01-29-2018, 09:19 PM
(01-29-2018, 06:45 PM)creative Wrote: I never complained about bike lanes or transit costs. I only pointed out your rediculous opinion regarding road cost recovery. I thought that we dropped this topic but you chose to bring it back up.
Not this again. There is no user fee to use local roads. The municipality pays to construct and maintain roads and does *not* recover a use-fee from those who use said roads. Fine, you want to count the gas tax, a portion of which is now sent by the province to the municipalities, there is a few-percent recovery, but given that the gas tax probably doesn’t even cover the appropriate level of carbon taxation that’s pretty questionable.
By contrast, as we all know, GRT riders pay something like 40% of operating costs, and TTC riders pay something like 80% of operating costs.
What is ridiculous is people claiming that road costs are recovered from users of the roads when they plainly are not. The fact that there is a large overlap between taxpayers and road users does not affect this. The same is true of transit: I’ll bet substantially all users of GRT pay taxes to local municipalities, either directly, or via their landlords. The whole point is that there is a difference between transit (some cost recovery) and roads (none, or almost no cost recovery).
Anyway, my original point this time around was not about this board or anybody here. It was about another board where somebody was in effect complaining about transit money but staying completely silent on the issue of road money. As it happens that discussion was about Manhattan, so there is the additional issue of how exactly that individual thinks all the bus riders are supposed to fit on the road in a larger number of smaller vehicles.
I just thought of question that may shed some light on this: who pays for our local police, the WRPS? Taxpayers, or the users of the service?