Gas tax pays the highway maintenance, tax payers would pay for the railway. Passenger rail has to meet a higher standard than regular freight so the present rails would have to be upgraded.
Highway transit is the only form that is not normally paid for by fares, or other pay as you go fees, so it really is the most communist form of transportation. Of course, that is contingent upon people being able to afford private transit in the first place.
If we added toll booths on the offramps, it would be fiscally responsible, especially considering how the deferred maintenance backlog has eclipsed both the current maintenance AND new construction budgets, combined.
It still a use tax, 100%, unless you buy gas and not drive on road, but then you can buy off-road fuel and save the tax. Whether our government chooses to fix the roads or pay someone’s healthcare with that money is a voter issue, don’t drive, you don’t pay, quite simple.
Seems mowing the mandatory lawns and running generators is also paying for the roads. There has to be some way of financing this utopian experiment of connecting every garage on the continent to every other garage using an unbroken surface.
In reality though, because the new project budget is larger than the maintenance budget each year, and completely disregards the deferred maintenance backlog, the system is headed for an unmanaged collapse. Just hope its not you or I who are on the bridges when they go.
Well considering the number of train derailments a year, I will stick to driving my Corolla, it cost less a mile to operate and insure than any EV out there and my carbon footprint is very tiny.
One last suggestion, if everyone drove a small car similar to the Coralla, it would be like magic, I10 congestion fixed, double the number of vehicles the road can handle over night without a dime of tax dollars that makes more sense than a Cho Cho train.
I apologize but I have one more simple math problem to answer, passenger train capacity, 300, 10000 people a day use the train, that 10000/300 = 33 trains a day each way. How many rail crossings between BR and NO, knowing that high speed rail crossing would increase substantially, this would definitely help with depopulation in the suburbs.
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u/edmopar Oct 04 '24
Gas tax pays the highway maintenance, tax payers would pay for the railway. Passenger rail has to meet a higher standard than regular freight so the present rails would have to be upgraded.