(01-30-2018, 10:12 AM)MidTowner Wrote: You’re right that most people are drivers- but should someone who drives occasionally all of a sudden be responsible for a share of the maintenance of the roads calculated based on the value of the property he owns? Is it really appropriate that someone who drives 20,000 kilometres a year on local roads might pay the same towards their upkeep as someone who drives a tenth of that distance?
I totally agree that we can do a lot better. I just find the whole "Drivers pay nothing" rant that people go on here to be really irritating and counter productive. So much so that I can't just let it go very often.
Although, as I've also pointed out many times, there are also a LOT of benefits to people aside from the time that they're physically on the road (like faster response times for ambulances/fire/police).
(01-30-2018, 10:12 AM)MidTowner Wrote: I would guess that the biggest cross-subsidy is not from “non drivers” to drivers, since the former are a small percentage and do glean benefits from the road network even if they never drive a car on it. It’s more likely that it would be from light users to heavy users. That’s also a big problem for everyone, since the way things are set up now, there’s no signal as to the actual cost of the road system, and people are therefore encouraged to use it wastefully.
I suspect it's actually from "wealthy" people to "poor" people. Which is actually fundamentally fine for me. I think there are good arguments for increasing usage feeds - but its not actually set up to be used that wastefully since there are still a LOT of other costs related to mile driven. Even if those costs don't fund the road infrastructure they still serve as a deterrent to wasteful usage.