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> your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of
by nayuki 2y ago
> your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads
That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of food. That way, the amount of road tax you pay is proportional to how much goods and services you consume.
Meanwhile, the status quo is that everyone pays into the road system regardless of how much or little they use it - even if they don't own a car.
Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago> Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users. Exactly right, but proving the opposite of what you request. Once roads are built they're a sunk cost. Roads have to be resurfaced as a result weather damage regardless of how many people drive on them. Road capacity that exists and isn't used is lost. The incremental cost of an additional car driving down a road, the actual wear caused by the act, is trivial. Far less than the pro rata share of building or maintaining the road, or than existing gas tax, or the cost of even the collections infrastructure for road tolls. But the use has value to the driver and plausibly to others in society (e.g. their customers/employers/friends), so we don't want to discourage it unless its value is less than the incremental cost, since the cost of building the road and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost. Which leads to the conclusion that the sunk cost of the road should be shared by everybody, since everybody benefits from having products delivered and emergency services even if they don't have a car.