A infrastructure tax.

[LienusLateTips]

Would you like to see a infrastructure tax in your city? A sales tax, or even property tax dedicated to large transit/road projects, such as train line, bus routes, and highway expansion? 

 

Could be something as small as a 0.5% sales tax increase, or a huge bump in a carbon tax (like they are doing in BC).

[2FA]

I put roads for question 4 for one reason only, there is nearly zero decent transit where I live. Otherwise I prefer transit over roads.

[themctipers]

0.5% sales tax is a large bump, maybe not in US..

i'd love to see it go towards transit instead of roads, because the roads have recently all been fixed up and much nicer now. I don't even know how I would improve the transit here, they have good schedules, they're ran everywhere, sure the fare is 'expensive' but $2 really isn't a lot. 

[AresKrieger]

Mass transit is useless to me, I would want roads however I never trust giving the government more money will result in nicer things because it always results in more money being wasted.

 

My state already pays in more than we receive from the feds, so give us our difference back and the rest can go to hell

[mr moose]

In Aus. we already pay a fuel excise that is largely not going into roads (where it is supposed to). no point in giving them more for it. 

[dizmo]

*An infrastructure tax.

 

Carbon taxes aren't the only way Translink is funded, it also gets several other income sources. I'm all for it, as the better it is, the more likely people are to use it. Though it's very area dependent, I think it only makes sense in metropolitan areas. Further out, public transit begins to make less and less sense.

 

I think the last one should have an option of having the money spread over both equally.

 

What do you consider a minor tax, and what's a major tax? Is it a tax of specific products, all products, or something that we pay at the end of the year? There's a lot of left out info in your question.

 

 

[FlatBrokeRacing]

Here in Winnipeg, the Roads are in extremely poor condition. You see they have stated and tried raising taxes, they have made mention that X amount of tax we pay on fuel at the pumps would go towards roads, and that the photo radar enforcement would be for safety and that 30km/h school zones were for safety and that we pay X amount of our tax dollars go towards infrastructure and you know what happened with all of that? fucking lies. So as far as i'm concerned those cock-suckers take enough of my hard earned money and piss it away on projects that are not only stupid, but cost 150 TIMES more expensive than they need to and generally run 25%+ ABOVE the "budget". Take the tax hikes and shove it where the sun dont shine because Government does nothing but piss money away.

 

do you know our downtown has a major intersection, its 3-4 lane traffic each way, we have an underground walkthrough called the exchange district, and an above ground walkover alittle futher away. Many many years ago ( sometime in the 70's) this intersection was closed so the public could not cross the street at ground level. This was done for safety and efficiency concerns as its a very heavy traffic flow area. Do you know what our crack-head mayor has budgeted to re-open this at GROUND level with no overhead walkways or bridges? ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS FOR !*!$*^&! SAKES! TO REMOVE SOME BARRIERS!!!!!!! 

 

Give me $10,000 and a week and i'll have it done, like seriously estimated over $11m 

[LienusLateTips]

11 minutes ago, dizmo said:

What do you consider a minor tax, and what's a major tax? Is it a tax of specific products, all products, or something that we pay at the end of the year? There's a lot of left out info in your question.

 

 

Like something like a major hike in sales tax/carbon tax, or a minor 0.5% sales tax increase, or something similar

[dizmo]

2 minutes ago, FlatBrokeRacing said:

Here in Winnipeg, the Roads are in extremely poor condition. You see they have stated and tried raising taxes, they have made mention that X amount of tax we pay on fuel at the pumps would go towards roads, and that the photo radar enforcement would be for safety and that 30km/h school zones were for safety and that we pay X amount of our tax dollars go towards infrastructure and you know what happened with all of that? fucking lies. So as far as i'm concerned those cock-suckers take enough of my hard earned money and piss it away on projects that are not only stupid, but cost 150 TIMES more expensive than they need to and generally run 25%+ ABOVE the "budget". Take the tax hikes and shove it where the sun dont shine because Government does nothing but piss money away.

To be fair, that has a lot to do with where you live, and not the funding. Freeze/thaw cycles wreak absolute havoc on roads, and until someone makes an elastic substance to pave roads with, it will always be a game of catch up. What on earth do you have against 30 km/h school zones? I think that's absolutely required, and makes total sense.

1 minute ago, JDE said:

Like something like a major hike in sales tax/carbon tax, or a minor 0.5% sales tax increase, or something similar

What's a major tax hike though? You still haven't quantified that

[FlatBrokeRacing]

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

To be fair, that has a lot to do with where you live, and not the funding. Freeze/thaw cycles wreak absolute havoc on roads, and until someone makes an elastic substance to pave roads with, it will always be a game of catch up. What on earth do you have against 30 km/h school zones? I think that's absolutely required, and makes total sense.

