ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

ijmorlan, the problem with your phrasing "Nor do motorists pay to use local streets, or in this backward country of ours, even superhighways" is that its blatantly untrue.  The interesting discussions can't be discussed reasonably, because you're not starting from reality.

You need to acknowledge that if we shift the burden to a more usage based model - tax revenue should fall accordingly.  It's absolutely unrealistic to pretend/assume that all the money that taxpayers are currently paying for roads would be available for other things, while at the same time the vast majority of people would have to spend a lot more for roads.  It would be a massive tax increase for the majority of people.

If you want to advocate that we should have a more usage based model - that's fine.  But its much closer to a shifting of funds than creation of new funds and I don't know how we have that discussion when you won't acknowledge that the money that's currently funding roads is already mostly coming from people using (and benefiting from) the roads and isn't coming from some magical source.

I’m not primarily talking about what we should do. In fact, my main self-criticism of what I wrote above is that sometimes I veer off into my opinion of how we should run things, instead of concentrating on how things are right now, which is that roads are free to the user.

Do you claim that you have to pay a significant amount to use our non-toll roads?

OK, fine, gas tax, roads are “almost free”, not actually free.

How you can say that I don’t acknowledge that the road funding money is coming mostly from drivers is beyond me. I said several times that there is a huge overlap between road users and tax payers. What else can I say?

You do raise one good point, which is that we can’t raise magical new revenue by imposing road usage fees without making any other changes. Exactly how to do this could be a large discussion topic, but I would tend to be in favour of some sort of arrangement that imposes road usage fees and simultaneously reduces other taxes by approximately the amount that currently goes to pay for roads. The same for carbon taxes: rather than just imposing them, I would either reduce other taxes or refund the entire carbon tax amount per-capita, thereby creating a guaranteed income as well.

In general I wonder if our hesitance to have purpose-specific taxes is actually becoming a problem. Instead of tax Tx going to pay for program Px, we have various taxes to raise money and then various programs. People ask for programs, the government promises them, and then engages in a separate search for ways to get more tax money. If instead the discussion was always more like “we’re proposing to start providing this program, and will pay for it with this proposed tax” it might be more transparent. Of course this could be taken too far, but I’m confident that it would be appropriate for transportation.

I think there are a lot of interesting discussions to be had here, and we might agree or disagree, but I don’t see how we can really have any of those discussions if some people think that they have to pay to use the roads when in fact they do not. They pay their taxes whether or not they use the roads, and they can use the roads no matter how much tax they pay (even if they don’t pay the amount they’re supposed to pay!).