Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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Who Pays for Roads?

  How the "Users Pay" Myth Gets in the Way of Solving America's Transportation Problems

~ https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

Road Taxes and Funding by State, 2025

  Most states fail to collect enough in user fees to fully provide for roadway spending. This necessitates transfers from general funds or other revenue sources that are unrelated to road use to pay for road construction and maintenance.

  Only three states—Delaware, Montana, and New Jersey—raise enough revenue to fully cover their highway spending. The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia must make up the difference with tax revenues from other sources.

  The states that raise the lowest proportion of their highway funds from transportation-related sources are Alaska (19.4 percent) and North Dakota (35.1 percent), both states which rely heavily on revenue from severance taxes.

Looking through the list,

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...

that's about what I expected. And that's not even including sales tax from car purchases, and maintenance related spending. Suffice to say, without cars, a year bus pass would need to run ~ however much the average person spends per year on all car related taxes.

Well it wouldn’t because we wouldn’t have as many people driving cars, so there wouldn’t need to be as many roads so costs would be much lower.

In Ohio we just spend $2bn on about 2 miles of road to effectively temporarily ease congestion. That’s $2bn paid for by taxpayers regardless of how it’s paid, that we didn’t necessarily need to spend.

I’d also like to add, yes that “bus ticket” (I’m no fan of busses for short term travel) might be a little more expensive but consumer costs overall would’ve likely to go down. Why? Well in addition to already paying for highway infrastructure you’re paying $30,000, $50,000, &c . on a vehicle, plus insurance, gas, repairs, tires, maintenance, interest on loans, &c. So while I think it’s hard to compare apples to apples, I think it’s good to have this information in mind as well when discussing this topic broadly.

Thanks. Yea also not accounting for other social costs - obesity, teen deaths, first responders and police spending time rescuing people who are maimed in car crashes.

There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.

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