I'm agreeing that the burden on cars is unfair, but not in the direction suggested previously.
Roads are a necessity to the whole of our society. We need them for walking, riding bikes, etc, not just driving cars, and many need them in order to earn a living. Using the PTUA's figures alone ignores two major things:
1) How many public necessities are user-funded? Schools are almost 100% tax-funded. Health and public transport are largely tax funded. Roads are already far closer to user-funded than most other public services, so why should it be considered "fair" to make them even moreso, unless you want a user-pays hospital system and a user-pays school system along with it.
2) Roads are used by more than just car drivers, yet there seems to be an effort here to charge car users for everything and charge those who walk, use bikes, etc, nothing at all. We (at least, city-dwellers) are all road users when we go anywhere, including when we catch trams and buses. While some of the costs (eg. pollution) are attributable largely to cars, the majority are shared by all road users.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Eh?
Date: 2006-03-11 11:20 am (UTC)Roads are a necessity to the whole of our society. We need them for walking, riding bikes, etc, not just driving cars, and many need them in order to earn a living. Using the PTUA's figures alone ignores two major things:
1) How many public necessities are user-funded? Schools are almost 100% tax-funded. Health and public transport are largely tax funded. Roads are already far closer to user-funded than most other public services, so why should it be considered "fair" to make them even moreso, unless you want a user-pays hospital system and a user-pays school system along with it.
2) Roads are used by more than just car drivers, yet there seems to be an effort here to charge car users for everything and charge those who walk, use bikes, etc, nothing at all. We (at least, city-dwellers) are all road users when we go anywhere, including when we catch trams and buses. While some of the costs (eg. pollution) are attributable largely to cars, the majority are shared by all road users.