As it should be. Same as you pay for schools if you have no kids.
Even if you don’t drive, you still eat because of roads. No food delivery to supermarkets without roads. Same for all other goods and services.
I think what this is pushing back against is the idea that roads are built for motorists because motorists “pay” for the roads. Entitled people in cars getting pissed at pedestrians and cyclists because they “don’t pay” for “their roads”. As someone who rides their bike most places I’ve experienced this first hand as well as online discourse.
Aother interesting thing about roads is that they’re build to withstand the wear and tear from heavy vehicles.
This doesn’t seem interesting, until you also find out that the wear from all other vehicles is completely and utterly negligible. Doesn’t matter if you ride a bike, a motorcycle, car, electric car, pickup or SUV. None of the personal vehicles make a dent on the roads of any meaningful size, even if they make up a majority of the traffic.
Obviously we still need the roads for small vehicles, but the cost of constant maintenance all comes from cargo and busses.
If you see it this way, then almost all road construction is a hidden subsidy for the cargo industry who uses trucks instead rails or boats.
It would make a lot of economic sense for the society as a whole to demand fewer cargo trucks and more cargo rails.
Huge heavy SUVs and large trucks absolutely do cause wear and tear, and EVs are especially heavy. The surface layers of roads are damaged over time by vehicles if the foundation of the road mostly remains unimpacted.
The weight of a heavy electric Hummer is 4.5 metric tonnes.
The maximum allowed weight of a fully loaded cargo truck is 44 metric tonnes.
According to the fourth power law, this would make the impact of the truck more than 500 000 that of the Hummer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Sure, the Hummer itself is already 16 times worse than a regular 1 ton car, but in the scale of things, the difference between any personal vehicle and a truck is about the same as whatever the truck is.
While big cars do more damage than small cars or a bike. It’s seriously negligable compared to any sort of goods transport vehicle
This very much depends on the country.
Maybe properly taxes go in part to fund local roads (mine do) and maybe some people paying these don’t have a car. But even people who don’t have cars do have garbage trucks that pick up their trash, mail delivery vans delivering their mail and packages, emergency vehicles that might need to come to the residence, delivery trucks that bring the food to the local supermart, and public transport buses that need to access parts of the community.
People indirectly use roads even if they don’t have a car.
Nope. Roads are public services and always cost more than the measly taxes. Same with trains and train tickets.
Well okay, because it’s also a myth that only people who drive get value from roads.
Food does get trucked in somehow!
Yeah i just love exhaust gaz, constant noise and lung cancer.
How about groceries? Medicine? Emergency response services?
Garbage trucks
Construction equipment to fix the bike lanes that go to Trader Joe’s.
Delivery trucks/vans for everything you buy off the internet.
That’s such a bad faith argument. Those are what? 1% of the traffic? if those were the only ones permitted on the road they would be everlasting and we wouldn’t need to rebuild them every 5 years.
Not to mention the ambulances wouldn’t have to wake me up in the middle of the night and make me deaf when they go pass me
The bulk of the traffic is some fatzo sitting alone in his pollution machine and we both know it, coz you’re one of them.
It is not a bad faith argument. Literally every single thing you eat is delivered by trick.
Obviously you have an overwhelming association between cars and roads in your brain but you could absolutely not survive without roads.
The trucks and vehicles that make your deliveries, pick up your trash, and stock your stores do about 15000 times more damage to the road than a passenger car. Even at a 1/100 ratio, that’s 150 times the damage of all the other vehicles, or if my shitty math is correct, approximately 99.34% of the road damage. All of the passenger vehicles on the road every day are a rounding error compared to Semis, Garbage trucks, fire engines, and construction equipment.
So I’d say it’s not a bad faith argument to point out that the people who don’t drive aren’t benefiting from road infrastructure.
For another comparison, it would be like saying that I shouldn’t have my taxes go to dam maintenance in my state since I don’t live in the flood zone.
yeah now do exhaust gaz and noise pollution. Car drivers are selfish people who shouldn’t be in public space. Go drive on a racetrack or something
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As bad as the roads out here are, it always irks me that they charge a road & bridge fee on my taxes but my roads still suck
Well, things that suck also cost money
I know. Thats why I call those fees my assessor’s escalade fund
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?
Principality of Sealand?
Toll roads?
Which country has strictly toll roads?
In McDonaldistan you can only live the suburb if your McRoad subscription is up to date
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 don’t really think this is a common misconception…
I guess that’s what gas taxes in some place are supposed to go to? Idk, I have done Municipal accounting before and I know that you can almost always shift expenses around to make money used for anything.
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.
And those are like what? 1% of total traffic? If every fatzo who could would take the train the roads would be pretty much everlasting
That’s totally missing the point. The scale of our roads is far larger than is strictly necessary, but we build in a lot of the costs associated with car usage, making it effectively cheaper to use a car. We also don’t invest in alternatives, making it practically necessary. This all has the effect of increasing the scale of roads, increasing the cost.
Yes, we need some roads, and yes some of that cost should be socialized. We do not need roads like we have today. We also do not need to be making it easier to use a car than, say, a bike for basic things, or a train for longer distances, or a bus for medium distances (yes, busses use roads, but they substantially reduce road usage, which means maintenance costs, by carrying dozens of people, compared to a car on average carrying slightly more than one person).
The largest cost of roads is maintanance. A large part of this, is just regular commuting, not the services you mentioned. That cost should not be socialized. It should be individual based on your usage. If you’re creating a need for more maintenance, you should have to pay for it. This incentivizes not just less car usage, but also less heavy car usage. IIRC, maintenance cost is accrued by a square of mass, or something similar to that. An SUV is creating much more maintenance demand/cost than a sedan, and a sedan more than a bike.
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.
Fire services aren’t giving people lung cancer omg.
