I can't find that info about funding sources in the urban.org article, or what "sales tax" is generated from specifically. The article does say that HTF is not fully self-funded. If something comes from general revenues/tax, that means that all taxpayers are paying for it, whether or not they use a car.

If this is in fact the case, I don't think it's a bad thing. The problem in that case comes from double standards, where the ground-level understanding of how society operates includes costs incurred by individuals/businesses which effectively disappear into a vacuum rather than being directly paid/passed onto customers, yet is used as evidence of the completely natural and inherent utility of cars over alternatives.

For a different doc more directly about who pays for roads, I've found this one useful. Made by a so-so thinktank, but seems well-sourced and rigorous.

https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...

I don't know that I'd call it a double standard though- a far greater percentage of the population benefits from road transport than subway. Unless it's handheld and it fits in a bag, goods and services are almost exclusively delivered by road vehicle. And even if a messenger is using the subway to deliver a package, it most likely was on a truck at some point before that.

I think we both agree that cars have some significant utility to them, although having utility doesn't mean that any amount of cost is acceptable. This is my problem with "cars pay for themselves, therefore other forms of transit should pay for themselves", which I have seen evidence against (see linked pdf) and nothing conclusively for. The meaningful discussion to have is what we want to support as a society, like your argument.

Trucks on last mile delivery are invaluable for some deliveries, as you mention, but then... why else does any other vehicle need to use most streets? Is it reasonable for someone who orders a truck to pay 33% of the cost of that truck on the road? What about 0%, or 100%? Which is best?

In cases where alternatives to trucks or cars are less costly overall in some situation, or additional efficiency can be achieved with batching, how much of that is ignored because of these accidentally created incentives? Not even mentioning the indirect cost to communities (walkability, clean air, autonomy of disabled people).

I don't have the answers, but I think these are good questions to be asking. For the specifics of policies, we need to base that on data ofc.

Well one thing for sure, internet warriors are always willing to give up cars or have others give them up but the simple reality is that cars and access to them is a requirement for many even in the city environment.

simply put, living in town is not financially or socially viable for many and the freedom afforded by auto ownership is not giving the value is vastly underestimated by those who would restrict their use by others.

as with most lifestyle conversations it is far easier to score internet points with altruistic comments let alone being part of the clique. about as useful as hashtag diplomacy

That's a politically constructed reality, created over decades by deliberate lobbying and political leverage. It's not a simple reality at all.

It’s not a “politically constructed reality.” It’s a reality constructed reality. Roads offer a relatively cheap and easy way of taking advantage of cheap, plentiful land in the US. There’s definitely subsidies we could get rid of (force property taxes to cover the costs of roads in the suburbs), but even if you did that I suspect most people would still opt to live in cheaper and bigger houses outside the city. (Especially if you got rid of corresponding subsidies in cities.)

> Force property taxes to cover the costs of roads in the suburbs

That's what excise taxes are for. For example, in my town, we spend $1.2m on highway maintenance, and $450k in snow removal, while collecting $2.4m in vehicle excise taxes.

There is also about $60k in fines income, but it doesn't break down exactly how much of that is vehicular.

If roads were used ONLY for delivery trucks most would be dirt tracks: trucks would be 4 wheel drive with a winch on front. this would be cheaper than paving roads.

This is wrong in every way possible. The entire concept of road surface preservation revolves around a sufficiently resilient but elastic (non-brittle) impermeable coating. Equally important is a well drained base.

The whole point is to keep the water away from the dirt, and when it's not possible, minimize (distribute) loads from the tires across as large as area as possible.

They tested alternatives extensively in the 50's, driving trucks in circles on different test tracks for literally weeks and months at a time. As poorly planned as some people believe the interstate system to be, the government didn't throw billions of dollars at it blindly.

True, but irrelevant: there are very few delivery trucks in the scheme of things, if that is your only use for roads a dirt track is good enough. 4 wheel drive and a winch are a must of course to get around on them. Some of the particularly bad one would be paved - though more as a bridge over streams.

Remember I carefully excluded everything except delivery from roads - this is horribly unrealistic. You can call it a strawman.

It's entirely false even as a strawman. 18-wheeler delivery trucks carrying 80,000 lbs of cargo (or even 1000 pounds of sensitive equipment) are not going cross country on dirt roads. Trying to maintain unpaved surfaces for that kind of usage pattern would cost exponentially more than paving the roads and providing for proper drainage.

Trucking is responsible for transporting roughly 12 billion tons of cargo annually, with an estimated value of $9 trillion dollars. As a total share of goods transported by value, trucking makes up about 70%, and 60% by weight. The trucking industry employs 10 million people (3.5 million of which are drivers), and directly contributes to about 5% of GDP, to say nothing of the share of GDP which indirectly depends on trucking, which would be roughly... all of it.

The United States' $20 trillion GDP is entirely dependent on a functioning and well maintained highway system, and it is absolutely irreplaceable as a means of economically and rapidly transporting goods throughout the country.

In that context, the roads that regular everyday taxpayers get to drive are basically free and paid for, because most of them would have needed to be built anyway for the basic provisioning of goods and services, health & safety, building materials and as a right-of-way for water, sewer, electrical, data, and communications infrastructure.

