are elsewhere. (and even more elsewhere if you count things not measured in money)
There are a lot of reasons we should be encouraging transit, but we still need highways for shipping and construction use that can never be on transit (could be on trains, that doesn’t seem reasonable)
“… regardless of whether they drive or not.”
Even if they don’t drive, they benefit from roads and highways. Trucks bring food to stores, along with all the other products. Unless they are living off the grid, growing their own food, and weaving their own cloth, they’re dependent on the roads. Also, emergency services and maintenance crews need the roads.
Many people long for a simple life, until they break a leg, or their appendix bursts, or they have an infected tooth. Then they’re more than happy to take the road to the hospital.
There’s no dichotomy of “roads or no roads”. Individuals driving necessitates wider and more extensive roads. People who choose to drive when they otherwise don’t have to have the effect of making everything farther away and making road maintenance considerably more expensive.
And your point?
Historically, roads were built for transporting goods, and this started long before cars existed as a concept, see Rome, the Silk Road, etc.
Even in the US the road infrastructure push was driven by the need to transport goods with trucks. Early days of the conversation were around this. It wasn’t until cars started becoming affordable for the average person (rather than the wealthy elites) that cars were even a consideration.
Even today the infrastructure is designed around trucks - bridge heights, durability, etc, cars are secondary.
You can stop driving cars all you want (which simply isn’t going to happen) but you’d still have trucks, because trucks on roads are flexible and trains are not.
