Financing local rural road maintenance. Who should pay what share and why?

Abstract

The benefits from minor rural road infrastructure can be very individual, when a road is important for reaching a (group of) farm(s), serving little or no inter-local traffic. Rural road maintenance therefore asks for a specific taxation model that distributes costs according to benefits involved for the individual taxpayer. The distribution of maintenance costs among taxpayers used by local governments is often poorly founded. A new model was developed for two local road maintaining governments in the Netherlands. In essence, the model emphasises that the basic facilities for reaching buildings and parcels along a road should be paid by the rural real estate owners. Extra facilities (like additional pavement width and plantings) enable inter-local traffic. Therefore, maintenance of these extra facilities should be paid by all inhabitants of the community. This article describes, in detail, the model used and the resulting cost distribution, among others in relation to the definition of `basic facility'. We compare these results with the cost distribution of comparable authorities and conclude that the model offers a logical and clear calculation of who pays what share and why. The model might also facilitate taxing the costs of road maintenance, in a broader sense, for a wide range of areas and governmental organisations.