So I am sure you are all aware of our Premier’s statements on how ALL of the gas tax dollars are spent on road repair, right?
Well according to The Canadian Taxpayers Federation only Manitoba and Saskatchewan put all of their gas taxes to the roads.
I call on the bumbling Rodney Liar Macdonald to explain to his constituents where our fucking tax dollars are really going…lease payments for SUV’s maybe?
This article appears in May 15-21, 2008.
Tell that to the Canadian Tax Federation, their figures seem to differ from yours and they have backed up those figures with references from the Provincial and Federal governments…
Well someone is misinformed. If you look at the amount spent on roads in the province you would see that the expenses outweigh the provincial gas tax of 15.5 cents per litre, which is the only tax on gas that goes to the road. If you add all taxes whcih includes 5% Gst and 10 cent Federal Exise tax, both of which go to the federal gov’t, are not used on NS roads.
if you want to complain about the price of gas…… then you need to look at the people around you.Just tim hortons in halifax alone has 3000 customers between the hours of 6am-9am at drive thrus alone. Using a conservative 5 mins as the average wait time, or time spent idling, that means collectively there is 15,000 minutes of cars idling. Multiply this 5 days a week. Divide that by 60 minutes and you get 1250 hours of cars that are burning gas……….just waiting for coffee or donuts. If there is a line up of 5 cars, that will be about a 4 minutes wait. they could have done inside and got served by any number of people inside and been on the go in the same time. However, no gas would be burnt. Now, lets look at drive thrus for fast food joints. Same thing, but longer wait times, and more idling and more gas being used, when you could have just walked into the freakin place. Your report, couldnt possibly have this years stats, as this years numbers arent correct. In a previous OP about pot holes, i explained that halifax is the only major city in Canada that has the PERFECT conditions for pot holes. Before you bitch and complain about pot holes, educate yourself on how they get there. Potholes are created by the freezing and thawing of water in the ground. WHen the water freezes and expands, it pushes up and softens the concrete. The soft ground then gets chewed up by plows and traffic that rumbles over it. The fact that we are close to an ocean creates a bigger problem in the sense that salt from the ocean adds to the softening of the concrete. If you look at the troubles the government has here, they are at the mercy of the weather. It snows here, lots some days, but just as they plow it all, it becomes warm again, and the ground never truly freezes. Then when all slushy, we get a cold snap where it is like -15 for three or four nights, just as it warms up….. it snows. Then BOOM, out comes the plows to clear the roads for you, but digging up the thawing water in the road. This happens here FAR more than anywhere in canada. The extremes here are unlike anywhere else in canada. Other places may get more snow, but the constant cold means, that there is less opportunity for the thaw/freeze pothole conditions. Sorry pal, considering that Mcdonald has a road condition issue that no other province goes thru, to compare to them isnt worth it. They have different conditions.
sorry, this years stats cant be in yet…… that is what i meant
The Homie, how convenient.”Your report, couldnt possibly have this years stats, as this years numbers arent correct. In a previous OP about pot holes, i explained that halifax is the only major city in Canada that has the PERFECT conditions for pot holes.”I’ll just add the entire world to that statement and.. Perfect.
i corrected myself, this years numbers arent in. They are still tallying up the cost to fix the current damage from the winter. And if you are suggesting that it is convienient that we are the city with the perfect conditions, actually this entire province is perfect pot hole conditions. We are the biggest city that touches the ocean and we happen to be furthest south. If we were about 200 km north, things would be a bit different.
@ The Homie: Yeah don’t even get me started on Drive-thru’s…not just Tim Horton’s either…all of them. They might have been ok before but at this point they are just irresponsible and selfish. Don’t you just love seeing 4-5 SUV’s all in a row idling away? Sigh….Oh and I know that NS has a very different situation compared to other provinces but there isn’t a region anywhere that has cold winters that don’t experience the freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw fluctuations. Admittedly it does occur here like it is on a timer or something so yes it is far far worse here that anywhere else.I wasn’t worrying about this years stats when I posted the Bitch…more I would like to see an actual fiscal breakdown on how the gas-tax dollars are truly spent, it does not seem like all of it could be going to the roads and highways…they said that a 4% drop in the gas taxes would cost NS something like 64 million, that’s only 4% of the what 15.4% they take in total (some of that being federal), that is a lot of money and you would think our roads were paved with gold if it were all spent on the roads.
