02-23-2024, 12:16 PM
(02-23-2024, 11:43 AM)cherrypark Wrote: Fun exercise: do a business case for vehicle users paying the full value per kilometer of their road use and expansion.
Imagine the furor if Doug said the 413 was doing to be tolled to pay for upkeep. The OPC have removed "free market" pay fors from their existing highways but paying to run buses into places that could grow with connectivity isn't worth it? Come on.
Right, exactly. Transportation used to be strictly for-hire, run by the private sector. The railways were businesses, operated to make profit for their owners. Later, the street railways and interurbans ran the same way. Yet now almost no passenger railway makes money. Why? Because they are competing with beautiful paved roads available for free (or almost free, if you count the gas tax as a usage fee — but even that is questionable because the gas tax probably doesn’t even cover the climate change externality of burning the fuel). The first railways were competing with horsecarts mostly running on what would barely qualify as a laneway today.
(I know this is hugely simplified; I didn’t even mention the Roman roads, for example)
What we really should be doing is making all superhighways be toll roads, completely funded out of the tolls and with congestion managed by congestion charges. That would take a huge expense off the books and remove a lot of low-value travel from the highways, especially at the busiest times. The only downside is it might become too easy to fund new superhighways, since they would be paid for by their eventual users rather than by increasing the debt.