General University Area Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

Free ?  I think fuel taxes were implemented in the past specifically to offset road construction... Nothing is free...  one look at the amount of money the government takes of my pay is good evidence things aren't free..

Free at the point of use, as I said. But raising enough money from various taxation sources to pay the bill is difficult, leading to a constant cycle of undermaintenance and complaints about high taxes.

Anyway, if that’s really true, it makes no sense. Fuel use is correlated with ongoing use of the roads, not with the construction of new roads. But policies don’t have to have justifications that make numerical sense.

Anyway, my point is that driving, especially driving on massively expensive infrastructure, is not a right. We as a society have decided to expend massive resources in making it possible, but we can change policies whenever we want without violating anybody’s rights. Whether that is what we want to do and in what way specifically to do it if so is a matter for political debate, preferably informed by engineering and economics knowledge.