When you have stuff delivered to your home you pay shipping costs, so you’re still indirectly funding roads through the fuel taxes paid by the delivery service.
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Which, as @Michael_R_Smith pointed out, is at an orders-of-magnitude discounted rate due to the physics of how heavy transport vehicles affect the roads compared to passenger cars, which in turn have a similarly massive impact compared to bicycles.
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It’s complicated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2007.71
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I’m not sure if @MalevolentPixy might be pointing at me also, but my distinction was that it seemed privilege-based, against the low-income people.
For me, a separate argument from universal health care, food security, and universal education.
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Roads are a public good. The Romans recognized that. They should be funded like any other public good. People avail themselves of roads in ways they don’t even realize.
Most of the people who complain about funding public goods like roads and healthcare are fortunate enough to be able to afford alternatives. Poor people can’t. Usage fees/taxes do punish the poorer people who are forced to commute longer distances to work, just so they can afford rent. Meanwhile the guy with the expensive downtown apartment who can telecommute and only needs to show up at the office one day every three months barely pays a thing. But he’s the first to say he shouldn’t have to contribute, and that the burden should be on those commuters who “choose” to drive.
Usage fees, mileage fees, jacking the cost of registration… all of those punish poor people disproportionately. A fairer tax scheme that actually ensured the wealthy and corporations paid their share could easily fund public goods. It used to. It could again.
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I am part of this demographic. Isn’t a portion of my public transportation fare going toward maintenance of public roads?
If you ask me, I’d say that if there actually were equity between cars, bikes, and pedestrians, they would build bicycle and pedestrian paths right alongside every highway from coast to coast.
As I’ve stated before, I believe in the public good, so they should put their money where their mouth is, and make it equitable and practical for all (which it isn’t – though bless the DOT for guaranteeing safe passage for pedestrians through construction zones. It’s the rules).
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I am saying that your share should be subsidized by the guy in the $2,000,000 condo who probably pays less than you in taxes thanks to the CPA he can afford who findd him all the loopholes. That’s why I feel a properly functioning tax system is better than user fees.
Roads, BTW, includes all the attendant infrastructure such as sidewalks.
Where I live, there are places that would be neither practical, nor safe. Which is why on top of the roads we also need to ensure that there is decent public transportation outside of cities, not just in them. As the Greyhound debacle taught us around here, trusting any of that to private companies is a risk to the most vulnerable.
And if the Donnies, Bills, Jeffs and Marks of the world would contribute what is actually their fair share, it’d be doable. Along with a lot of other things.
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I agree. Just to be sure we’re on the same page, I’m not saying I don’t want to pay. I’m saying I’ve been paying for 35 years (adult life), and as a “dedicated” pedestrian for 28 of them, I’m still getting shortchanged compared to auto owners when it comes to access.
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Trust me. The people I hear bitching the most aren’t people like you. It’s people for whom it quite literally is a choice.
But user fees, including mileage fees, always disproportionately punish the poor. For something as vital as transportation infrastructure, we need to do better.
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Probably the same people who try to run me off the road where there is no shoulder or sidewalk. Or throw tamales at me (true story).
I’ve walked or bicycled over 2k miles of highway in the past decade. Some motorists are neither kind nor gracious.
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I was in the pilot program for California a few years ago that tested road use tax as an alternative to gas tax, and it cost no more than the gas tax at the time, so lower-income folks would not be disproportionately affected under that program.
That assumes that under the current regime low income users weren’t already disproportionately affected. And I can assure you as a former welfare recipient, the cost of fuel is a nontrivial consideration in terms of expense for low-income folks.
Very much this. The problem is, there’s a whole ton of “society stuff” that happens on roads that makes things go, way more than your commuter traffic does. And that stuff has to be paid for even if you never ever drive, because those roads are what let things like garbage collection, service and utility delivery, road trips to see family and friends, etc. etc. all happen in the first place.
This whole unequal taxation thing perplexes me, and it’s the first thing I noticed moving to Texas - no state tax, sure, but instead user fees everywhere based not on income but on a unit of use. But we don’t expect low-income earners to disproportionately fund defence or medicare or regulatory bodies, why do we expect them to disproportionately fund things like street cleaning and roads, which come out of non-income discriminatory user fees or goods taxes?