What's a major tax hike though? You still haven't quantified that

to be quite frank it has very little to do with where we live and very much  to do with the quality of road, materials being used, and the amount of salt/creotine we use in the winter time. I know this for fact.

 

30km/h school zones are to be honest, a money grab, nothing but bullshirt. If this was so safety enduced why for the last 50+ years has the suggested road speed limit been fine? Why the sudden change now? Is it a parenting issue that they cannot teach their kids to look before crossing? Is it a parenting issue that the parents cannot keep an eye on their kid and teach them playing in the road is not  the place to play? Is it a driver issue where modern drivers are not as attentive and are more ignorant? Why do they have photo radar in school zones on a sunday at 10pm at night? If this is a safety enduced thing, why not make it permanent 30km/h regardless of route, road, intersection, time of day or month of the year? (our school zones are mon-fri from 7am-5:30pm from sept-june)

 

A major tax hike right now with our current government, and its spending habits is ANY tax hike. but to be fair anything above 0.5-1% would be significant in my books.

[Donut417]

7 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Freeze/thaw cycles wreak absolute havoc on roads, and until someone makes an elastic substance to pave roads with,

Here in Michgian in the summer at night they close down roads or certain lanes of the freeway. They use a machine that pulls up sections of asphalt road, melts it down, oils it and reapply's it back down. Pretty cool if you ask me. Of course, these roads generally get fucked in the summer time due to Semi trucks. Here in Michigan if you want to carry more weight, just add more axles and tires. So the road heats up and the weight from the Semi's fucks the road. But at least they can repair it some what quickly. 

 

10 minutes ago, dizmo said:

What's a major tax hike though? You still haven't quantified that

Well recently Michigan and the Federal Government increased gas tax. I think between them its going up 70 cents per gallon. Id call that a significant increase. But really it depends where you live, how rich the people are and how much you have to rely on motor vehicles. In Michigan we really dont have any public transit except in a few cities, so yeah, increasing gas prices are not cool. 

[Apepa]

On 01/03/2018 at 1:20 AM, JDE said:

Would you like to see a infrastructure tax in your city? A sales tax, or even property tax dedicated to large transit/road projects, such as train line, bus routes, and highway expansion? 

 

Could be something as small as a 0.5% sales tax increase, or a huge bump in a carbon tax (like they are doing in BC).

I think the roads and transport in my area (and most cities) have enough capacity, the congestion and bottlenecks alare caused by the fact that everything non-residential gets clustered in the middle.

[dizmo]

29 minutes ago, FlatBrokeRacing said:

to be quite frank it has very little to do with where we live and very much  to do with the quality of road, materials being used, and the amount of salt/creotine we use in the winter time. I know this for fact.

 

30km/h school zones are to be honest, a money grab, nothing but bullshirt. If this was so safety enduced why for the last 50+ years has the suggested road speed limit been fine? Why the sudden change now? Is it a parenting issue that they cannot teach their kids to look before crossing? Is it a parenting issue that the parents cannot keep an eye on their kid and teach them playing in the road is not  the place to play? Is it a driver issue where modern drivers are not as attentive and are more ignorant? Why do they have photo radar in school zones on a sunday at 10pm at night? If this is a safety enduced thing, why not make it permanent 30km/h regardless of route, road, intersection, time of day or month of the year? (our school zones are mon-fri from 7am-5:30pm from sept-june)

 

A major tax hike right now with our current government, and its spending habits is ANY tax hike. but to be fair anything above 0.5-1% would be significant in my books.

Do you now? So what causes the roads to break up? It wouldn't be the water that gets into the cracks, freezes, and spreads them would it? No, no that wouldn't make any sense at all...

 

Haha, what? 30 km/h school zones are nothing new, they've been around for decades. Children are more likely to dart out into traffic. Slower speeds reduce both the damage to the individual and reduce the chance of impact as you have more time to react. You've gotta be pretty daft to not see the advantages to lower speeds. Are the parents always with their children in school zones? No, they're not. Do kids always listen to their parents? No, they don't. It's safety of the children, hence the time frames. You seriously can't understand that?

 

27 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Here in Michgian in the summer at night they close down roads or certain lanes of the freeway. They use a machine that pulls up sections of asphalt road, melts it down, oils it and reapply's it back down. Pretty cool if you ask me. Of course, these roads generally get fucked in the summer time due to Semi trucks. Here in Michigan if you want to carry more weight, just add more axles and tires. So the road heats up and the weight from the Semi's fucks the road. But at least they can repair it some what quickly. 

