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Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the
by shereadsthenews 8y ago
Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. If you are proposing a $5/gallon fuel tax then I completely agree. That would be about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel and consistent with the state's greenhouse gas emission goals.
- SilasX 8y agoThat's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but that's not because of personal cars. Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.
- xster 8y agoAre there studies for how these measure up in practice? Also curious about wear per weight characteristics between concrete and asphalt.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoThat's not really the view from a city budget. Cities don't have that many truck routes and their costs are dominated by maintaining streets where virtually all the traffic is light vehicles. For the state it is a bigger problem because almost all state route are truck routes.
- SilasX 8y agoEven then, the same phenomenon means that the dominant source of damage to those streets is the delivery vehicles; smaller cars still cause a disproportionately small fraction of the damage and are overpaying via taxes. Ubers are not externalizing here.
- mikeyouse 8y agoWithout much better data the best you can say is that Ubers are benefitting from externalities at a rate lower than other, heavier vehicles. It's still likely they aren't paying their fair share.
- SilasX 8y agoA vehicle twice as heavy per axle is doing 16x the damage. Unless the taxes on delivery vehicles scale like that, a sedan is subsidizing the costs.
- vkou 8y agoA road that's never driven on suffers damage from the elements, and the passage of time. A truck does more damage then a car? Great. But there's an upfront road maintenance (not to mention construction) cost that you have to pay, regardless of who uses the road. Gas taxes do not come close to capturing that.
- kbenson 8y agoHow does this account for all the upkeep on the residential roads where a large truck almost never travels. Sure, large trucks may account for the vast majority of wear on roads where they travel, but I imagine the majority of the roads in a city rarely see large trucks, and still need regular upkeep. Without some sources to back up your claims, I'm not sure if it's accounting for that or not. Can you supply your sources so we can look into exactly what that statistic means?
- blihp 8y agoAre you sure about that? I see garbage trucks, delivery trucks (package, furniture, appliance etc.), lawn service trucks, salt trucks, snow plowing trucks etc day-in, day-out.[1] And to do their job, they probably need traverse 95% of the paved roadways on a regular basis. Granted, you don't typically see 18-wheelers tooling around most neighborhoods[2] but there is quite a bit of truck traffic through even moderately populated urban and suburban areas every day. [1] If your argument is that these are all 'light' vehicles, my city disagrees with you. They recently cited road damage from the variety of garbage hauling services as a reason to limit our options. Not that I entirely buy that as the only or even main reason they did so... local politics and all that. [2] However they have been known to use secondary streets when they shouldn't.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoWe're talking about California. There are no major cities in California in possession of snow plows and salt trucks. A garbage truck goes down the street once per week, yes. The overwhelming majority of traffic on most city streets is cars and light trucks. The main cause of damage to most city streets is the mere passage of time, and rain.
- btilly 8y agoWe are talking about California. What rain? :-P
- jacobolus 8y agoThankfully CA is now finally pretty well drought free, after getting pretty decent rain the past couple months. https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article226462260.html https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article226462260.html Drought map https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito... Reservoirs are doing well http://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=rescond.pdf http://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=rescond.... Of course, this is an El Niño year, so we’ll see whether we return to severe drought in the coming years.
- mc32 8y agoExactly this. Of course, if they tax per axle and tonnage combination, it’ll just be passed on to consumers anyhow as most of trucks are distributing goods which directly or indirectly end up in the hands of consumers. However, it would be quite fair to do, I think.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoSure, but it might also have some other nice side-benefits, like favouring railroad expansion. Having transport by lorry being artificially cheaper is non-ideal for lots of reasons.
- jacobolus 8y agoIn the short term it would get passed on to consumers. In the medium term supply chains would figure out how to reduce shipping by road. In the longer term (in conjunction with other changes) we might be able to get larger-scale urban development on a more sustainable track. If we could properly price externalities (not just road wear but also ground water contamination, CO2 emissions etc.) there are many parts of our economy which could be made dramatically more efficient and less harmful without that much overall change to human quality of life.
