Funding roads (taxes, user fees etc)

[danbrotherston]

HST you have to pay on a tax you're forced to pay IS part of the tax, imo.  I don't really know why you'd think otherwise.

Let's put it this way.  If they abolish the gas taxes, people would pay 27.9 cents/litre less for gas.   

I'm obviously not counting the HST applied to the rest of the price of gas.  That portion I agree shouldn't be counted.

That's an arguable conclusion I suppose.  As I said my argument is, if you spend that money elsewhere, you'll still be paying HST, so the government get's that money whether or not you buy gas.

If you're only including HST on the gas tax....well, that's such a small amount it isn't really worth arguing about, so I'll agree with that.

I'm still surprised you disagree with the benefits.  I am guessing it is because you think that transit cannot be competitive with driving.  But like I said, this is really to do with urban form an design.  Transit oriented design can make transit just as competitive as driving, in my opinion, and when that's the case, all the economic benefits opened by driving, are then available through transit as well.  The problem is, we have 60 years of building driving only oriented design.  Which leads to transit being terrible in many places, which I think is why you feel that transit doesn't provide the same benefits of driving.

I would also argue that the benefits of transportation cannot be sustained with driving either, take the GTA, you have a focus on driving only pretty much everywhere outside of Toronto. Huge massive roads, which are expensive and detrimental to the urban landscape, to the environment, to social and physical health. They make other forms of transit function terribly. And yet, we still have enormous traffic congestion, and thus lose the benefits of driving anyway. Driving anywhere in Mississauga took forever. So clearly the benefits are being watered down there.

Like I said, I realize that we cannot just flip a switch and undo 60 years of planning. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, 60 years of work has gone into one solution, and we should be cognizent that limitations that might appear to be inherent to another form of transportation might simply be an artifact of that 60 years of designing exclusively for driving.