Exactly. I get ~32 MPG in my car on the highways. It's closer to 25 for city driving. Given the taxes here in TX, at most I'm looking at about 2¢/mi. Yet, when I get on tollways, it's anywhere from 50¢/mi to almost 75¢/mi. It's crazy.
Tollways are nothing but scams, and we rightly reject them whenever we can. If they actually spent our gas taxes on roads, I'd have little problem with the cost/benefit of the equation, because the roads would be reasonably maintained. However, they are always diverting our highway taxes to mass transit and other boondoggles. (Amtrack - I'm looking at you too). There is also the fact that from what I understand your average automobile causes very little 'wear' to roads. Not so, the big rigs that share the road with us. However, they also get a lot worse MPG than my car, so they are paying more by virtue of that. Additionally, I know that tractor-trailers pay craploads of additional fees. I'm also not really interested in jacking up what they have to pay in any case, as any additional costs would just be passed along to consumers via higher prices. I figre that overall, the system we have is at least moderately fair on the revenue side.
It's the spending side that has to be looked at more closely. Spend the money on the freaking roads, and you can get your graft from the construction companies. (road construction is a huge bucket of fraud that should be more carefully monitored.)
“Exactly. I get ~32 MPG in my car on the highways. It’s closer to 25 for city driving. Given the taxes here in TX, at most I’m looking at about 2¢/mi. Yet, when I get on tollways, it’s anywhere from 50¢/mi to almost 75¢/mi. It’s crazy.”
A few of the things that REALLY gets on my nerves about all of this are the following:
1) We need more money for roads. We can either raise your gas tax by 1 penny per mile, or we can hand over our roads to private companies to charge you 25 cents to $1.00 per mile to drive on those same roads. Since we’re Republicans, and we abhor increasing taxes, we won’t - we’ll hand over your roads to private companies.
2) All these electric cars are out there, and they don’t pay any gas tax, therefore we need to start charging everyone by the mile to drive. [first of all, there are still very few electric cars, well under 1%, and second, I thought the push was to get people to use electric cars...I guess not when it conflicts with this crap, that is]. If electric cars really take off, which they won’t, then maybe raise the gas tax by a nickel a gallon - that would cover the loss for DECADES.
3) Get with it, BobL, it’s the future. Bull shit. The future DOES NOT require that we change things that are working fine...maybe raise the gas tax a bit, but we’re far from needing to scrap the system. And, by the way, government-run healthcare is also ‘the future’, since that is what virtually every other country went to - but I don’t see a lot of people here calling for it.