Originally Posted by
Allez3
So what your saying is people with cars do pay more than you do for the roads everyone uses regardless the mode of transportation. Your use is not excluded to getting around either. I presume you eat and work and supporting those functions requires roads for delivery of goods and services even though you don't use a car, and it's actually those larger vehicles that do the vast majority or road damage. There will come a time where you need police, fire or ambulatory services which your tax dollars pay for. I would also argue, and it is fact, that someone living car free has a much lower tax footprint and is therefore paying significantly less money into the kitty to support those roads overall.
This doesn't hold up. You pay less taxes in two ways: you earn less or you spend less. It's true that a person who doesn't buy gas will pay less that is specifically earmarked for roads, but the damage they do is also considerably less if they are not using a motor vehicle. Yes, there are heavier vehicles that do even more damage to the roads than passenger cars, but we all pay for those, just indirectly. Those goods and services that we all enjoy have transportation costs baked in. Every time you check out at the grocery store or confirm payment in your Amazon cart, you buy some gas and pay some fees for the trucks that get your stuff to you. So in that way, we all pay equally for the most damaging vehicles. But there is definitely a correlation between vehicle weight and damage done to the roads. So if one vehicle weighs 10 times what another weighs, shouldn't they be paying 10 times more for road upkeep? For that to work, we need to raise the gas tax so that it accounts for 90% of the road budget. Then cyclists can finally stop subsidizing the car drivers. And maybe then they can stop using money I put into the general fund to pay for limited access highways I'm not allowed to use.