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Should Public Transit Be Free, I.E. Paid Out Of General Taxes?  

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Posted
Pure nonsense. There is nothing more subsidized than public transit with little or no benifit. Governments provide no subsidizes to oil companies what soever.
Well, that's clearly wrong. But for the rest of this thread, I dunno.

As Kimmy pointed out:

When you sit in your car, you might feel resentful that your tax dollars are helping pay for the bus of 40 people in the lane next to you. Use your head. Be happy. That's 40 less cars clogging the road you're on. And that's 40 less cars fouling the air you're breathing.

It is in the interest of car drivers to subsidize public transit. Why? It keeps other drivers off the roads and lowers traffic congestion.

Driving a car in a city incurs many costs (gasoline, wear-and-tear on car and road, noise, pollution, urban sprawl). Car drivers cover some of these costs privately or through taxes, and sometimes, others assume the cost.

I suspect the biggest cost is one everybody notices but no-one sees. Congestion. When a driver moves a car into heavy traffic, another place is taken on the road and the driver has imposed a tiny cost on all the drivers behind. When the Left refers to a "race to the bottom", there's the best example.

Traffic in Canadian cities will only get worse and congestion is the biggest cost that private individual car drivers don't see.

If you believe that transit riders should pay the full cost of the service then people who drive cars should also pay the full cost. That would require much higher gas taxes and tolls on many roads.
Sparhawk, I think gasoline taxes more-or-less cover road construction costs but I'll stand corrected. On the toll roads, you have my full attention. Why do drivers have to pay for a parking space but it's free if the car is moving?
Posted
Sparhawk, I think gasoline taxes more-or-less cover road construction costs but I'll stand corrected.  On the toll roads, you have my full attention.  Why do drivers have to pay for a parking space but it's free if the car is moving?

Gas taxes are collected by the federal and provincial governments, right? Isn't most road construction paid for by city governments, with provincial and federal contributions only coming in grants to major projects?

Wasn't the Liberals' "new deal for cities" so popular with mayors because it planned to actually give cities a share of the gas tax to use on roads?

Although i also spent a number of years in construction industry, I've never driven an asphalt roller.

What, then? Grader? Gravel truck? Back-hoe? Shovel?

Whichever the case, I don't think any of us are prepared to believe that you're some kind of expert in transportation and urban planning. Frankly, you just don't seem cut out for it.

(although, if you were an urban planner during the Bill Smith regime, that would explain a lot.)

Japan is not a model country for this topic. Of course, unless you think people should be hauled around in government owned human cattleliners. Most people in this country do not. We believe in individual rights and freedoms and mobility, at least in the west. The east is a different matter.

Japan has a numbers problem (too many cars in not enough space) that we don't have... yet. Although some places in Canada-- Vancouver, for instance-- already have traffic congestion problems that make a 10km drive take half an hour. Sitting in those traffic-jams is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom and mobility, and we use things like "planning" and "foresight" so that we might try to avoid having those problems here. Because at the rate Edmonton and Calgary are growing, the day is not far off.

-k

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