> As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads?

Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.

"Car culture" and "public roads" are not the same thing.

I'm a militant cyclist and I'm extremely unhappy with the state of urban planning in the world. But... Roads are a really good thing and I'm glad my government builds them.

I just wish they'd built them a bit differently, at least in the city.

I am not trying to equate the two concepts. Just that in most of North America car culture is what dictate the roads we have and who they’re built for.

>Yes, and people should be annoyed by this

So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.

Trucks are responsible for 99% of road damage and only pay 38% of the costs.

https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

Yes, the costs should be apportioned to those who are making them. If the bus causes the most road damage, then it should be charged. Then it'll make financial sense to invest in rail. Financial incentives are how capitalism works and the purpose of governments under capitalism is to apply externalities to the source causing them.

Should cyclists be charged a special tax for bike lane construction and maintenance? What about sidewalks, should you need a pedestrian pass?

1. As soon as the roads are all paying best-possible-use property tax for the space they take up and it's completely paid by automobiles, in addition to all maintenance, we should try to proportionally assign dedicated bicycle infrastructure costs toward bicycle users, now and anticipated.

2. Everyone is a pedestrian.

People accuse communists of being unrealistic idealists, but they have nothing on the libertarians.

That's the first I've heard of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax (and, less directly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism ) being libertarian!

fuck cars

User pay formerly-public-infrastructure is what I identified as libertarian. Would you also advocate for residents of high crime areas to pay more taxes for police coverage?

"User pay" is typically associated with regressive per-use taxes. It's perfectly compatible with socialism to ensure the cost of the road system is applied to only automobile users in a progressive manner. Relatedly, Finland moving violation fines are not a fixed fee and are proportional to income: https://nri.today/wealthy-speedsters-beware-finlands-million... Stop thinking "cars=default", they are not.

Legally criminal actions are violations against the state, which is why a prosecutor decides whether to file charges and does not need the consent of the victim to do so. We already have what you suggest with civil law and private security.

It's pure pedantry to distinguish between "user pay" and "progressive fees" based on usage. You're advocating for private payments on public infrastructure, it doesn't make it socialism just because it's infrastructure you disapprove of.

It'd be interesting to try charging vehicles relative to the road damage they do as it's proportional to around the fourth power of weight. It would likely change the nature of logistics as it could mean that large trucks would be more expensive that using two or three smaller trucks. Similarly, buses would benefit from being smaller and lighter.

Trucks already have lots of axles and wheels for this reason, because it's weight per wheel that matters.

I suspect the number of axles and wheels is to generally improve the strength/weight ratio rather than to minimise road surface damage.

Nope, the requirement comes from government standards intended to reduce road damage and specifies maximum ground pressure.

Okay, so there is a maximum. Charging proportionate to the road damage costs would still change the cost benefits of using single large vehicles vs multiple smaller vehicles, or possibly lots more axles.

No, in a perfect world, there would be a use tax, and those doing the delivery would pay the cost, and then pass that cost on to you. You might have meant it that way, but it sounded more like a gov. imposed tax based on the price of goods or something.

> So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.

"Yet you participate in society, curious!"

> In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included

There's nothing capitalist about that. Driving around and polluting the environment is currently done for free. That should be taxed. Highways and streets are by and large (in NA) used as a publicly subsidized private good at the expense of everyone else. Subsidized to the detriment of all because it pulls funding away from public transit that would move more people, prioritizing convenience of drivers over the safety of everyone else (to say nothing of it creating dead spaces with nothing but parking as far as the eye can see).

Public transport uses the roads too. In my country Romania there are road taxes included in the fuel prices and there are vehicle tax that is proportionalw itht eh engine size and vehicle age and how mych it pollutes. So people that drive more use more fuel and pay more tax. If you use your bike then you will not pay that taxes, now what should we tax for the bike lanes ? And how should we convert he fuel road tax for electric cars ?

> tax for the bike lanes

That already exists. In large parts of North America there isn’t a tax proportional to vehicle age, and the tax on gasoline doesn’t cover road wear (to say nothing about the unproved externality of pollution). So municipal property taxes and the like are used to cover the costs of road repair.

> electric cars.

The same way we pay for electricity and natural gas, report your kms and then have the odometer inspected on a semi regular basis and when you get rid of the car.

Yes, yes, and yes. Is it an intentional mischaracterization to conflate not wanting wealth redistribution with “others not having nice things”?

“others not having nice things” is a superset of “others not having unearned nice things”.

I don’t see where roads are unearned?

Why are you acting like subsidizing a homeowners free power is like any of these?

If I instead phrase it as "I'd rather subsidize someone's health care than pay for your free electricity", would that help you understand that there tends to be a priority system when spending tax dollars?

You don't have infinite tax dollars to spend after all.

> Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?

Yes we should immediately end these subsidies.

> It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.

The US as a whole has lots of nice things. And sometimes the things the US has are not as nice as they could be because an unwise subsidy is paying for something inferior, and a small group of people who financially benefit from the subsidy advocate politically against changing it.