- pfisch 8y agoThis would devastate the economy. For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion. There is no way to do what you are proposing without massive price increases in electricity, gasoline and virtually every other good. I wouldn't be surprised if when you priced all of this in you discovered that people couldn't really afford electricity anymore. Also this economy would never be able to have exports because the price of producing goods would just be insane. The truth is we can't afford the externalities without an economic implosion that would realistically end with an extreme political group taking control in the ensuing chaos and undoing everything you are proposing.
- vincentmarle 8y agoThis is why the Netherlands also has weight-based vehicle taxes (on top of the gas tax and many other taxes).
- ams6110 8y agoAs do the states. Commercial trucks pay a lot more road use tax than passenger cars. Whether it's proportional to the damage they cause I don't know.
- acdha 8y agoThere are counter examples like the federal and some state (e.g. California) tax breaks for trucks over 6,000 pounds, providing relief to all of those orthodontists who needed a Hummer to get to the office.
- berbec 8y agoI'm waiting for people to buy the actual military surplus Hummers for all those Whole Foods that are on top of mountains.
- joe_the_user 8y agoDamage isn't the only thing involved in people using the roads. Roads are a public good (in contrast to railroad tracks which are a private good). The state effectively charges for the use of roads both to pay for maintenance and to make sure that the road remain usable to a reasonable cross-section of people. This is just as landlords charge for the use of land even when that land isn't consumed.
- reaperducer 8y agoSo the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error. Which is why the California tax on gasoline is 48.7¢/gallon and the California tax on diesel fuel is 67¢/gallon.[1] Federal tax on gasoline is 18.4¢/gallon, and diesel fuel is 24.4¢/gallon.[2] I'm not defending the trucking industry. I think more stuff should go by train instead. But truck fuel is taxed more heavily than car fuel. (For those of you in other countries, the number of cars running on diesel in the United States is about 3%.) [1] http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/l561.pdf http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/l561.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
- mikeash 8y agoIt’s taxed slightly more heavily. But trucks cause literally thousands of times more damage than cars.
- xvedejas 8y agoThey also require more gas per mile. It seems like it should roughly add up to paying a few more times than cars (they're a few times less fuel efficient).
- mikeash 8y agoYes, the average car in the US gets about 25MPG, while the average tractor trailer is 6MPG, so about 4x the fuel per mile. Accounting for the higher tax rate, they’re paying maybe 5x the tax per mile, while causing maybe 5,000x the damage.
- gammarator 8y agoDamage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. [citation needed]
- gesman 8y agoAnd add to that pollution caused by large trucks. Some are literally hard to follow behind due to the cloud of poison they are fuming all over. California's crusade on sedans to cut down on pollution is a joke.
- megaremote 8y agoYou are joking right? Just because the pollution from cars is not visible, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And there are a 1000x more cars than trucks.
- sbov 8y agoNo need to use the 1000x number, there's actually information about this out there, at least when it comes to greenhouse gasses. In 2016: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100USI5.pdf https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100USI5.pdf Medium and Heavy duty trucks: 425 Tg CO2 Light-Duty Vehicles (passenger cars + SUVs, pickup trucks, etc): 1,106 Tg CO2
- megaremote 8y agoExcept there are a 1000 times more cars on the road than trucks, and we actually need trucks. We don't need cars, at all.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stygiansonic 8y agoFor those wondering about the source of the "4th power of weight per axle", I found this after some short, but intense, Googling: http://co-asphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TrashTruckDamage.pdf http://co-asphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TrashTruckD... Reference 1 lead me to this: (Page I-11) https://habib00ugm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/aashto1993.pdf https://habib00ugm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/aashto1993.pd... From that: "The load equivalency factor increases approximately as a function of the ratio of any given axle load to the standard 18 kip single axle load raised to the fourth power." That is also cited here, on page 14: https://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/dmv/agri-eq-veh/ag-study/rpt-phase2.pdf https://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/dmv/agri-eq-veh/ag-study/...
- andys627 8y agoI am bad at math... could you help me understand. A 80,000 truck and 5,000 car drive down the road... how much more damage does the 80,000 truck do? Thank you.
