Essay on Traffic
In order to solve traffic problems, governments should tax private car owners heavily and use the money to improve public transportation. What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution?
Traffic congestion in many cities around the world is severe. It is recommended that one measure to this problem is to impose heavy taxes on car drivers and use this wealth to make public transport superior. This essay will look microscopically in the benefits and drawbacks of this proposal.
Implying heavy duties on private vehicles could bring down the rising level of traffic on highways. A primary benefit of such a measure is that the heavy taxes would discourage car owners from using their cars because it would become very expensive to drive. For example in many countries road taxes are charged from general population at almost every highway in terms of toll. This policy can encourage the use of public transport among people and can further reduce traffic problems on roads and pollution in atmosphere.
Another merit would be that the modes of public transport would improve in terms of the services if their usage of frequency would increase by commuters. For instance, it is often observed that the public transport in cities is very poor. We often witness old buses and trains are not commonly used by majority of population due to their poor conditions. Thus, high taxes would generate enough money to make the necessary changes in them.
However, disadvantages of adopting this policy cannot be ignored. The major adverse effect could be heavy burden on the car drivers. To illustrate the fact, currently there are many areas in which people have to pay heavy taxes to the government. Upon this, the weighty road taxes would create imbalance in the family budget which would result into insufficient funds at the end of the month for people who further may have no choice but to drive every day. In addition, these sorts of taxes would likely be set at a fixed amount. This would create a problem for low income earners, whereas wealthy people would likely to be able to afford it. It is therefore not a fair tax.
To conclude, this solution is worth considering improving the current situation, but, before practical implementation of such policy there should be a statistical analysis to examine its effects in the real world.