Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
The 2021 Fiscal Plan indicates that capital spending on roads will be about $800M/year with about $500M/year for maintenance and repair over the next three years.
https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/6f47...an-2021-24.pdf
City of Calgary capital spending on roads is expected to total about $705M for 2020-2024 (though the last two years are tiny). Operating costs of roads are about $130M/year.
https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/w...20Schedule.pdf
While Cities generally don't have the power to tax fuel directly, the Government of Canada fuel revenues (about $1B collected in Alberta) generally are transferred back to Cities. It could be easily argued that the drivers of Calgary collectively pay in fuel taxes an amount that covers the costs of building and maintaining the roads of Calgary.
And if you divide the costs of roads by the passenger-trips, passenger-km and freight-tonne km that they carry, roads are extremely cheap for Governments because users pay for most of the capital and operating costs themselves. |
I don’t think this is a fair view of the things roads need to pay for though. They also need to cover the costs of transit and other measures that keep roads empty. Without transit spending road spending would need to be substantially higher and given that transit is the less desirable form of transportation the costs of transit should be borne by the people who reap the benefits which are car drivers.
Transportation needs to be looked at collectively in terms of funding including Bike /Rail/LRT/and roads