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!
but still gets underfunded somehow.
Right? I don’t have kids but I’m happy my property tax funds schools.
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
So? those are a tiny fraction of the total use and if it was only used by those who really need it we would need a tiny fraction of the budget to repair them
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.
Exatly. I don’t drive, Im sick of my taxes going to some highway so some fatzo can sit on his pollution machine because he’s bothered by trains.
Ok. What would that realistically look like? How does your plan account for the significantly higher cost burden that would be born by people who are lower income, given they’re less likely to be able to afford fuel-efficient vehicles? And how do you account for EVs, or variability in carbon emissions?
Regardless, we’re talking about funding for roads, which is a related but totally separate issue from everything else I just mentioned. Roads are a public service, and I’m vehemently against the libertarian idea of “pay per use” you’re advocating
Given that car drivers currently overpay for road maintenance and trucking underpays you would see the opposite effect, where people are encouraged to use smaller vehicles.
Costs would rise for everyone, impacting the poorest.
Suddenly the BMW drivers who currently overpay and have been subsidising roads for non-drivers is saving money and the pensioner who doesn’t drive has increased food and medicine costs.
There’s a reason the costs are spread the way they are. It’s a form of effective socialism.
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.
the public transportation in the west coast has been largely getting rid of seats since they can force more people to stand per area than sitting around.
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.
not viable in our area to in the west most tech employers are outside of cities.
well they will move when they realize nobody can go there anymore
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
if only ambulances would use the road we wouldn’t need to repair them every five years idiot
If we have to maintain a national road system without charging people to drive on it, everyone will still be stuck paying for the roads. So since that would evidently be non-viable then there will be no ambulances and no roads. So have fun dragging yourself in your belly to the nearest ambulance-train, because nothing else would be cost effective lol
we wouldn’t need to repair them every five years
We don’t need to do that now…
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.
yea no shit. I lived all my life with a neurodegerative disease and it’s been proven to be caused by fine particle. I loathe vroomers with all my heart. I wish i was born before cars
I don’t think that’s true.
You don’t think this would merit a “carbrain”? I’ve seen it thrown at much less.
Nah, I don’t think “tax money is used to provide public infrastructure” warrants a “carbrain,” and I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion, even amongst my fellow automotive unenthusiasts.
It’s amazing how you just gloss over than the “public infrastructure” is “roads”. I’ve seen people call people carbrains just for acknowledging roads ARE public infrastructure.
I maybe only see the stupidest and most vicious. You maybe only see the most intelligent and measured.
The truth is, you’re at a disadvantage here trying to convince me or anyone that rabid idiots don’t exist in the fuckcars community when others have seen and interacted personally with them.
I guess all I can really ask is that IF you see this behavior you call it out. Communities that don’t self regulate inevitably go insane and start generating slurs for people outside of thier culture which is a pretty good litmus test for toxicity.
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.
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?
that’s such a disingenuous argument. Those are a tiny fraction of the traffic and you goddamn know the bulk of it is some fatzo sitting alone in his pollution machine
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.
Sign me up for bulldozing entire cities to rebuild them without sprawl. I’m not too optimistic about it getting approval though.
They’ve already been bulldozed, look at all the parking lots and unnecessarily wide roads. The average US town or city has had more of its area destroyed by car infrastructure than London did after The Blitz.
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”.
Must be a city thing, only reason people complain about bikes where I’m at is they sometimes like to use the center of the lane like a car but don’t follow traffic laws
Ya, mostly just them throwing a hissy fit whenever a city wants to build any infrastructure for non-cars
As a cyclist I have, many times. And always from people that feel bicycles shouldn’t be on roads when they are
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.
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.
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?
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.
maybe not the damage to the roads themself but they’re the one spreading cancer
Yeah, each individual car may not cause as much wear, but the sheer number of cars and light trucks causes most of the damage overall. I suppose it would still make sense to tax larger vehicles more heavily though, so I guess it still supports your conclusion, I just heard that the proportion of damage caused is way more than ~1% from just car traffic.
Doubt it. Stand on basically any street and count cars until you see a bus, big diesel truck, or a tractor-trailer come through, if you count less than 15000 cars, then the truck is doing more damage.
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.
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.
Not in america.
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.
The point is that costs should be applied fairly so that people will make decisions that are also rational at the system level. The system isn’t rational now so fixing that will change things. You can have principles or you can maintain the status quo but you can’t have both.
If your principle is everything should be cheap you’ll say you don’t want to pay taxes and the roads will go unmaintained and you’ll pay in accidents and delays and insurance and repairs. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Shouldn’t the cost be spread to consumers though? Shouldn’t we try to encourage people purchasing products that created less damage to infrastructure? Buying local would be made cheaper, in comparison, and so would products that do a better job with shipping. That’s good, isn’t it?
Instead, we spread the cost evenly so there’s no reason to minimize this. That’s wasteful and antithetical to any argument that capitalism can effectively encourage beneficial behaviors. (I’m not a fan of capitalism, but as long as we’re stuck with it the things it does well should at least be used.)
Everyone with a bro truck and SUV should be taxed to death.
You dont need that shit. 95% if Americans can do totally fine with a miata or a small hatchback. But Americans are idiots, see, and won’t buy those vehicles, and car mfgs stopped making them (for the most part).
And before Americans get upset, I live rural and drive a small hatchback or a 2 door car the large majority of the time. Meanwhile chad lives in suburban hell and has a lifted ferd fteenthousand with mud tires that touches less dirt than my hatch drives in 3 minutes.
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.
Infrastructures are expensive. Startegic ones must be owend and maintained by all the people for the people, regardless individual usage, since being strategic have impact in every individual.
Yeah like trains
Nah, I’m good on not paying for wars of aggression
Holy straw man
