I'm having trouble interpreting this. What is 100% here? Cars fully pay for roads? Or roads are 100% subsidised?
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
212 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
12195 readers
1513 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Kind of maddening that people who can't even afford to own a car have to pay for other people's car dependency, only to be yelled at for "not sharing the road" when they've got to get to work or school by bike.
That's how taxes work. Is it also insane people who don't go to school or have kids have their taxes funding their local districts and community colleges?
Not the same, though.
The ROI on public education should be incentive enough to want your taxes going to it.
Encourageing car dependency creates losses across numerous categories, including health, environmental, further tax burden, public safety, land use, etc.
But my point was that the entitlement that some drivers have about "owning the road" is so toxic.
Don't most goods move by truck? You want your Amazon package don't you?
Trains to move long distances, trucks for city to city transport, local deliveries can be made by smaller truck or cargo e-bikes.
No need to get rid of roads. We need to get rid of car dependency and make road use more equitable for all users.
Switzerland requires all warehouses to have a rail connection. Semi trucks are not needed.
I guarantee that not all places those goods are going will have the ability to have rail lines. The goods will have to be distributed somehow. Not to say that rail shouldn't be used where possible. Also emergency sevices will always need roads.
I think this goes both ways though. Obviously cars get more money, but there are lots of instances of taxpayers paying for public transit they cannot personally use.
but there are lots of instances of taxpayers paying for public transit they cannot personally use.
Yes, but public transportation has a return on investment that makes it worth paying for, even if you don't use it.
the ROI of public transport is difficult to quantify though… things like social mobility, etc… we shouldn’t be thinking about public transport in terms of ROI - its quality of life improvement for the entire city
its quality of life improvement for the entire city
That's exactly the point! You put in a dollar of tax dollars to get many dollars back in benefits (QOL, environmental, safer streets, lower healthcare costs, etc.).
The same can be said for cycling and other active transportation investments, they pay back society in benefits. The data (and here) is incredible.
Car-centric infrastructure does the opposite, and you are always losing money.
the thing about public transport is that you benefit from other people using it, i for one quite like having less traffic on the roads and less pollution in the air that i breathe
True! And while roads often have negative impacts, the positive economic impacts are measurable and legit (at least in absence of other ways of getting around!).
To be clear, I am on your side lol, just playing devil's advocate
The aggregate cost of public transit besides roads themselves is a rounding error against the aggregate cost of roads alone, nationwide. This is not a valid argument until that comparison is anywhere near peer.
load more comments
(8 replies)
See every NJB video that references Strong Towns.
Road transit exclusivity bankrupts cities
Per usual, so many hypocrites here. Without roads you would not exist. Your emergency services, your grocery stores deliveries, and the products you buy all use roads and highways. If you don't want a car or a road to drive on, move to a mountain away from everyone and stop bothering people.
Yes, roads are important. Attributing costs to who or what is causing those costs is still a good idea.
Paying for roads is fine, paying for 10 lanes of roads that only exist because the real costs aren't included in all kinds of decision making is dumb.
Wow, edgy take. You came here to fuckcars with a wild, untamed, edgy take like that?
I do think it's important to reject the neoliberal demand that all services pay for themselves. I think a heat map showing percentages of local/state and federal funds spent on non-car transit infrastructure would be more useful and interesting. Or, a heat map showing the percentage of roads in each state which the state is currently able to afford upkeep on. As the big issue with our road funding model is that it's easy to build, almost impossible to maintain.
You can have all that without 10-lane highways.
yeah, roads, not highways
Gotta think, though....roads are used to transport goods across the country. While at first glance it's a shitty deal for people without cars, but when you bike to the store to buy something. How did those products get there? From a truck, that had to drive from warehouse to store, on the roads.
And those trucks will collect taxes through fuel, licensing, etc. And that cost gets passed down to the consumer. There's no reason to subsidise roads for that.
almost every single country used to have like 2x as dense rail networks, there's no reason we couldn't go further and make rail networks 4x as dense as they are now.
You don't need 11 lane highways to supply the supermarket. Every multi lane road you encounter is built for private drivers, not for deliveries.
Our rail systems are crumbling for a reason.
It is much better to ship by train than truck. If we put this money toward revitalizing and expanding our rail in this country it would have a way better ROI.
The US freight rail system is actually extremely robust. We move more rail miles of freight, than Europe does people.
It's just a shame we built our rail for boxes and not people
except that american railways are in such terrible condition that trains largely run at speeds that can be beaten by a fit dude on a bike
The point being made isnt that roads aren't worth the investment, its more so that everyone pays for roads regardless of the amount of use they get out of them, but that same investment into cycling paths, bus lanes, or trains is viewed as "government subsidies" or "wasting money on infrastructure that won't be used by drivers".
We should be paying for the trucks to use the roads when we buy products transported on the roads. Just like how we pay for the ships, ports, trains, and railroads used to transport other goods. The cost of transport should be part of the total product cost. Trucks should be paying road tax in proportion to the damage they do to the roads, and those costs should be passed to their customers, then to us. This is how it works with most other forms of transport.
By moving the cost of the roads used by trucks to "everyone", it makes trucking artificially cheaper and turns the cost of roads into an externality. If shippers had to pay those costs directly, I bet there would be many more goods shipped in more efficient ways.
Sure but that truck can pay the taxes which then get passed down to the consumer buying the goods.
This map cannot be correct. For example, it shows California drivers paying much of the costs of their highways and that is not the case at all.
I don't doubt it, but how do you know? Can you share a contradictory source?
Public funding for California’s transportation system comes from numerous sources. Historically, about one-third of total transportation funding has come from state sources [gas tax]. Local sources—such as local sales tax revenues, transit fares, and city and county general funds—have made up slightly less than half of total funding. The remaining amount (roughly one-fifth of total funding in most years) comes from federal sources that are provided to the state or directly to local governments.
https://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2023/4821/ZEV-Impacts-on-Transportation-121323.pdf
I will probably get down voted because this is fuckcars. But For Ohio, The vast majority of these taxes for road funds come from fuel taxes and motor registration fees. Some come from property taxes, which I think is reasonable seeing as they have roads that go right to their houses.
This seems ok to me. People who use vehicles end up paying for the roads they rely on.
And those who don't have cars still get access to the roads.
Do you have a source for those numbers? Id be surprised if the fuel +registration taxes cover even 1/3 of the cost of roads. Maybe they could cover basic maintaince like painting, plowing, and potholes, but initial construction or resurfacing likely needs heavy investment from elsewhere
Edit: i see the OP does have a source for tax revenue numbers, but it is unclear exactly what is covered under the taxes. Does it include funds for police for traffic enforcement? Funding for emergency services responding to accidents? The site isn't clear if new road construction or lane widening is included in the budgets as road maintaince or not.
According to the map, Ohio is one of the outliers.
And they’re still just awful.
My ass in NJ looking at the roads going "...think they're saving money by doing almost nothing"
view more: next ›