Stolen from my favourite Facebook group (warning: not really safe for work).
Literally my thoughts as I try to navigate around Brisbane. A trip from the west to the airport can involve up to half a dozen tolls if you do it wrong.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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People should pay for their roads. "Free" driving leads to a tragedy of the commons, and inefficient road system.
But we do though, with rego and fuel taxes and the like - sorry, I'm just confused and trying to clarify atm, were you suggesting we don't at the moment?
Rego doesn't even begin to cover the cost of roads. Nearly all the cost comes from general tax revenue.
It's easy to work it out yourself.
Road funding is 8.3 billion from councils per year plus 5.6 billion (federal maintenance) +15 billion (federal projects) plus whatever the states spend. Plus there are other parts of road funding that come from other budgets but it's well over 30 billion all up. The number of registered cars in Australia is 21 million. So over $1500 per car per year for road expenditure.
Rego (excluding the insurance component which doesn't go towards roads) is about $200 depending on the state. So the rest is coming from general revenue.
Note that they never claimed rego paid for all the road costs. It's just something that's commonly assumed.
My understanding was that vehicle registration basically covered the costs of administrating the scheme, with road funding being driven by the excise on fuel. Which is why the government offers rebates for certain off road uses and if you run a generator etc.
If you calculate the revenues from fuel excise it doesn't come close to covering road costs either. I didn't even count the state funded road costs above but they come to some additional thousands per year per vehicle.
Most road costs are paid out of general revenue. Which means that the 30% of people who don't drive are paying for roads for everyone else too.
Yeah registration and fuel tax certainly covered a majority of it. This site has a breakdown and even with some of the dubious categories it's definitely still a significant portion. I suspect this also includes local roads which doesn't really make sense because you need them regardless of whether you have a car or not.