President Bush today signed a $286.4 billion transportation bill into law. Incidentally, that comes out to about $1000 for every man, woman, and child in the US today. That seems a bit stiff to me. Of all that money, about $24 billion (which is about $81 for every man, woman and child in this country) went to the 6,371 "special projects" that legislators got for their states.
Now, I have a family of 3, and I don't know about you, but don't really like the idea of paying $3000 in taxes for road work when the bill is so long (1,000 pages) that I will never read it or know anything that is contained in it. And I like the idea of paying $243 for some legislators' pet projects even less.
One of the reasons this particular issue irks me so much is that I use roads very little. I telecommute, and my wife is at home with our baby, which means that our road use is pretty light. On the other hand, someone who drives on the roads for hours a day still has the same amount of taxes going towards the roads that I do. And what about all those trucks? They take up lots of room on the roads, cause more pollution, and cause much greater wear and tear on the roads than a passenger car or even an SUV. Most of the time, a road or freeway must be built much tougher because of the weight of trucks.
I have a solution. Not everybody will like this solution, but that will be mostly the people who currently use the road system on the backs of others who pay for it. The solution consists of two parts: The use of toll roads, and the use of a vehicle's weight in determining its rate of payment. It makes sense to me that a person who uses a road more than another should pay more. And it makes sense to me that someone who drives a heavier vehicle (or a semi) should have to pay more than someone who drives on that road with a geo metro (because heavier vehicles force the roads to be constructed thicker, which costs more, and causes the roads to deteriorate faster, costing more in rebuilding and maintenence).
The practical application is that freeways and other long roads are paid for by tolls, and shorter and local roads are paid for by registration fees and gas taxes. Tolls for freeways are more than viable, and with today's technology they can be cheaper to run than ever before. A car could register to pay automatically and would then be tracked electronically as it entered and exited the toll area to determine the price, which is either billed to the owner, or payed for in advance. Registration fees can be adjusted based on a vehicle's weight to account for the damage of heavier vehicles, and gas taxes typically already tax heavier vehicles more than light vehicles.
We need to move more to a society where you pay for what you use, rather than one where everyone pays for everything (otherwise known as socialism), and this would just be one small step in that direction.
