No, their work products should be priced to include the cost of the infrastructure they use. And they and their buyers should look for way to optimize those costs.
Or we're both.
Roads could be pay per use. But like so much else provided by government - like security - it's not.
Horseshit. Most of what goes on in the remote and rural parts of the country is required to prevent cities from decaying into rubble populated by howling savages. Construction materials, food, energy. Cities pay taxes to support remote and rural parts of the country in order to support themselves.
Yeah. Just like.
And in a pay for use model vendors add those costs to their selling prices. They are the same as tariffs - the end user ultimately pays.
Sure. Then two things happen: domestic consumers turn to imports, and our producers are out-competed in export markets. Domestic production of wealth craters, and we become absurdly dependent on foreigners. Excellent national strategy.
It's a pity that states have absolutely no tools to balance the playing field in such situations, such as taxes or tariffs.
Industry pays to maintain and to build some of the roads. Mainlines were generally put in by the Province that wants to see the tax benefit from resource extraction. Spur roads are normally the responsibility of the logging company to build, maintain and decommission, similar for exploration roads for mining/oil and gas. Much of BC was built by the likes of WAC Bennett, who saw the role of government to build the infrastructure, so companies could succeed and he was right. If a company want to use a resource road on a regular basis, then they have to get an agreement with the Department that owns that road, that will cover use and maintenance.
Well the Provinces did and look how well that work.
Taxes? On whom? And where does the revenue go? Maybe it could be used to pay for roads...
Yeah that’s not what the oil workers will be hiring the Japanese robots for…
In addition, the amount of freight we ship by rail is far ahead of Europe. Canada is #1 in rail modal share (percentage of all goods shipped) in the world.
So long as on the same day municipalities start paying the full cost for their roads and transit.
We don't need all 1200 km covered in one go. And nobody in the world has built a rail network like that. It's a weird Canadian obsession with everybody getting a piece at the same time. Start with the highest demand segments and move down the list. It should actually take 20 years to build the full 1200 km. So even if costs $100B. That is manageable over decades.
Not sure what you've been reading but Ford has proposed a 10-lane tunnel under the existing east-west Hwy 401 through Toronto.
So goes manufacturing pretty much across the country, and so goes 'twin' hospitals in many Ontario communities. Pretty much every city with a hospital had two; a 'general' and a Catholic, often right next door or across the road from each other. Some smaller communities, particularly in northeastern Ontario, the only hospital was often Catholic.
It's close to certain that there are other uses for $100B that would produce greater benefits, including spin-off revenues to governments.
much as I love the train I must agree with you on cost/benefit. Roughly 120,000 cars transit the 401 at Kingston per day along with 10000 heavy trucks. A 12 couch train would take 840 people maximum out of those 120,000 cars so if you ran hourly service each way (not very likely) for 12 hours and they were full (also not likely) you will have removed 8400 cars: not insignificant but certainly not worth 100 billion.
People who like to compare us to Europe forget (in addition to some geographic and density issues) that they moved to high-speed passenger service from a foundation of reliable high frequency express rail service . The original proposal for Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal was for high frequency service on its own trackage; meaning scheduling reliability. That then morphed into HSR in typical Canadian scope creep resulting in a price tag that is eye-watering.
