Quote:
Originally Posted by badrunner
Hell no. The pay-as-you-go approach is short-sighted. Everyone benefits from roads whether they directly use them or not. How do you think your Amazon order gets delivered? How do you think emergency services will get to your house if you ever need it? How do groceries get delivered to your local market? If you take public transit, how do you think the building materials for the system got there? How did the construction workers get there? It's just dishonest and disengaged from reality to say "I don't use it, why should I pay for it?"
Our whole economy and modern civilization is dependent on good roads and their upkeep. Everyone benefits and everyone pays - individual drivers already pay more through gas taxes and vehicle registrations. Wealthy people would hardly notice the extra couple of dollars here and there, so toll roads hit the poor and working class the hardest. It amounts to a punitive and regressive tax on the people least able to afford it, in order to fund a piece of critical infrastructure that everyone uses.
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I fully agree.
I'm generally against toll roads, but I grew up in SoCal so toll roads to me were always a foreign concept. I first encountered toll roads in New Jersey, and then when Orange County opened up some toll roads (kind of fitting for a conservative county, huh?) back in the early 90s, I drove down one just for the curiosity factor, and I've never used it again.
And now, LA County has HOT lanes which I've never used, on two different freeways, and in my opinion, they just add to the traffic congestion for the general purpose lanes. They essentially turned what were originally HOV and bus lanes paid for by California road taxes into toll/bus lanes, for the people who are willing to pay to use them. People do zip by on them, but at the expense of people who can't/won't pay to use them.
I drive between northern and southern California fairly regularly, and in my opinion, California's roads are generally good---It's some of the freeways in the LA area and Bay Area that can be pretty bad, condition-wise, but they take a pounding, but I guess that's no excuse. So build them better with the tax money, then. For example, in LA County, I think the worst freeway is the 710, which goes from Long Beach to just southeast of downtown LA, but it's used by many big rigs because of the Port of Long Beach, so it does take a hard beating. It gets pot-holed and worn down regularly.
When it comes to the condition of city streets, it varies by municipality. The city of Los Angeles has some really shitty streets; that city really needs to do some serious street paving. From what I've read some years ago, a lot of the concrete streets in LA were laid down almost a hundred years ago, with just some minor crack repairs done over the decades. Long Beach has nicely-paved streets, as well as some of the smaller suburbs in LA County. Torrance has nice streets. Glendale has nice streets. Norwalk and Lakewood have nice streets...
California voters have recently voted to keep the higher gas tax to fix our roads, and I think it's working. On my most recent drive through the state, I encountered a number of road projects with those signs touting "our tax dollars at work" thanks to SB whatever it's called.