[sydneycatalyst]

I think that road users should pay to use the road. Fuel excise, or electricity surcharge tax or whatever, is a tiny fraction of the subsidy that road users get from regular tax payers.

I'm a blind Aussie taxpayer.

Consider my tax situation. If I take an Uber to my local pub, that's about A$10. Of that $10:

$0.90 in Goods and Services Tax $1 to the taxi compensation scheme

That's 19% tax - or $1.90/$10.

In Australia, public transport and P2P services get to a tiny fraction of all available road destinations. It easier (and sometimes cheaper) for someone like me to get from Sydney to Singapore than to Sydney to Kangaroo Valley (about 350km from Sydney).

So, for my 19% tax rate to get to the pub, the equivalent journey someone who can drive a car on their own may pay $0.25 in fuel excise duty.

They can pay the road users tax. They already get enough of a subsidy from me.

[throwaway0a5e]

>I think that road users should pay to use the road.

I think we should have pay to use parks. And schools.

What's the point of having government funded infrastructure if not to make it equally available to all regardless of means?

[sydneycatalyst]

I agree. If we were to make roads equally available to all regardless of means, I should be able to travel to 100% of Australia, not the small fraction served by PT and P2P.

What I object to is that the tax for blind road users is several orders of magnitude higher than driver-users. And that comes with the caveat you can access maybe 5% of areas in Australia by PT and P2P.

At least my kids can use schools without an orders-of-magnitude higher tax. They can only use parks accessible by PT and P2P (which - in Australia - is a very small fraction).

So I get we all should pay for shared resources. But its less fair to ask someone who isn't permitted to access these shared resources an orders-of-magnitude higher tax to access a tiny fraction of those resources.

[Tiktaalik]

To be able to use the road at all requires buying a car, which is expensive. No such barriers in park use. Let's be clear, roads are for wealthy people, not the poor.

(Yes I know bicycles and buses use the road too, but if that's all we built roads for we wouldn't need so many!)

[sydneycatalyst]

I agree!

Well, besides not being blind or otherwise barred from driving through no fault of your own... :-)

[tshaddox]

Roads are a bit different than parks and schools, in that the vast majority of the maintenance costs of roads are caused by commercial (generally for-profit) activity. You do often have to pay to use public parks and school facilities for commercial events.

Also, there’s a difference between the government funding infrastructure or protecting monopolies that develop and maintain infrastructure, and government providing total end-to-end funding of something. We generally pay for usage of electricity, water, and postage, for example.