Originally Posted by
The Banjo
I believe in 'i' before 'e' except after 'cee' but that's a side issue. The current fuel tax is 48.8 to 49.6 cents per litre. Factor that into the coach journey as ol' mate iccy suggests.
Cost of road infrastructure in Australia annually is $30 billion, add another $27 billion for the cost of road trauma. Fuel excise returns around $18 billion. So the tax payer funds at least $39 billion, not including tolls, subsidies for road businesses, vehicle tax concessions and subsidies and concessions for fuel production and distribution (give with one hand take with the other), policing costs, commervial operator rebates and tax breaks and so on.
Aviation fuels also have excise, as well as en route taxes, landing fees for just about every airport, and parking fees, as well as the general taxation on mostly profitable operations. Aviation mostly pays for itself.
As said above the major airports are run at a profit, country airports are run by councils on shoestring budgets. If the government funded better infrastructure for aviation to the sane level they fund other transport we would have 10 times the air traffic. Regional airlines are collapsing around the word because no one is subsidising the cost anymore. Almost all the 20 to 50 seat airliner projects were helped along by a particular government funding it. Yes there are particular route subsidies, but for some reason the world expects an industry that constructs 3000 planes will somehow fund itself billions in R&D costs, when it learned that car companies which move 100s of thousands of vehicles need subsidies to exist.
PS, the coach can run on biodiesle so no excise when it does and I could buy an electric car and pay no fuel excise, especially when charging it off my subsidised solar... so yes I can run my vehicles on the road paying for it only through measly rego and taxes Ive already paid for, and most of that tax will be returned to me through pension and the vast amounts Ive cost medicare already.
Something to ponder, Hong Kong (China) based MTR operates the Melbourne Metro is subsidised around $1 billion annually by the taxpayer, just to operate, they in turn run at a profit only due to those subsidies, so quite a few million dollars goes to a foreign company to operate trains that carry 100 million passengers annually.