Like I said in my fist post - if you want to offer tax breaks to people that don’t have cars registered or travel less than X miles in them or whatever, have at it - incentivize their good deeds by travelling on foot or by bicycle. But the roads still need to be there, and the costs to maintain them should be proportional to income, not use, because everyone uses them.
And while you’re at it, corporate tax needs to take into account road use the same way the carbon tax proposals are trying to do that for pollutants.
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In some areas, mass transit costs are also offset by gasoline taxes.
That’s a common argument trotted out against EVs, but it’s really disingenuous (and generally used to create false equivalencies with ICE vehicles).
The fact is that the efficiency of EVs is orders of magnitude higher. I drive to work and back every day for a week on the equivalent of 3/4s of a gallon of gas. Furthermore, pollution at a central place is much easier to control. If everyone was driving EVs, we could replace the coal plants or capture their carbon, or various other options and solve huge problems all at once.
There are certainly issues with EVs. The environmental footprint of batteries is not great, the power grid couldn’t handle it if everyone drove them, etc. But please shelve the tired “they burn fossil fuels too hurr hurr” argument. It’s not scoring the points that most people think it is.
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Well I AM a big believer in impact fees on developers for the capital expenses of construction, things like the cost of construction for new schools and roads. We still need to maintain existing infrastructure./
All the posts in this thread in favor of the original idea all seem to blindly accept that user fees are a good idea. People are even suggesting ever more complicated versions, including basing it on odometer readings, or other bureaucratic nightmares.
I feel like this all misses the point. As @orenwolf and others have pointed out, all user fees on common services are regressive taxes. The idea that people should all pay for what they use is seductive, but it’s basically libertarian propaganda. The people who suggest user fees have never been poor.
As others have said, there is not a single person who does not depend monthly, weekly, daily, hourly on roads. I don’t care if you ride a bike to your organic food co-op every day. Everything you own was brought by a truck. A bus takes your kids to school. The fire department who put out that fire down the street last week. Roads are as fundamental to civilization as clean air, and the idea that we can somehow unpack exactly how much each person is benefiting from them so we can surgically tax them exactly fairly is silly.
They are a common good, tax everyone for them, and give some tax breaks to the poor. To help offset trucking companies socializing the losses of damage they do, you can tax them a bit more or incentivize freight rail if you like. But let’s give up this fantasy that gas taxes are a fair way to maintain roads.
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The system we have now is not fair, never has been fair, and is not becoming more fair over time.
Fairness as a concept is a red herring.
Gas taxes already exist. Reducing carbon emissions is something we already want. Taxing things we want to reduce to pay for things we want to increase might not sound fair, until we get used to it and then it does. “Fair” is just whatever we’re used to.
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Sometimes I get the feeling businesses who influence government spending are really expecting to use drones in the future. They’re not particularly worried about crumbling infrastructure. Maybe conditions need to be bad enough to require replacement before they’ll get enough profit out of construction deals.
Either way, let’s hope other states & watchdog groups learn from NJ and PA’s mistakes. They collected for road and bridge upkeep, but enabled agencies to spend the money on other work (not only transportation, but also pol’s pet economic development projects). In the end, both states went back to the consumers via gas taxes and tolls to fill the funding gaps the government created.
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True, although if we choose a use tax the person who never leaves their house and has everything delivered isn’t paying the use tax directly, but all the delivery companies roll the use tax into their fee structure, and then any “free shipping” retailer rolls that into the normal prices. So the non-driver isn’t escaping the fees (and in fact pays something close to proportional to the use they cause others to do on their behalf).
My post however wasn’t me trying to avoid paying, it was me saying “hey, I have a psudo-EV and think I ought to pay something”.
So while we are not quite saying the same things I think we are largely in agreement.
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I believe the estimated shortfall in the USA is “only” 11%, but that ignores the fact that nearly all US grids have significant excess capacity at night. So it is possible that if enough EVs only charged at night the existing system would be fine. (and as a practical matter it would take a decade or more to replace all gas cars even if no new ones were sold starting today, which gives a fair bit of time to beef up the grid a bit)
It also ignores the rather high percentage of Tesla owners that install solar to charge them, but I think that is fair, there are no indications that that trend will continue, or would be true of other brands, or be applicable to people that don’t own their own homes (who wants to pay $10k+ to install solar on a house they are renting? Or worse yet an apartment)
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