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The future of driving: You pay for the roads you use, a kilometres and a kilogram at a time

May 13th, 2011 · 88 Comments

It costs $5-8 million to build one kilometre of road. Until recently, we drivers have taken that for granted. Not much longer. All kinds of people are busily looking at how to extract money from drivers in new and different ways, in a user-pay world of funding for roads and transit.

For BC Business, I got to explore this subject beyond B.C.

Sadly, no trips to experience congestion pricing in London or Stockholm, no flights to Singapore to drive through their roads where the price per kilometre changes with the rush-hour conditions. But I did get to go to the most experimental place in the U.S.: Oregon. Convinced that the fuel tax is a bad way to pay for roads or transit, since people are buying more fuel-efficient (but not less road-damaging) cars or electric vehicles, politicians there have been dabbling with the radical black-box monitoring system.

Now, I’m just waiting to see what TransLink and the province, who have been looking quietly at this whole issue behind the scenes, are going to do next.

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