On the back of new chancellor Rishi Sunak’s announcement of £27.4bn in investment for the UK’s roads in today’s budget, the Department of Transport has published its strategy for revamping the UK’s motorways and “A” roads.
The funding will go towards the both the enhancement and repair of existing roads as well as completing a raft of prominent new projects around the country.https://www.cityam.com/budget-2020-government-announces-27-4bn-roads-revamp/
A report published earlier this year confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation that’s widely disbelieved: Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Group and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Who Pays for Roads?” exposes the myth that drivers are covering what they’re using.https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/
Highways do not—and, except for brief periods in our nation’s history—never have paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label “user fees.” Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent.https://frontiergroup.org/sites/default/files/reports/Do-Roads-Pay-for-Themselves_-wUS.pdf
Resource Insights: "The trouble with infrastructure is that it breaks down and needs to be repaired, it wears out and needs to be replaced, and it gets destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. All that requires energy, resources, labor and money."The US has extensive infrastructure supporting autos and sprawl. Farmland has been turned into suburbs. This spreading requires a lot of expensive pipelines, bridges, and roads. The repairs of such things have been deferred, while home builders and oil companies took profit. Now, the bill is due and there is no cheap oil to borrow against.
Public discussion coming on road salt, transportation commissioner says | KGW.com: "The Oregon Department of Transportation said it knows salt works wonders melting ice, but there are concerns because it would ultimately get washed into our storm drains which flow to a sewer treatment plant to be cleaned before going into the river.
ODOT is now studying whether the tons and tons of salt that would be needed would corrode those old metro-area pipes. Can treatment plants handle it? Or will fish suffer?
"It affects the roads, the steel in the bridges and the concrete and it affects your car. With this storm, how many times would we have to lay down salt?" asked ODOT spokesman Dave Thompson. "How many tons of salt would we have to lay down? That would affect a great deal of infrastructure. All that salt stays on the road or washes off into the environment. It's not picked up, it's now part of our environment. Is that what people want?""
New map reveals shattering effect of roads on nature | Environment | The Guardian: "Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed."Another of the many example of the costs of the autosprawl system that are not paid for by those who profit from it. In other words, subsidy. In some cases, even money cannot fix the damage. We pay with a less secure biosphere.
The True Costs of Driving - The Atlantic: "A report published earlier this year confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation that’s widely disbelieved: Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Group and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, “Who Pays for Roads?” exposes the myth that drivers are covering what they’re using."
City Observatory: "The report documents that the amount that road users pay through gas taxes now accounts for less than half of what we spend to maintain and expand the road system. The shortfall is made up from other sources of tax revenue at the state and local level. This subsidization of car users costs the typical household about $1,100 per year – over and above what they pay in gas taxes, tolls and other user fees."
The Latest - APTA - Advocate: "These inaccuracies need to be addressed, because the forecasts inform lawmakers’ level of ”needed spending,” and could spur overbuilding of infrastructure to support car travel, draining funds from other investments like public transportation, where ridership actually increased in 2013. While funding public roads and highways remains crucial for all forms of transportation, the rising ridership of public transit should trigger increased investments."
Think Drivers Pay the Cost of Roads? | Barataria – The work of Erik Hare: "Clearly, somebody besides the driver is paying for Minnesota’s roads. Drivers-through gasoline taxes, car registration fees and sales taxes on vehicles-actually pay only 62 percent of the costs of roads. General taxpayers “subsidize” the rest, no matter how much or little they drive."
Feeding the Beast: The Backdoor Ways Transit Subsidizes Roads | Streetsblog.net - n8han: "One of the most insidious ways that automotive transport picks the pockets of alternative transport is in the construction of pedestrian overcrossings (POCs) spanning major arterials. It seems obvious that the $5M or so that it costs to construct a ped bridge should come from funds earmarked for pedestrian improvements, right?"
