Please edit and put we should know. This post is locked until you message me that it’s fixed. It will be deleted if not fixed in 24 hours.
As it should be. Same as you pay for schools if you have no kids.
“… regardless of whether they drive or not.”
Even if they don’t drive, they benefit from roads and highways. Trucks bring food to stores, along with all the other products. Unless they are living off the grid, growing their own food, and weaving their own cloth, they’re dependent on the roads. Also, emergency services and maintenance crews need the roads.
Many people long for a simple life, until they break a leg, or their appendix bursts, or they have an infected tooth. Then they’re more than happy to take the road to the hospital.
There’s no dichotomy of “roads or no roads”. Individuals driving necessitates wider and more extensive roads. People who choose to drive when they otherwise don’t have to have the effect of making everything farther away and making road maintenance considerably more expensive.
And your point?
Historically, roads were built for transporting goods, and this started long before cars existed as a concept, see Rome, the Silk Road, etc.
Even in the US the road infrastructure push was driven by the need to transport goods with trucks. Early days of the conversation were around this. It wasn’t until cars started becoming affordable for the average person (rather than the wealthy elites) that cars were even a consideration.
Even today the infrastructure is designed around trucks - bridge heights, durability, etc, cars are secondary.
You can stop driving cars all you want (which simply isn’t going to happen) but you’d still have trucks, because trucks on roads are flexible and trains are not.
The citizens pay for the infrastructure. Yes. That’s how it works. You want mail? You want your package delivery? You want your grubhub? You want things to be in stock at the stores you shop at? You want the farmers at the farmer’s market to be able to bring your their sweet corn? Even if you don’t drive, you use the roads. All of the time, every day. This myth of “I don’t drive” or, “I ride a bike” or whatever excuse is en vogue today, it’s reductionist logic that doesn’t hold up. You belong to a society that uses infrastructure, and as a member, you use it as well.
This very much depends on the country.
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Maybe properly taxes go in part to fund local roads (mine do) and maybe some people paying these don’t have a car. But even people who don’t have cars do have garbage trucks that pick up their trash, mail delivery vans delivering their mail and packages, emergency vehicles that might need to come to the residence, delivery trucks that bring the food to the local supermart, and public transport buses that need to access parts of the community.
People indirectly use roads even if they don’t have a car.
And this is why I support cyclists and pedestrians having as much right to roadways as a person that chooses to drive their car.
As bad as the roads out here are, it always irks me that they charge a road & bridge fee on my taxes but my roads still suck
Well, things that suck also cost money
I know. Thats why I call those fees my assessor’s escalade fund
Just like people without kids pay for schools through the same mechanisms
Taxes go to schools, libraries, fire and police, lots of things you might never use. I think gas taxes usually go towards road maintenance (or they should).
Not directed at you, OP, but there seems to be a lot of anti-tax stuff lately that I’ve seen posted, and not one of them brought up how much taxes go to support a military operation. They always seem to lean towards pointing out how much of their money goes to social programs that they don’t use or want. They ought to compare the price of a school vs. a missile.
Eh gas tax basically just covers Healthcare externalities from all the pollution. If you are in a country with private health care its even worse - drivers aren’t even covering the lung disease they are giving you!
Libertarian astroturfing.
Housecats don’t understand the system they are in and think all tax bad. Usually males between 19-27. Unless they never mature, which is common.
Housecats
Is this a term for libertarian that I’ve never seen?
Kind of insulting to cats imo
The total amount of money that’s spent on roads and driving in car-oriented cultures is absolutely fucking astounding when you add it all up.
right, highways are a tiny % of the budget. Most of the costs to a car are elsewhere. (and even more elsewhere if you count things not measured in money)
There are a lot of reasons we should be encouraging transit, but we still need highways for shipping and construction use that can never be on transit (could be on trains, that doesn’t seem reasonable)
YSK that this varies significantly from country to country and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so stating this without identifying the specific area to which it pertains is misleading.
Does it? In which countries do drivers pay for the roads exclusively?
Principality of Sealand?
Toll roads?
Which country has strictly toll roads?
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I’ve never heard anyone claim that only drivers pay for roads.
Many people think registration and gas taxes cover roadway expenses. Its why you see people complain “cyclists don’t pay their fair share for bike lanes”.
Now you have content for tomorrow’s “the idea that X is Y is actually a myth…” post
Ya, mostly just them throwing a hissy fit whenever a city wants to build any infrastructure for non-cars
As a cyclist I have, many times. And always from people that feel bicycles shouldn’t be on roads when they are
It seems to me that the snippy responses in here are from people responding to the headline and an imaginary POV from the author. The author has thought about this stuff more than anyone commenting here has.
I never heard it was drivers who pay for the roads. I’ve always heard it’s taxes.
Yeah, I really think this is a common misconception…
I guess that’s what gas taxes in some place are supposed to go to? Idk, I have done Municipal accounting before and I know that you can almost always shift expenses around to make money used for anything.
Maybe because some states use the gas tax to fund their DoT?
On the one hand most people in America have to drive, so they do to a certain extent, on the other hand people who own property work or purchase things such as food benefit from the road system even if they don’t drive as grocery stores in their communities get deliveries on roads and the such. Not a fan that our society requires cars for almost everything but knowing how tax dollars are collected and spend are only part of the story, it’s like saying that because you personally don’t want social security or single payer healthcare or public schools you wouldn’t benefit from its implementation; social security means that older people don’t become complete burdens on society dying in the street and the such, single payer healthcare would reduce costs for all medication and increase the number of doctors available to treat people because (one would hope) there would be less paperwork a doctor needed to do between patients at the very least, and public schools having an educated population eans cheaper services that require things like reading comprehension, be it entertainment, engineered goods, medical treatments, etc. You might not use any one or all of those yourself doesn’t mean you don’t benefit from them.
