[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.