Driving your car may take on a new and larger meaning ”” for your wallet.
To fix its crumbling roads and bridges and rescue the state’s financially challenged public transit system, a draft report made public yesterday says the state should consider charging tolls at the state line on every interstate highway and creating a new tax for each mile a vehicle is driven.
The report calls for tolls on a new Sakonnet River Bridge, increasing the state gas tax and a long list of other things related to using the roads. One proposed tax would apply to anything made from petroleum, from paint to detergent to plastics.
If Rhode Island charges tolls at the state line on every interstate highway and creaties a new tax for each mile a vehicle is driven, the traffic will double in CT on 91 North [to the Hartford Interchange], 84 East [from the Hartford Interchange], and on 395 North. In which case, I suggest that CT start charging exactly half the tax that RI wants to tax and start a new revenue stream. Folks are sure to bypass RI altogether to avoid their taxes. It’s a win-win for CT. More tax revenue and more revenue for merchants along the highways. Please do this…please, please, please do this Rhode Island!
What’s wrong with relying on user fees to pay the full costs of maintaining streets and highways?
The money has to come from somewhere.
What do fuel taxes, automobile registrations fees, automobile property taxes, automobile sales taxes, and licensing fees pay for?
I just hope that RI actually does this. It could be a great boon to the CT economy as folks bypass thier portion of US 95.
What is [i]not[/i] a user fee? For that matter, what is it that you or I don’t use that we don’t want to pay for? Maybe if I lived in a shack in the woods like Kaczynski I would be able to avoid touching anything that had some contact in faraway places like RI and could point to something like infrastructure as someone else’s problem, but who knows where all the money I spend ends up (that which doesn’t go to China, anyway) or who’s handled that thing I want to get it to me? Nothing is free already, so where do we draw the line on user fees versus all the other taxes we already pay or what’s hidden in the cost of something?
Do I hear VAT rumbling in the background?
RE: “What’s wrong with relying on user fees to pay the full costs of maintaining streets and highways?
The money has to come from somewhere.”
I would be happy to do this if we also at the same time eliminated all the other taxes that were purportedly to pay for the building and maintenance of roads.
[blockquote]What’s wrong with relying on user fees to pay the full costs of maintaining streets and highways?
The money has to come from somewhere. [/blockquote]
Fuel taxes already do this, and do it quite efficiently. About the only thing they don’t take into account is peak driving hours, and even then they are a rough estimate by virtue of fuel wasted in stop-and-go traffic. If there can be a more efficient way of doing it, I’m all for it but, like Sarah, I’ll demand that fuel taxes be repealed simultaneously.
Some curious responses to my comment #2.
Sick-Tired [#1] opened with a reflex plaint against the Rhode Island proposal to increase user fees.
I responded at the level of general principle by asking what’s wrong with relying on user fees to pay the [i] full [/i] costs of maintaining streets and highways. I neither endorsed nor criticized the Rhode Island proposal.
Now consider the responses:
[i] What do fuel taxes, automobile registrations fees, automobile property taxes, automobile sales taxes, and licensing fees pay for? [/i] —Sick-Tired [#3]
Note the assumption: because these taxes and fees exist, they therefore already cover the full costs of maintaining streets and highways.
If fuel taxes and registration and licensing fees do fully cover those costs, fine. But that’s not clear from the article.
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[i] Fuel taxes already do this, and do it quite efficiently. [/i]
—Jeffersonian [#4]
Well, how do you know fuel taxes cover the full costs of maintaining Rhode Island streets and highways?
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[i] What is [/i] not [i] a user fee? [/i] —Blue Ontario [#4]
Sales taxes and income taxes, for starters. Plus most alcohol and tobacco taxes. Plus property taxes insofar as they fund general governmental services rather than property-specific services like fire protection.
“User fees” include tolls, fuel taxes, and registration and licensing fees. If a state does not tax other personal property, user fees would also include property taxes on automobiles.
Blue Ontario seems concerned about the overall level of taxes. That’s a fair point, but separate from the one I’m making: that there’s nothing wrong with having motorists, rather than other taxpayers, bear the full cost of maintaining streets and highways.