this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I don’t like paying taxes, but holy hell not having the things they’re supposed to pay for sucks. You ever use a toll road or get caught in an intentional speed trap? Holy hell it sucks. And also we’re only kinda sure our food is safe and our medicine works. But the cops have tanks and the beef and gas are subsidized
Toll roads are a kind of tax.
True
I mean toll roads make sense, I'm not sure why we're expected to pay to use public transport but not roads, when roads are far more expensive to maintain and us driving literally causes them to be damaged.
If roads and parking are free then public transit should be free. Otherwise toll roads are fine by me, although they're technically a regressive charge in the US and Canada since you're kind of forced to use a car in most areas... I mean car dependence itself is a giant regressive charge so that's just one part of it.
But assuming we had actual functional transportation infrastructure, toll roads would actually be preferrable near more densely populated areas since it makes you think twice about using your car instead of taking a train or biking.
The way toll roads work in a lot of places is that they are built with public funds, then a private operator gets a lease for a set amount of time and gets the lion's share of the revenue.
And yes, public transport should be free.
Won't that encourage overuse of transport, which will actually make it harder to reach emissions targets and similar?
It'll encourage the use of public transport over private vehicles (provided there is a good public transit network present). Public transport has got better efficiencies, and if it can supplant individual transit to a good degree, that's not a bad thing.
As far as 'overuse' goes: how many people do you know who just travel on public transport for the fun of it? Even in places where people can travel for a flat monthly fee, very few people spend any more time on public transport than they need to. I doubt that free public transport would substantially change that.
Few people just like to hang out on trains, although I do remember the one guy on Reddit who did all his coursework while cruising around Switzerland and then got trapped in a railyard. However, plenty of people will choose a long commute or to visit a more distant destination if it's cheap enough. Extreme example, but I once knew a person that drove a full 2 hours each way to work. Through a far more densely populated area.
I don't and couldn't really have empirical evidence that people would overuse free public transit, but the I think the theory is strong. Generally, people will travel less if travel is more expensive. If travel is provided at cost instead, they'll avoid it unless the value to them of the travel exceeds the cost to other people to provide it and bear the side effects.
Another thought: Flights In some places there's a government air carrier, and they fulfill the same basic function of getting people from point A to point B. Usually they're not considered public transport, but then you have cases like the small arctic communities in my country, which are filled with very poor people and can only be accessed by plane. Should we make an exception? That's where things might get complicated.
Invalid feelings + wrong opinion
Based and accurate
Why shouldn't you pay for using car infrastructure? You're damaging the environment and damaging the roads, it's a lot more sensical for the cost to be put on you, the driver, instead of burdening everyone else with higher income/sales taxes.
Funding for the development and maintenance of roads in the U.S. come from a variety of taxes such as vehicle registration fees, wheel taxes and taxes on gasoline and motor fuel. So , we do pay for using car infrastructure
Yes, but not nearly enough. Those kinds of taxes are extremely low (especially compared to e.g. the EU) and form only a fraction of the costs of car infrastructure.
All those hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars in infrastructure bills, all the regular car infrastructure maintanence costs, a large chunk is paid for by taxes that everyone gets regardless of how much they use a car. And all the extra non-tax costs (in both time and money) that non-drivers have to pay because car-dependent infrastructure fucks up transportation for everyone else, that is a massive charge.
Even in the EU, car related taxes can't pay for all the car related infrastructure. Building and maintaining roads is crazy expensive.
People who don't drive don't pay any of those taxes that were used as examples. I'd love to see the numbers that you're basing your argument on.
Let me google that for you: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
There are literally tens of thousands of articles like this one.
TLDR:
No, drivers pull their own weight in regards to car related taxes.
The point the seems to have missed you is that taxes should be what pays for the road
I just said – you're burdening other people with taxes for damage that you cause. Car infrastructure meant for drivers destroys the fabric of cities/towns, destroys the environment, and costs a shit ton of money on top of that.
Using more toll roads and similar things means you can "tax" people a lot more proportionately to how much they use cars on public infrastructure, instead of punishing people that don't use cars or use them less than others. It would be entitled to assume that everyone else should pay more taxes because you want to use an expensive destructive and dangerous mode of transportation rather than just take public transport or bike.
I also find it hilarious how my state gives tax credit for using/owning an electric car, but not for not using any car at all... this kind of shit is representative of the norm across most of the US, car drivers are directly subsidized by non-drivers.
(It's obviously a lot more complicated than "make more toll roads" since some jobs actually need vehicles, plus it'd make sense to mostly do it around densely populated areas)
I pay for schools i dont go to, hospitals in places ill never go to, roads i dont use. The point of taxes is to pay for the things that better everyone even if you yourself dont personally use them.
Okay, but schools and hospitals don't destroy the fabric of cities and don't destroy the environment. Schools and hospitals actually improve society a lot and SHOULD be subsidized.
A majority of the money spent on car infrastructure does NOT go to improving society. In the current state of things, cars harm society, and the majority of people using cars don't need cars. Most of the money spent on car infrastructure should be put into actually making transportation not car-dependent, and as I said earlier car drivers should subsidize this.