- SilasX 8y agoIf the 80k truck has 5 axles (as is typical of an 18 wheeler) and a 5k car has two, then the truck has 16k on each axle and the car has 2.5k on each axle. Because the damage scales with the 4th power, then the damage ratio is the 4th power of the axle weight ratio: (16k/2.5k) ^ 4 = 1677x as much damage. Edit: Sorry, that oversimplifies it a bit. For the same vehicle, the damage scales that way, but for a fair comparison, you'd have to account for the fact that the weight is distributed over more and bigger tires on each axle. Still, that should show you how the math works.
- Moru 8y agoHere in northern Sweden we have a lot of wear on the roads. After a few years you can clearly see where most drive because there is a deep depression after the wheels. If you drive a truck in the track you will notice that you don't fit, the distance is slightly smaller than the trucks wheel distance. It does however fit exactly for the cars. We do however all have spikes on the cars in winter, I'm guessting this helps a lot. The trucks usually does not have spikes. There is a lot of trucks too, hauling wood out of the forests.
- WalterBright 8y agoThe more technical term for this is "fatigue damage". I read years ago that the fatigue damage inflicted by a truck loaded to the legal weight limit (and it's often exceeded) is 9,000 times that of a car. The damage done by cars is usually from snow tires.
- CalRobert 8y agoWorth noting that the damage to the air, increase in noise pollution, and increased costs of health care spending from injuries, lung disease, etc. from both is substantial.
- briandear 8y agoThose roads are what allow stuff to be delivered. How do you ship an air conditioning unit on a bike path? The point is that the roads serve commerce and a tax on roads is really a tax on everything. Roads aren’t exactly massively subsidized — the commerce they generate results in taxes. Tax revenue generated per mile driven is far greater than any supposed subsidy. We could make an argument that schools are massively subsidized — the parents of students attending don’t pay the actual cost of attendance however, the tax revenues generated by an educated workforce are considered a net win compared to the cost of the “subsidy.” My kids don’t go to public school and some people don’t drive on roads, but we all benefit from roads and other people’s kids being educated and the economic gain vastly outweighs the subsidy. Not everyone uses the roads, but everyone benefits from them — thus a direct user-fee really serves no purpose, it’s just an additional tax on everyone. Since practically every single product touches a road at some point, taxing the roads more just makes everything more expensive. You are also incorrect suggesting that $5 per gallon is “about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel.” In France, it’s $2.77 per gallon. In the UK, it’s $2.83 per gallon. Netherlands is $3.5 per gallon. Sweden is $3.51. In Australia, it’s $1.12 per gallon, New Zealand is $1.58. None of those countries are even close to $5 per gallon.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoGas in Switzerland is currently about $9 USD per gallon (CHF 2.27 per liter), chiefly in taxes.
- reaperducer 8y agoFuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. Which is why I always laugh when I hear people complaining about evil subsidized high-speed rail in America. That's just talking points from the airline and trucking industries, which are already far more heavily subsidized than rail.
- adventured 8y agoThe problem with the US and high-speed rail isn't on-going subsidization per se, it's the comically enormous cost to initially build it out. Major infrastructure is wildly expensive to build in much of the US. To do national high-speed rail, you'd have to figure that out. The only solution I've ever seen that might work, would be a belligerent Federal Government that just brutalizes anyone that gets in the way, threatening uncooperative states via funding, aggressively using eminent domain to take land, bulldozing through environment reviews, etc. You'd have to use the full power of the Federal Government to rapidly get through obstacles and it would piss off everyone in the process. There's only one major state where you can build cost-effective high-speed rail in the US - Texas. They're going to do what California couldn't and at ~1/4th the cost per km of rail. 20-30 years from now Texas will probably have high-speed rail between all of its major cities. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/spring/news/article/Houston-Dallas-high-speed-rail-construction-may-13620560.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/spring/news/ar...
- 100ideas 8y agoFlorida already did - gobrightline.com. Private rail linking west palm beach with Miami, expansion plans to Orlando.
- baddox 8y agoIf the usage fees aren't sufficient, then that's true for all drivers, whether it's Uber, or an eighteen wheeler, or a personal driver. If you get those usage fees right, then the argument that "specific group X profits from using public roads" goes away.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoDo you not have a road licence tax for all vehicles with trucks and HGV's charged a lot more (as they do the moast damage) as we do in the UK.