Funding for the development and maintenance of roads in the U.S. come from a variety of taxes such as vehicle registration fees, wheel taxes and taxes on gasoline and motor fuel. So , we do pay for using car infrastructure
Yes, but not nearly enough. Those kinds of taxes are extremely low (especially compared to e.g. the EU) and form only a fraction of the costs of car infrastructure.
All those hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars in infrastructure bills, all the regular car infrastructure maintanence costs, a large chunk is paid for by taxes that everyone gets regardless of how much they use a car. And all the extra non-tax costs (in both time and money) that non-drivers have to pay because car-dependent infrastructure fucks up transportation for everyone else, that is a massive charge.
People who don’t drive don’t pay any of those taxes that were used as examples. I’d love to see the numbers that you’re basing your argument on.
Let me google that for you: https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
There are literally tens of thousands of articles like this one.
TLDR:
- less than 50% of car infrastructure cost is paid for by driving related taxes
- An average of $1100 in general tax per household per year is used to subsidise driving
- Car infrastructure receives more subsidies from general tax than transit, passenger rail, cycling and pedestrian programs combined.
No, drivers pull their own weight in regards to car related taxes.