its just tough to swallow that you see other provinces with that budget being managable, but the differance in the amount of thaws that occurs here, combined with the enormous snowfall, we are not able to use the same numbers as other regions. Bitter pill to swallow no doubt, but you want to lower gas prices, dont worry about the tax, that is the least of your problems, the roads are in decent shape, especially after that weird assed winter. Work on gas consumption.Trivial things like closing your windows and letting the natural areodynamics of your car when you are over 70kph, will conserve gas. Your car performs better the lighter it is. If you have the old hockey equipment, or golf clubs, or whatever in your trunk, take it out. Take the car seat out each time you drive and will not need it. When accelerating, very slowly ease on the gas instead of pressing down at your current rate. All will save you them precious few dollars sir.
All good points Homie, oh don’t forget Air Conditioning too, that will eat away at fuel consumption too. I only leave some washer fluid and blanket in the trunk of my car (and when i get a new one: a Just-in-Case bag…has all sorts of emerg stuff), though I know of many people that drag half their lives around in the trunk…always seemed a waste to me even when gas was much cheaper, call me frugal!
Ooo just remembered a another good tip…tire pressure, that can have an impact (though not quite as much as the other points) on fuel consumption…but it is another easy measure to help keep the cost down.PS…anyone know where a WORKING tire pump station in HRM is?
What would you need a tire pump for… Sissy…I would have thought you could blow those tires up happily yourself…
LoL Floyd….Homie, The Darkside has Digital Tire Pumps 🙂 Located at Petro :)And Very good Tips as well Homes 😉 I just wish everyone would do them… Not only save gas, but, the environment… Sweet Deal!
The freeze thaw cycles also does really nasty things to the steel in the car. Between all the salt they use, and the salt in the air, every single time it gets above freezing your car will start to rust. That’s why it’s recommended to not have a heated garage.Incidentally, if a 4% cut off of 15.5% costs 64 million, that means they’re taxing in about 250 million in gas taxes. Sounds like a lot, but from the 08/09 budget plan from the dept of transportation and infrastructure, the highway structure costs are about 280 million (http://www.gov.ns.ca/tran/publications/publication.asp). With the feds kicking in less and less, it means that right now they would have to increase the gas tax to properly cover the actual costs.The fed tax money however, seems to just disappear into a giant pot of cizzash and disappear. If that money would be dedicated to just highways, then it’d be different. But then other things would lose funding, so what can you do?Another helpful thing to keep your mileage up is to keep the car properly tuned and change the oil when you’re supposed to. Old oil will gum up your engine and can be hard to clean out.
i just thought i would like to share this with people. I had a conversation with the people at Tim Hortons. They forwarded over a test that was conducted by Al Gore’s people as the dickweeds there are trying to be all conservative and shit.A test was taken of the emissions of 15000 cars from a random sample. The average emmission was taken from them. (this was done so that the reality of wear on a car and not the listed emissions of the car when new). Each of these cars had its emmissions tested repeatedly as the cars were time 10 differnt tim hortons. (there are 10 types of drive thru, and store configurations) im not going to go into the finer points of the study, but it concluded, that if you have to wait more than 3:54 seconds, you are emiting the same pollution into the enviroment as someone that starts and stops the car and goes in.Now. If you look at a number i posted earlier that each week canadians are idling at tim hortons drive thru’s between the hours of 6am -9m to the total of 41,666 hours a week. That works out to filling up an average size car more than 4000 times. You wanna complain about a waste of gas? Think that is just from the hours of 6 am – 9 am. How much more do you think is wasted if we added other donut stores, mcdonalds, or whatever else you want to between them hours? Now, lets go one step futher….. .lets look at the other hours of the day, lets add that wasted gas. I hope i dont get mocked for this one and people take this serious. Gas prices are high cause we are idiots. I, my girlfriend, my parents, we are trying to do our part and stop wasting gas. Please folllow suit. Call me an idiot about everything else if you like, but a drive thru can be the start of your conservations.
The CTF is a special interest lobby group just like all th eothers. They like to pull publicity stunts to get headlines but you cannot accept their “facts” as in any way accurate.The numbers on both revenue and expoense are published in the provincial budget if you care to look them up. It’s in the Dept of Finance page on the govt web site. At first look it appears the govt actually spends more on roads than they take in on gas taxes. However like most statistics it depends on how you interpet it. Does the salary of the guy who dispatches the work crews count? How about his secretary? How about the people who run their paychecks? Etc Etc. It’s a mug’s game.
