Who pays for roads? Most US States require residents to subsidize cars
Who pays for roads? Most US States require residents to subsidize cars
Only 3 states Delaware, Montana, and New Jersey raise enough revenue from cars to fully cover their highway spending.
The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia must make up the difference with tax revenues from other sources
By diverting general funds to roadway spending, the burden of paying for the roads falls on all taxpayers, including people who drive very little or may not drive at all.
Source: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-funding/
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Gotta think, though....roads are used to transport goods across the country. While at first glance it's a shitty deal for people without cars, but when you bike to the store to buy something. How did those products get there? From a truck, that had to drive from warehouse to store, on the roads.
And those trucks will collect taxes through fuel, licensing, etc. And that cost gets passed down to the consumer. There's no reason to subsidise roads for that.
almost every single country used to have like 2x as dense rail networks, there's no reason we couldn't go further and make rail networks 4x as dense as they are now.
You don't need 11 lane highways to supply the supermarket. Every multi lane road you encounter is built for private drivers, not for deliveries.
Our rail systems are crumbling for a reason.
It is much better to ship by train than truck. If we put this money toward revitalizing and expanding our rail in this country it would have a way better ROI.
The US freight rail system is actually extremely robust. We move more rail miles of freight, than Europe does people.
It's just a shame we built our rail for boxes and not people
except that american railways are in such terrible condition that trains largely run at speeds that can be beaten by a fit dude on a bike
The point being made isnt that roads aren't worth the investment, its more so that everyone pays for roads regardless of the amount of use they get out of them, but that same investment into cycling paths, bus lanes, or trains is viewed as "government subsidies" or "wasting money on infrastructure that won't be used by drivers".
We should be paying for the trucks to use the roads when we buy products transported on the roads. Just like how we pay for the ships, ports, trains, and railroads used to transport other goods. The cost of transport should be part of the total product cost. Trucks should be paying road tax in proportion to the damage they do to the roads, and those costs should be passed to their customers, then to us. This is how it works with most other forms of transport.
By moving the cost of the roads used by trucks to "everyone", it makes trucking artificially cheaper and turns the cost of roads into an externality. If shippers had to pay those costs directly, I bet there would be many more goods shipped in more efficient ways.
Sure but that truck can pay the taxes which then get passed down to the consumer buying the goods.