Funding roads (taxes, user fees etc)

[ijmorlan]

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.

Lol.  Of course it affects that claim.  Just because it is inconvenient for your whole argument doesn't mean you get to ignore it.  And the vast majority of people are going to care only if the money is coming out of their pocket - not whether its coming out of their left or right pocket.

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).

Yes, there's a difference between the two.  Although the percentage of transit users is much lower than the percentage of drivers in the general tax base, even counting indirect taxation through rent to a landlord.  It is very likely that transit is more subsidized by "Non transit users" than driving is subsidized by "Non drivers".  I don't have a problem with that.  Nor do I have a problem with you pointing out that the funding of transit and roads are different.  The problem is when you jump to the illogical claim that driving is completely subsidized.

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?

Taxpayers - who are also the users of the service.  Of course, even more than roads, a big chunk of the benefit is the presence of the service and not an actual explicit incidence of usage.

I’m not sure what to say to this. To me, it is obvious that user-pay means that those who use the service pay for it. In particular, if I can arrange things so that I don’t use the service, I don’t have to pay for it. For example, in the policing example, if I don’t use the police, I don’t pay for the police. If I don’t use the roads (maybe I only walk everywhere), I don’t pay for the roads. If I don’t use the library, I don’t pay for the library. If I don’t use the food from Zehr’s, I don’t pay Zehr’s. And so on.

It doesn’t have to be a precise proportional payment. For example, suppose public transit only had monthly passes, and was fully funded by those passes. Or suppose there was an Internet movie viewing service that charged by the month. In either case, they would be user-funded. If I don’t use the service, I can opt out of paying for it.

But the bottom line is that words are supposed to mean things. And user-pay means that I can opt out of paying, by not using the service. Do you have a different idea of what it might mean?

It’s impossible to have a rational argument about which services should be user-funded, and to what extent, if people refuse to recognize what things are self-funded and which are paid for by the general taxation base.

Funny thing is, I’m not even sure which services should be user-funded. I think reasonable cases can be made for a wide variety of choices in many different cases.

But I’m not seeing anybody even attempting to make the case that roads are self-funded, presumably because it is an impossible case to make. You might start, however, with the gas tax contribution, which you could probably show, under colorable assumptions, is responsible for a several-percent degree of user-pay.