Should road tolls be introduced as a wide spread pricing policy and why?
I’m against Road tolls. I drive 3000 miles a week and I pay roughly 658 dollars per week in road use taxes. I see no reason to pay more than that, as collectively people like me contribute 1.68 BILLION in road taxes. Toll roads are most often PRIVATELY FUNDED HIGHWAYS. a Business that makes money from you driving on the road they built. This saves the state from having to maintain them, and the companies even HIRE the state to enforce the speed laws on their highway. Road/fuel taxes will never go down, nor will states give them up to private enterprize… the toll roads are just a way for them to have their cake and eat it too….
Absolutely not! Tolls were first introduced as a way to pay for the construction of the road, once paid for, the tolls were supposed to go away and regular taxes would cover maintenance. The governments discovered tolls were a cash cow that could be endlessly milked from drivers pockets, so once the tolls were in place they never went away. Some politicians, Leftists, Greens, see tolls as a way to control people’s driving, like high vehicle taxes and high fuel taxes. Ream out their wallets and they can’t afford to drive to work, for business, unless they raise their prices, which hurts the common man. The common man can’t afford to work anywhere he has to drive to, so he’s unemployed. If the shopping centers are more than a short distance away he can’t get there because of the expense. Shopping centers close, auto manufacturers close, tourism stops. Don’t say public transportation unless you mean “universal on demand, portal-to-portal transport” because rail and bus lines don’t cover e
I’m with those who say that the road tax – and tolls – should be scrapped and replaced with an additional tax on fuel. This way, no-one could dodge road tax – something that costs the treasury (and thus us, the legitimate road-users) millions. If the treasury were to work out what the average mpg of a car might be – together with typical annual milage – it would then be simple to calculate how much per litre need be added. It’s democratic: if you drive a gas-guzzling SUV, you contribute more than someone in a fuel-efficient vehicle; if you do more mile per year than the average motorist, then you pay more pro-rata – conversely, if you do fewer than average miles, you pay out less. Similarly, those on low incomes won’t have to find the hefty lump of cash currently required for road tax, but instead pay-as-they-go. As for the contribuor above who protested on behalf of country-dwellers, I can’t see that such an argument stands up to scrutiny: if you use the roads, then prepare to contrib
