this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Tolls are good actually
Only works when there are decent alternatives, other wise it is just taking money from commuters (and in the case of my city giving it to private corporations).
Congestion charges are better
Explain.
People should pay for their roads. "Free" driving leads to a tragedy of the commons, and inefficient road system.
But we do though, with rego and fuel taxes and the like - sorry, I'm just confused and trying to clarify atm, were you suggesting we don't at the moment?
Rego doesn't even begin to cover the cost of roads. Nearly all the cost comes from general tax revenue.
Citation?
Yeah registration and fuel tax certainly covered a majority of it. This site has a breakdown and even with some of the dubious categories it's definitely still a significant portion. I suspect this also includes local roads which doesn't really make sense because you need them regardless of whether you have a car or not.
It's easy to work it out yourself.
Road funding is 8.3 billion from councils per year plus 5.6 billion (federal maintenance) +15 billion (federal projects) plus whatever the states spend. Plus there are other parts of road funding that come from other budgets but it's well over 30 billion all up. The number of registered cars in Australia is 21 million. So over $1500 per car per year for road expenditure.
Rego (excluding the insurance component which doesn't go towards roads) is about $200 depending on the state. So the rest is coming from general revenue.
Note that they never claimed rego paid for all the road costs. It's just something that's commonly assumed.