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The most common of these is that a toll of 20 cents a kilometre would price the roads out of reach of the poor — the automobile-owning poor, but let that pass. If the thesis is that attaching any cost to driving a car is an affront to social justice — if, in the name of the poor, bus tickets should be $3 but driving should be free — then it is a puzzle why gas should not be free as well. Not only gas, but tires. And cars.

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It’s nonsense, of course. It’s simply a convenient rationalization for a much more reptile-brained objection, summarized as follows: roads have always been free. Therefore roads should always be free. Which not only doesn’t follow logically, but isn’t even true.

Gentle Torontonians: you pay to use the road now. Every time you park on it, in the centre of town at least, you pay a fee, and the longer you use the road, or the busier the time of day, or the more heavily trafficked the road, the more you pay. And nobody makes a fuss about it, notwithstanding the impact on that section of the community that can afford to buy a car but not to park it, and even though — to anticipate another objection — we’ve already paid to build the roads.

Because everyone with an ounce of sense knows that if we didn’t, if we gave away the space for free, you’d never find a parking spot. Or to be slightly more technical, we do it because one person’s use of that space imposes a cost, over and above the cost of its construction or upkeep, on others who might like to use the same space, and so like any other cost it is good economic policy to charge a price to cover it.