 

Well recently Michigan and the Federal Government increased gas tax. I think between them its going up 70 cents per gallon. Id call that a significant increase. But really it depends where you live, how rich the people are and how much you have to rely on motor vehicles. In Michigan we really dont have any public transit except in a few cities, so yeah, increasing gas prices are not cool. 

Yeah those are pretty crazy. They're doing some interesting things with road materials here, like including an insulating layer to try and combat frost heave.

 

That's a pretty substantial tax increase, probably pretty similar to what Vancouver implemented. What are they using the increased taxes for?

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Do you now? So what causes the roads to break up? It wouldn't be the water that gets into the cracks, freezes, and spreads them would it? No, no that wouldn't make any sense at all...

 

Haha, what? 30 km/h school zones are nothing new, they've been around for decades. Children are more likely to dart out into traffic. Slower speeds reduce both the damage to the individual and reduce the chance of impact as you have more time to react. You've gotta be pretty daft to not see the advantages to lower speeds. Are the parents always with their children in school zones? No, they're not. Do kids always listen to their parents? No, they don't. It's safety of the children, hence the time frames. You seriously can't understand that?

 

Yeah those are pretty crazy. They're doing some interesting things with road materials here, like including an insulating layer to try and combat frost heave.

 

That's a pretty substantial tax increase, probably pretty similar to what Vancouver implemented. What are they using the increased taxes for?

Well who knows what the state is going to use it for. Our roads are shit, so maybe they will actually use it for road maitenece. Though I think the Gas tax is given to the county and they use it to fix main county roads as well as part of the interstate system. As far as the feds, Trump says its for our infrastructure, but as many times as that man has lied I highly doubt any money will be used to fix anything. 

 

Though let me put some things in to perspective. My dad was telling me that one of the potential candidate for governor (as we are on an election year) says we need something like 6 billion dollars to fix Michigan roads. I dont even think Michigan has that much in its entire budget, but yeah, thats how bad things are here and why we need to really look at fixing things. 

[Guest The Viking]

I got really confused for a second, then realized this is americans. Right. You don't pay much tax. We already pay taxes for roads. There's local tax for your car and stuff, and then highways are paid by government and usually end up being maintained by a private company for x amount of years. Obviously depending in which country or even city you live in, there's different taxes.

[Zodiark1593]

In my area, SR49 (that is, Highway 49) has gotten a major repave a year and a half ago, and a new bridge is also in the works. However, the big rig traffic wreaks absolute havoc on the road surface. The cold mix asphalt obviously isn't well suited to heavy big rig traffic (or for use as a high speed major roadway), though getting a concrete factory out in the boonies is probably cost prohibitive as well.

[FlatBrokeRacing]

12 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Do you now? So what causes the roads to break up? It wouldn't be the water that gets into the cracks, freezes, and spreads them would it? No, no that wouldn't make any sense at all...

 

Haha, what? 30 km/h school zones are nothing new, they've been around for decades. Children are more likely to dart out into traffic. Slower speeds reduce both the damage to the individual and reduce the chance of impact as you have more time to react. You've gotta be pretty daft to not see the advantages to lower speeds. Are the parents always with their children in school zones? No, they're not. Do kids always listen to their parents? No, they don't. It's safety of the children, hence the time frames. You seriously can't understand that?

 

yeah actually i do know, and know for a fact. Having friends, customers colleges in the construction industry, have friends that are engineers with city road works, etc. take for example north dakota, they are within a 2hr jont of here and have less than half the road issues that we do, why? because of how they are built and the materials they use.

The water in the cracks is only a part of the issue, and that does not become a huge concern until the road has already degraded. 

 

You see the problem with bedding a roadway with 6" of 2" down, and 1/4" compact, then oiling for 3" of asphalt may be ok for a driveway, but not a roadway. This is the kind of shit they pull here. Different mixes of concrete and different mixes of asphalt have different properties and benefactors. Talk to virtually any concrete engineer or paving engineer/specialist and they will tell you that. Often times budgets are not in place for proper materials, and corners are cut. thems the beans.

