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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

Indeed - the number of educated people who believe there was a 'car tax' that paid for the road was outstanding. Until recently nearly all taxation went into a central pot and was allocated from there. Sadly this is now changing which I think will further drive the sense of 'ownership of the road' that many drivers have.

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As someone who doesn't own a car, and rides a bike for everything, I get this argument on why I shouldn't be on the roads quite often. I just want to leave this article, here:

https://momentummag.com/free-rider-myth/

for those who believe that a gas tax is used to pay for roadways, and since cyclists do not pay a gas tax, they have no business riding the roads.

As the article points out, driving on roads is heavily subsidized. WE ALL pay for the privilege of driving a car on public roads.

The thing that gets me (as a cyclist) is that I commute almost entirely on local roads that are largely paid with my property taxes.

Yet the people that seem to complain most about bikes on the road are commuting from 2 counties away and very little of their tax money goes to paying the roads that I'm commuting on. And they act as if that me riding in that tiny 3 foot wide painted strip on the road is caused them to have an hour long commute in stop and go traffic from 30+ miles away.

I'm going to take a guess (and if I'm wrong, I apologize), that you also own a car, which would have a tax on the gas it consumes. Thus, you may in fact be contributing to the gas tax, while also riding a bike and having people think you're a freeloader (while also getting to work, paying Federal taxes that contribute to the loans that subsidize the actual construction of the road ways ,etc).

I don't own a car, but as the article I linked points out, more than 50% of commuters would need to ride a bike for their commute, before car drivers subsidize the cost of roads for cyclists.

It would be then that I would be interested in talks about cyclists contributing extra to the costs of infrastructure through some sort of... tax - that infrastructure would also look amazingly different. One can dream :)

Well, yes and no - my family owns a car, but my wife drives it most days. We got rid of our second car when we moved within easy bike commuting distance of my job.

roars by cyclist after 2 seconds' wait, races up to traffic ahead, slams on brakes, gets passed by cyclist at the stop sign 30 seconds later

Let's also not forget that road wear's relationship with weight is greater than linear, which is to say that doubling the weight will more than double the wear. Your average cyclist is going to be 10x smaller than a normal 4 door car.

IIRC, it goes with the 4th power of the axle weight, which is much more than just nonlinear

That may be the situation in the U.S. – definitely not comparable in most of the EU.

Also worth bearing in mind that not all the money that goes to road infra for motor vehicles can be attributed to the costs of enabling the use of passenger cars, as at least part of that is needed for other aspects of a functioning society (transport, etc.)

It boggles my mind how places have set up toll roads, and then somehow negotiate the tolls to a third party. Just, why!?

(Alternatively, someone please educate me on how what I think I "know" there is false. Thanks! :) )

Privatized vs government run. In some situations a privatized provider can be more effective than a government run one. If the private company has the call center in Tennessee, their accountants, lawyers and headquarters in Phoenix, they can be cheaper than a government run organization that has all employees living in a high cost area in CA. There are also economies of scale for a private company to manage these services for many different areas. S a city getting half of the toll revenue from a private company can get more money than collecting all of it themselves and hiring people.

Some folks, if inclined towards skepticism, think that it's a form of give-away: Hand it to a private business, and bail it out when it fails. Some of these things work, and some fail. A couple of interesting privatization episodes to consider:

* Public education --> Charter schools

* Public and nonprofit colleges --> For-profit education industry

at least here in the US we have a fetish for older guys in business casual with a little bit of a beer gut that knock off early to put in a quick 9. as long as one of those guys is taking a cut, we're happy.

thats the way it seems

the idea is that an enterprising private company can manage costs and deliver services at a lower cost than a Gov run one.

Not really sure i 100% agree, but I suspect that oversite would be better with a Gov run Toll

That idea sounds fine, absent all of the evidence I've heard of where the vast majority of the toll money is going outside of the city where the toll road is.

I suppose taxes aren't much different, in that most go somewhere else. But, at least with taxes you can see a money stream back to the city and argue it up. With it going to a private company, you are sorta screwed.

Except for the fact that the cost of collecting tolls exceeds the cost of collecting a tax on fuel [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817279

Tolls achive more than just crudely approximating a car's impact to the road system. Tolls can influence traffic behavior and congestion; which I'd guess is the point of that LA article.

Also, I'm curious how those costs look when you have open road tolling, as recently implemented in Massachusetts. No toll takers, just cameras, computers, and a call center "somewhere".

> Tolls can influence traffic behavior and congestion

That's more like "give poor people a reason not to drive on certain roads/lanes" if you take the glass half empty view of things.

There's also the cost of setting up and maintaining system that doesn't apply to fuel tax collection (since it's already in place).

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