Gas isn’t high because of people going through drive thrus, it’s because of the ridiculous commodities market setup which drove the price per barrel up artificially. Avoinding idling in drive thrus will have zero effect on the price of gas, although it might save you a buck or two if there’s a lineup.So there you go, if there’s only a few people, it might use less gas to go on the drivethru with all there extra staff.
pete, hate to inform you….. the more gas we use, the higher the rates.I am not saying that drive thrus are a direct influence. I am saying that we use about 40k litres, a week, just standing still. If the market doesnt sell that much gas….. it will lower the bottom line.
Homie, I agree with you on the drive-thrus… I stopped using them a long time ago, and after that I stopped getting coffee there altogether as a personal boycott… It makes a small difference in the big picture with regard to the price of gas and the environment, but it IS a difference and a step in the right direction…If the government were serious about reducing our fuel consumption and pollution, they would bring in a carbon tax on Tims and others with drive-thrus… That would end that problem pretty quick…
Did you mean 3.54 seconds or 3 m 54 s? I took it as min:sec.I appreciate that the usage adds up, but it’s pretty insignificant to the overall usage. Even if all drive thrus were ditched, that small percentile drop won’t correspond to a drop in gas prices.The recent big jump in oil prices happened right after the US subprime mortgage crisis. Investors pulled their money out, and a lot of it went into commodities via oil. The sudden billions in demand drove the price/barrel way up. Gas prices are driven by the stock market, not consumer demand. If actual usage goes down, then the producers drop the output, which makes the stock market panic, and drives the price up. It’s all a big circle jerk where the end user gets screwed. If Canada hadn’t gone with OPEC and had a seperate domestic rate, the price at the fuel pumps would be significantly lower.Don’t get me wrong, I usually avoid drive thrus, just don’t think that has anything to do with gas prices.Interesting fact though, when people have switched over the the lower power fluorescent light bulbs, energy usage has actually gone up in households, as people are more likely to leave the lights on , because they think it’s not using as much power. So I’m wondering if everyone eventually switches over to electric cars or something like hydrogen, do you think habits will change at all? I’m guessing no.
pete we use 33% more gas that 1978. I am not saying it would make a difference with the drive thru boycott. I am saying it would make people FAR more conscious of the waste. The funniest is when i am pumping gas for my gf and someone at another pump is asking me “the price of gas is ridiculous huh? And you see like 25 tim hortons cups in the car. I tell that woman, “if you stopped going to the drive thru for those coffee cups, how much gas do you think you are saving?” Then i explain to her that she is idling for more than 30 minutes a month at the drive thru, they get the picture and stop. Now, if that was something that was a normal occurance, and not like some one day boycott, the consensus that less gas is needed for this country, will drop the prices. You see the price is tied into the demand. OPEC only drills X amount of barrels. That supply is in high demand because the customers want it. If they drilled unlimted oil the price would be lower, but with certain amount of barrels a day, it becomes a hot commodity. They will never allow unlimted drilling, because gas is a nonrenewable resource.Basically the price of gas would drop significantly if we all switched to biodiesel or green cars. You might think that the companies control the rate, but they are just reaction to the consumers consumpiton and thurst for the product. Floyd, i talked to some of the higher ups, and to charge a company that tax now, would be illegal. I thought of that too. They also cant charge a fee or anything like that because handicapped people would sue and win. Its tough for them to implement, but i can tell you this, when i called, and explained to him the numbers i came up with, he said that i was the first person to ever call him with this complaint. Tim Hortons gets millions of calls from enviromentalists, so they did the research to see about emmisions and what not. The study was interesting as can be, as drive thrus actually help the enviroment to a point. There is less emmisions from your car if you are in and out of the drive thru in less than 3 plus minutes. Starting and stopping your car is a large polluter. I told him that i didnt really care about that angle, i was concerned about how much gas we waste. He is getting together with his board and discussing that at the next meeting. He said that they could come up with some campaign, but it is a hard sell for a coffee shop to be giving car advice. I am happy that the man called me back, and has said that he is going to keep me informed on the progress and allow me to call him anytime should i come up with a suggestion. I told him about my participation on many site like these, and the ideas that come from the other posters. (sorta makes it a shame when conversation skews to insults) I actually really came up with this whole want to make a small change, when i read a topic here and posted about it like 2 weeks ago.