Comment 93961

By seancb (registered) - website | Posted October 30, 2013 at 09:20:47 in reply to Comment 93947

A very simplistic report - commissioned by the CAA - which attempts to calculate the total cost across Ontario of all our roads, and sets that against the total revenue generated through fees and taxes paid by drivers alone. And they found:

Across Ontario, drivers generate about $7.7 billion in revenue and the province and municipalities spend between $10 billion and $13 billion on roads, said Gill.

Which by my calculation is a 2-5 billion dollar deficit. Notice that their range of error in calculating costs is 30% - they got it accurate to within 3 billion dollars... um OK.

Meanwhile, the "revenues" they are counting do not all go towards the roads. So, mathematically, they are considering the government as a black box and simply analyzing inputs and outputs. But if you are going to do that, then you have to calculate a LOT more externalities - health care, lost time from building infrastructure that lengthens commute time, opportunity cost lost by not having efficient transit etc.... all stuff that is virtually impossible to calculate.

A much better way of looking at this is to consider Hamilton's budget directly. We are a billion dollars behind in our infrastructure spending, and we spent 102 million on roads this year - out of our general property taxes. According to public works, we SHOULD have spent 179 million this year in order to keep up with our maintenance requirements. In other words, we added another 77 million to our deficit this year. And next year we'll do the same - unless we add a crapload to everyone's property tax bill.

roads budget roads budget

Meanwhile our 2013 gas tax kickback is 10 million... so 10% of what we spent and less than 6% of what we NEED to spend to keep our roads running.

So, yeah, you can believe a blue sky report by the CAA or you can look at what Hamilton actually spends on roads. Since I pay property tax, I'm quite concerned about the latter... I'm not going to put much weight into the former.

Comment edited by seancb on 2013-10-30 09:40:24

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