Double taxation on city streets

For the anti-toll whiners patriots, and even those who use it to try to get more hits, here’s a story for you.

There’s this guy. His name is Joe Urbanite. He owns a car, which he drives sometimes. He used to walk and bike a lot, but now due to medical problems, can’t bike at all and can only rarely walk. When he drives his car, he usually goes a mile or two to the grocery store on Red River, or downtown via Guadalupe for a show to the main library, or up Speedway to the pool at Shipe Park, or across town on 38th/35th Street to get to his inlaws’ house. Joe’s wife also uses the car a lot to go to the frou-frou grocery stores like Whole Foods (Lamar, 6th) and Central Market (38th). Joe might also use the car later today to go to the hardware store (29th near Guadalupe) to get some wiring supplies. Even when Joe’s going far enough where Mopac or I-35 might be an option, he usually tends to stay away from those highways because he’s found out it’s a bit quicker to stick to surface streets than going through those awful frontage road traffic signals.

Those roads range from very big to merely minor arterials; but we’re not talking about residential streets here. All those roads were paid for out of Joe Urbanite’s property and sales taxes (usually but not always in the form of bonds). And remember, Joe lives in a property which is valued very high per acre compared to Bob Suburbanite, so he’s paying proportionally more in property taxes.

Joe Urbanite goes up Guadalupe to the gas station to fill ‘er up. He notices that the state of Texas has assessed a “gasoline tax” on his fuel. Wow! Neat! Does this money go to pay for the roads Joe used? If so, man, that’s an awesome user fee; barely even a tax at all.

But no. The gas tax in the state of Texas is constitutionally prohibited from being spent on anything but state highways and schools. That means that if it doesn’t have one of them nifty route shields with a number on it, it ain’t getting squat. What about the federal gas tax? In theory, it could be spent on roads outside the state highway system, but it rarely is – most of that money gets dumped right back into big highway projects.

In summary: Joe pays the entire cost to build and maintain the roads he uses out of sales and property taxes. (Compared to Bob Suburbanite, far fewer roads in his area get any state gas tax money). Joe also pays as much in gasoline taxes per-gallon as does Bob Suburbanite, but that gas tax really only goes to build roads for Bob.

So tell me, anti-toll whiners patriots: how, exactly, is Joe Urbanite not double-taxed? And how is this example not much worse than toll roads?