Roads allow our current society to function, long haul drivers allow our current society to function. We will need to rely on these things for the foreseeable future even if we did implent the sweeping changes you seem to forment today we would still need to use roads for decades while we changed over. That is why we should all be subsidizing the roads, the are the logistical veins of society.
That is something I pointed out already – a lot of things require cars, emergency services and logistics and some trades and what not. That doesn't reduce the need to put a larger amount of the cost onto people who use roads – most of whom don't need to. I also pointed out that it's not as simple as put toll roads everywhere, and we need to figure out the most efficient system for making it easier for those who do need it for their job.
Toll roads allow us to fund better infrastructure and reduce the attractiveness of using cars around urban areas, and they allow us to punish non-car users less – now the portion of their taxes that would normally go to car infrastructure can go to things that would benefit everyone, and we can more proportionately charge people based on how much they cost the public.
As I said, the average American pays way less proportionately than most Europeans do for car infrastructures. They have a much higher tax on car-related stuff, and usually a lot more toll roads. It makes people more inclined to use other modes of transportation that are better for society when they don't need to use a car.
But a lot of drivers are very entitled, they want to offload the costs of their car usage onto others as long as it means they don't have to deal with toll roads. It's a completely selfish thing – in areas where non-car travel is an option car drivers are a detriment to everyone else and increase everyone else's cost of living, you can't use car infrastructure unless you are a car driver (which is what separates it from funding e.g. public transport or hospitals). They should be charged a fair amount for that.
It would be great if we could shift to a better system integrating better and much more robust public transit, but in much of the U.S. driving a car is the only option. I understand being upset with the system we have, but taking out your frustrations on many people who don't really have a choice is counterintuitive.
Wait but cars don't damage the road (much) - trucks do. We should all be mad we are so heavily subsidizing the cost of moving goods to our grocery stores, construction sites, and anywhere else.
The simple answer is to make commercial/industrial users pay fairly. Practical studies have shown that road damage is related to the fourth power of vehicle weight. The damage attributable to private cars is less than a rounding error compared to commercial vehicles, and commercial users have the most directly-atttibutable profit from road use.
Gas is taxed to pay for roads. There is nothing free about it. The more you drive, the more you use gas, therefore you pay more tax. The heavier your vehicle is the more it damages the roads. But, it also uses more gas and therefore you pay more tax.
Gas tax is pretty much nothing in the US... the minimum gas tax is about 3x higher in Europe (and it's usually much higher). The amount that people from areas prone to having high rates of driving (suburbs for example) pay in taxes is highly disproportionate to the amount car infrastructure costs.
Plus using things like toll roads means you can reduce the car infrastructure tax everyone pays a lot, currently if you're not a driver or don't drive that much you generally pay the same amount (or maybe slightly less with tax credits if you're eligible) as someone that drives constantly. Which is pretty terrible – using cars as the primary mode of transport is just bad for society, and it should be looked to reduce it as much as possible. My taxes shouldn't be going to funding unnecessary car deaths or mass pollution etc. etc., and cars are one of the largest causes of pollution on the planet.
Gas tax doesn't do much in that regard, sure it's a minor environment tax but those who don't drive are still subsidizing the people who do. Ideally it should be the other way around – people who drive who don't need to drive should be subsidizing those who don't drive.
Average gas tax in the U.S. is 52 cents per gallon. Average consumption is 370 million gallons a day. That's not an insignificant amount of money.
Sure, it seems like a lot, but here's a quick read to explain why it's not:
https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
Gas taxes generate only about $50 billion of revenue, when car infrastructure spending is in the hundreds of billions per year. At this point I pay more in regular taxes than someone who drives regularly pays in gas tax. Plus the gas tax is out of the picture when we consider EVs – which still have a majority of problems gas vehicles do, and cost individuals who don't drive a ton of money still, minus the constant pollution.
In the Netherlands about 9% of the total price is actually profit.
If the price for gas is €0.80 per liter, we pay €2.017 per liter. There's this calculation with it:
€ 0.8 + € 0.867 = € 1.667 without tax € 1.667 x 21% = € 0.350 tax € 1.667 + € 0.350 = € 2,017
The € 0.867 is standard Consumer tax per liter on gasoline.
This is only the tax on gas, let's not talk about the tax you pay for your vehicle every month. I don't like it, but it beats being eternally in debt for breaking your finger. Or destroying my car in a pothole.
Canada doesn't have tolls. And, at least in BC, good transportation.
It's just a matter of how much they want to invest in what.
In many cases toll roads mean that the government didn't want to/wasn't able to invest in building a road, so they let a private for-profit company do it for "free" (meaning without tax money) and that company then recoups their investment using toll.
Some times toll roads are used to steer traffic. Some cities for example have a city toll that's meant to discourage commuters from using their car to get into the city and instead get them to use public transport.
The first case means the country doesn't raise enough tax, wastes too much tax money or has other priorities than road infrastructure.
The second case is totally valid since it uses tax to discourage unwanted behaviour.
We do have taxes on car ownership, though, at least where I live.
A controversial take apparently, but yes. A big part of the reason everything was able to become car-centric is because we're effectively subsidising driving by providing the infrastructure for free, both parking and road.
You can also go the route of a hypothecated tax by mileage, which is probably more convenient.