 

Maybe in Edmonton or other places they have been around for ever, but they certainly have not been in Manitoba. Oh i see the advantages, but you dont see my argument against them as well. I'm all for the 30km/h speed zones in residential areas, but when you have major routes going by schools that are 60-80km/h major roads and yeah i think its pretty daft to reduce limits on a 4 lane divided road way. It would've been much more economical to not have the school there in the first place, or build curbed barriers. No kids dont always understand or listen, no parents are not always there. maybe things were different 35 years ago when i was a young'n but we understood what danger meant. didnt mean we didnt push the limits, but we certainly were aware. My major argument against this is something you completely missed the point of..... make it permanent, not exclusive to a time/day/month. 

 

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, The Viking said:

I got really confused for a second, then realized this is americans. Right. You don't pay much tax. We already pay taxes for roads. There's local tax for your car and stuff, and then highways are paid by government and usually end up being maintained by a private company for x amount of years. Obviously depending in which country or even city you live in, there's different taxes.

To an extent we have some control of those taxes. In some cases, an increase or decrease has to be put on the ballot and voted on. For example when the Schools wanted more money to put in to the sinking fund (building maintenance) due to bad roofs and other issues. They had to add the proposal to the ballot. The money collected would have been taxed based on property values, essentially its added in to Property taxes. 52% of our citizen said screw the kids. But we in some cases have power to tell the government NO on taxes. As the same thing happen when the city wanted to levy taxes to fix some of the roads in city. 

[FlatBrokeRacing]

51 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Here in Michgian in the summer at night they close down roads or certain lanes of the freeway. They use a machine that pulls up sections of asphalt road, melts it down, oils it and reapply's it back down. Pretty cool if you ask me. Of course, these roads generally get fucked in the summer time due to Semi trucks. Here in Michigan if you want to carry more weight, just add more axles and tires. So the road heats up and the weight from the Semi's fucks the road. But at least they can repair it some what quickly. 

 

Well recently Michigan and the Federal Government increased gas tax. I think between them its going up 70 cents per gallon. Id call that a significant increase. But really it depends where you live, how rich the people are and how much you have to rely on motor vehicles. In Michigan we really dont have any public transit except in a few cities, so yeah, increasing gas prices are not cool. 

damn, they did that here as well with a gas tax, was something like 10c/gal if you worked it out, started back in 2005ish era i believe, and i can honestly say never made a difference in roads, as it'll get sucked up in infrastructure projects.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, Zodiark1593 said:

In my area, SR49 (that is, Highway 49) has gotten a major repave a year and a half ago, and a new bridge is also in the works. However, the big rig traffic wreaks absolute havoc on the road surface. The cold mix asphalt obviously isn't well suited to heavy big rig traffic, though getting a concrete factory out in the boonies is probably cost prohibitive as well.

Concrete doesn't necessarily fair much better. It really depends on how cold it gets. If water gets under the road and it freezes then the road is fucked regardless. I know cause Michigan has some of the worst roads in the nation. 

[FlatBrokeRacing]

5 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Concrete doesn't necessarily fair much better. It really depends on how cold it gets. If water gets under the road and it freezes then the road is fucked regardless. I know cause Michigan has some of the worst roads in the nation. 

both concrete and asphalt are fine with big rig traffic, a 12" fiber re-inforced concrete pad with a 12" thick 2" down sub base and a 6" thick 3/4+1/4mix base with pinned joints will last 20 years with insane moisture and winters with the only regular maintenance being re-sealing the expansion joints every few years. The problem is that costs alot of money and most state/provincial governments dont have the funding for it.

 

I'm not 100% sure on asphalt blends, i cant remember as it was a year or two ago last time i talked about it with the people in the know, but there is a blend out there that has proven to be more durable than concrete in cold weather climates, but the cost is extremely high.

 

[Canada EH]

we are already taxed too much

its time for the government to start cracking down

 

like for instance, this city does not have a 24 hour shovel the snow fine, its just a warning, should be a $250 fine, then doubles every time.

 

gas should be taxed more because people cant live without their vehicles

 

permit prices should be increased

[LienusLateTips]

3 hours ago, The Viking said:

I got really confused for a second, then realized this is americans. Right. You don't pay much tax. We already pay taxes for roads. There's local tax for your car and stuff, and then highways are paid by government and usually end up being maintained by a private company for x amount of years. Obviously depending in which country or even city you live in, there's different taxes.

taxes are actually pretty high in some cities

 

like vancouver

[Guest The Viking]

29 minutes ago, JDE said:

taxes are actually pretty high in some cities

 

like vancouver

but that's canada. Canada, from what I have seen, has similar taxes to europe, up to a certain point.

[wasab]

They really gotta improved the transit in my city. I rely on it for work because traffic is just horrible here. I will gladly pay taxes on it. I can’t recall how many times I was late to work and hence missed out on pay cuz the subway did not arrive on time.