During the year, I take notes on absurdities that appear in the news and that deserve some clarification. This is the case with all those studies that regularly come back to state that motorists are subsidized, that is to say that they do not pay the full cost of the road network.
You will understand that such studies are part of the anti-automobile movement. The conclusion is already written each time: we must now invest in public transport and cycle paths.
You may easily wonder how it is possible that the motorist does not pay enough. The list of charges is unimaginable: driver’s license, registration, registration surcharge, gasoline taxes, tolls, fines… not to mention the GST and QST on vehicles and their maintenance. The motorist pays a hell of a lot!
High cost
But it is true that the road network is expensive. Building roads, viaducts and bridges, maintaining them, clearing snow during the winter, all this represents colossal sums.
So it is true that motorists do not cover the entire cost of the road network. What is absurd is to think that they should. To believe that motorists should pay the full bill is to also believe that motorists are the only ones who benefit from roads. This is a huge flaw in reasoning.
Let’s imagine a person who lives without a car. A road or street runs past his place of residence. Would this person accept living in a place where ambulances and fire trucks cannot access? Does this person receive visitors, deliveries? I suppose that if he has some furniture and household appliances in the house, he has not brought them back in the basket of his bicycle.
I assume this person eats. How did all the food get to the grocery store? How many trips on the road did it take to get a single loaf of bread on the shelf? To get all the ingredients to the bakery, it takes daily transportation by truck. Go back up the bread chain, the flour comes from a mill that has sourced grain from multiple farmers. Transportation at each stage that takes place… on the roads.
In short, when you eat a piece of toast, you become a major user of the road network… even if you don’t have a car. So it makes sense to have the community pay for part of the roads.
Since Julius Caesar
The reason is simple: transport infrastructure is the backbone of an economy, I should even say of a civilization. How did the Roman Empire become the Roman Empire? Because they had the genius to build roads.
This has nothing to do with an obsession with gasoline-powered cars. Over the centuries, roads have remained indispensable, accommodating all sorts of vehicles, from animal-drawn carts to electric cars.