(03-04-2018, 02:15 PM)p2ee Wrote: Let's approximate that 80% of households have a car and drive. An extremely conservative approximation, because the number is likely in the 90% range. So based on what's being suggested here, those households need to have the cost of road maintenance removed from the income and/or sales tax and they then instead pay tolls. But while we're at it, let's do the same for education, healthcare, etc. I mean if I am young and I don't have kids, I shouldn't have to pay for other people's health or the education of their kids. And if I don't use transit, my tax dollars should not be used to subsidize at least the capital costs of building transit. But not only that, lets have 18 wheelers, buses etc pay higher tolls because they effect roads disproportionately (as was suggested by other people in this thread).
I mean if I am being asked to pay-per-use for roads, it would be completely reasonable for me to ask pay-per-use for most government services. And if I am young, have no kids and have great health, I will save a lot of dollars, right?
Do we not see the problem with such a way to provide government services? I wouldn't want to live in a society with this kind of a system. It really sounds like a capitalist utopia where wealth will disproportionately effect what you can afford, even more so than it already does.
Education is needed by everybody. It most definitely is in the interest of the childless to have the children in society educated.
Healthcare is like the fire department. It’s best handled as, in effect, a mandatory insurance scheme.
You can’t make choices that exempt you from needing the schools or the hospitals. But you can make choices that mean you don’t need the roads as much.
By contrast, most road users don’t even like using the roads. All those people stuck in traffic on the 401 aren’t (most of them) having a good time. The problem is that the only solution many people see is for the government to build them another free highway. Then we all wonder why our taxes are so high. If people paid for their own roads, then I actually agree it would be reasonable for GO to charge higher fares, certainly high enough to cover operations and probably even capital. Then people could make a fair economic decision between different modes of travel.
Transportation can never be a pure “free market” because of the planning required to provide roads and transit and make them fit together well, but right now we don’t even try to give people the opportunity to make an economically long-term rational decision.