ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

Off topic of this LRT discussion, to some extent;

Roads and "super highways" are paid for by taxes, be it from property taxes (regardless if you own a home or rent, you're paying property taxes - as well as businesses) that maintain local roads.  Generally people who 'earn' money to pay income tax, (and so do corporations and small businesses) are using the roads, same applies to sales tax, though that can be avoidable.

As for taxes on gas, those taxes were created to maintain roads. It's not a small sum of money. At roughly 40 cents per litre in tax (or more) you're looking at least at $16,000,000,000.00 in taxes paid by motorists just in gas taxes.  Not to mention sales tax on cars, sales tax on maintenance, etc.

Here is an interesting article, claiming that Ontarian's motorists pay 90% of road costs:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-dr...e14901607/

The article doesn't add to the price paid by trucking firms and others that aren't included in that scope.

Of course, one could argue that if you're not using, give a rebate: Does this work if we don't use transit? Like the LRT? Hospitals if we maintain our health by eating healthy and exercising? Paying for schools if we don't have/want or can't have children? Paying for community centres and pools?  All of these are heavily subsidized by tax payers (be it federal, provincial or local taxes) and users would have a hard time paying if they had to pay 'their share'.  This is especially true of transit.

Bottom line, we live in a country that values helping each other out. We acknowledge that we benefit from services that we don't use. Be it police services, school, fire departments, hospitals or transit or whatever.  I'll probably use the LRT a handful of times, simply because there is no bus route close to my home, and the LRT is a 45 minute walk. But I'm paying for it by property taxes. But I am ok with that. I see the benefit in it.

And everyone benefits from the roads, whether they use roads or not.  Think how one benefits just by going to the grocery store.  Even if a perfect world where everyone uses transit and no one drives a personal vehicle, you'd still need roads for police, ambulance, fire trucks, transit, transportation of goods, etc. So the road costs are still going to be there.

Of course, we could tell drivers that they have to pay some sort of toll or fee to drive their car that goes directly to maintaining and building roads. But if that was the case, then there can't be any taxes associated with driving a car. In the end, it would work out to the same amount. Bottom line, drivers pay more taxes and fee's than none drivers. They shouldn't be expected to pay more.

Anyway, just my two cents worth...

This is very off topic.   Why is this conversation even happening.  This should be a simple question of math, somehow it isn't.  The 90% figure you quote is from the CAA (auto association) and is an attempt to find every possible reason to say drivers pay for roads, and even they came up short.  In fact, our fuel taxes are nowhere near 40c/L, in Ontario it is 24.7 c/L the rest is sales tax which you pay regardless of whether you're fueling your car or buying cliffe bars to fuel your bike.

You are conflating the economic benefits we derive from having cars, with the vicious circle of traffic congestion and traffic inducing policies we have implemented in order to make driving free instead of pricing it appropriately.

We laughed at the Soviet Union for their bread lines, but we can't even acknowledge we've created the exact same scenario here.