07-17-2017, 07:24 AM
(07-16-2017, 11:36 PM)SammyOES2 Wrote: We understand the difference. Stop dumbing down our position.
Our point is that statements like: "but ignore the enormous subsidy paid to drivers in the form of effectively free and unlimited roads." is an unbelievably dishonest statement (for reasons clearly laid our earlier).
ijmorlan, I was kind of hoping you wanted to have an actual discussion, but then you didn't respond to me and went back to just making statements like the above.
Sorry, we’ve had illness in the house the last few days and it wasn’t a good time for me to make comments needing careful thought on here.
For the record I did read the site and I think you said some pretty reasonable things in the last few days.
But I don’t see how we can have a good discussion if some people don’t understand that roads are free to use. You can’t send less money to the government by not driving. (OK, if you don’t drive at all, you can save on the minor expense of car registration and driver licensing; and if you drive less you spend less on gas tax, which doesn’t mean regular HST but the gas-specific tax; but neither of those come close to paying for the full cost of road construction and upkeep).
So to be accurate, you can’t send significantly less money to the government by not driving. Roads are paid for by the general taxpayer, not by their users in rough proportion to the extent of their use.
Incidently, it’s possible in principle to eliminate congestion entirely: “just” introduce per-road-segment, per-time-period, congestion charges that respond to how busy the road is. So instead of getting to the road and discovering that it’s clogged, you would get there and discover that the sign is advertising a prohibitive fee for using it. You would then either decide to pay the fee and proceed, or turn around and come back a different time when it’s less busy. Of course in today’s society Google maps would probably tell you the toll and you would decide before leaving the house whether to proceed.
Same applies to parking, except that it’s actually practical to do something like what I suggested, as proven by SFPark.