Paving roads is super cheap. Repaving part of the six lane freeway near my house (US-50 in Maryland) recently cost less than one million per mile.

Overlaying an already properly designed road can be super cheap, but it requires the original road to have been properly designed. Whatever that cost might have been.

Not really. Rail is paved to high standards, roads to the same standards are more expensive yet. If I were to replace my driveway with a rail I wouldn't use the same high standards that the main line gets and so my costs would be much less (of course since there is no rail down my little street that would be pointless). Mainline rail is expensive, but so is highway paving.

No, rail is always more expensive, even at the lowest spec'ed design loads. It becomes more cost effective the heavier the loading, not lighter. But AREMA ensures it's pretty much always more expensive.

That’s only true if you assign a very low cost to the local health and global climate impact of cars

"What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"

The fact that tax revenue from cars & trucks pay for the cost of their infrastructure is true regardless. IF you want to analyze externalities, please by all means, take a tally of all positive and negative and show me the balance.

This is ridiculous. And doesn’t even cover the costs due to 40,000 deaths every year, and over 2million disabled and injured every single year.

I strongly disagree. The question was do cars and trucks cover the cost of infrastructure. The answer is that they clearly do. When I see someone claim otherwise, I'll just pipe in with the truth.

If you want to talk about externalities, you have to have a clear-eyed analysis of both positive and negative externalities. It's a very difficult analysis, because they both total in the trillions of dollars. I'd welcome a well researched scientific paper on the subject.

Cars do not pay their own way. Tabs, gas taxes, and tickets do not cover even a third of spending on road construction, maintenance, and highway patrol... And that's ignoring the high cost of 'free' parking.

But since they are very visible, very direct taxes (And in addition to them, you have to pay for gasoline itself, insurance, parking, etc), drivers who have not done the math mistakenly believe that they aren't being subsidized.

I just did the math, and showed my work. Cars and trucks pay hundreds of billions in taxes annually, which more than covers the cost of creating and maintaining the infrastructure.

Your math:

1. Ignored the amortized cost of all that roadway construction. You can't just look at maintenance costs.

2. Ignored the state and federal funding that went into it.

3. Ignored the cost of 'free' parking.

4. Ignored the cost of highway and parking enforcement (If you have even one officer doing it full-time, the fines don't pay for it.)

5. Is quite atypical.

1. When Eisenhower founded the national highway system, roads were built to provide for the common defense, and to provide the economic foundation upon which practically our entire economy is based (see trucking figures I quote above). At a cost of $500 billion (that's inflation adjusted) [1] I believe it was the single greatest investment ever made in human history in - terms of total dollar return on investment.

2. State & Federal funding of highways currently totals approximately $175 billion per year. I think inflation adjusted that has been fairly steady of the last half century. It's one of the few things where government spending has actually remained constant. [2] Income from fuel taxes has been reducing over the last decade, while income from sales & excise tax has been increasing.

It's reasonable to project that for the last several decades that infrastructure costs have been more than covered by vehicular income, and will continue to be covered for the forseeable future. Setting policy for today and tomorrow should be based on the facts of today and tomorrow.

It would be claiming more than I need, to state that vehicular direct revenue has always exceeded direct expenses, when we can at least clearly state this was true for the last decade, and the next. Economically speaking, it would be extremely costly to reduce the utilization rates for infrastructure we have already paid for, for example, in terms of infrastructure cost per passenger-mile.

One aspect which will eventually need reform is gas taxes will continue to drop with the spread of EVs, so a new form of usage-based billing will need to be developed -- hopefully one that doesn't involve a national tracking system, but I digress. It's fortunate that roads are so profitable that we haven't needed to raise the Federal fuel tax rate in over a decade, and have ample time to develop a solution.

3. The cost of 'free parking' is a relative rounding error in the $175 billion/yr we're talking about. Don't confuse the theoretical economic value of selling parking, or the potential value of re-purposing the space, with what it cost to build it.

There may be a subsidy here, even possibly a large one, but that's not based on the cost of building the spot, but more the perceived theoretical value in renting it. Again, we've gotten into externalties and strayed away from the basic cost analysis.

In reality, most parking costs are paid for by the parking consumer in one way or another. For example, at the mall, while you might not pay a fee to park, the store's rent includes the cost of building and maintaining the parking, and the prices of the goods at that store cover that rent. At your place of employment, you might not pay to park out back, but rest assured that the profit margin of the business includes the rent on the building, leaving less room in the P&L for salary. Again, whether the parking "benefit" is taxed as income to the employee is a different discussion as to whether roads pay for themselves.

4. You're getting into externalities here, without considering the positive ones. Police use the roads to prevent and respond to crime, which includes vehicular crime. Don't underestimate how much money is collected by governments through fines, fees, and forfeitures. In D.C. it works out to over $200 per person. Yes, it turns out, highways are overall very lucrative for the police. [3]

5. Thank you!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

[2] - https://edit.urban.org/sites/default/files/hr_4.png

[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2016/10/26/police-c...