Should the private motorist be made to pay more heavily through higher road tax, petrol prices,...?

Question

...parking fees and motorway tolls?

Answer 1

we pay enough allready (in australia)

Answer 2

No, they should not. These kinds of penalties affect the working class to a far more severe degree than necessary, and they are the people most often forced to commute and are in need of inexpensive transportation. If prices were to be raised, I'd suggest a different group of consumers- such as a commercial airline. They use massive amounts of fuel, and an increase would affect ticket holders less than drivers.
Or we could eliminate NASCAR. Why waste extravagant amounts of fuel for dozens of cars to spin circles for hours? And think of how much air pollution would be avoided!

Answer 3

people should pay the real cost of providing and using any product.

however "real" cost is debatable, and most people want to directly pay the least possible and are not interested in the shared cost, or the environmental cost, or to people they don't know, or to their children, or even to themselves 5 years hence.

eg who pays the cost for the 1,000s killed & hospitalised each year from diesel particulates.

"market" economists make sure their companies and customers don't pay for any costs that cannot be directly attributable to them. The only way for our current individualistic consumer growth society to recover these costs is through taxes.

Because taxes are unpopular; governments are more likely to fund or give grants for environmentally destructive activites, like industrial agriculture and de-forestation; road and airport building, etc.

So the choice is either the polluter pays, or we all pay through long-term loss of quality of place and standard of living (though the burden falls most on the poor and dis-enfranchised people who create least pollution, but can't personally afford to mitigate the effects).

Plus the most pollutting cars are incredibly ugly eyesores, with grotesk bulges and excess of pipes all over; no wonder they all have blacked out windows so the drivers can't be recognised.

Answer 4

yes