3 ms·
For cars, the roads really are free. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damag
by burfog 8y ago
For cars, the roads really are free.
Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks.
Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail?
So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not impose a cost. As it is, car drivers are paying money to fix roads that are being damaged by buses.
What if we charged bus passengers the true cost of taking the bus? Each passenger on a bus is contributing to road damage. Each driver in a car doesn't cause damage.
- xsmasher 8y agoRoad damage is only part of the story. How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.
- burfog 8y agoThe vast majority of roads are narrow. The wide ones are extreme outliers. It may seem otherwise if you judge by the portion of time you spend on each type of road, but most roads are quiet little empty lanes. So, on average, we don't really have more lanes than the minimum.