5 ms·

Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them. Businesses t

Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them. Businesses that are primarily located in.....cities. If Middletown USA didn't have to worry about 80,000 lbs trucks hauling kombucha to your local bodega tearing up their roads, perhaps road costs would be a bit more in-line with reality. More importantly if we focused more on making transport costs in-line with the damage they do to the road surfaces (not to mention the environmental impact of long and short haul trucking, plus the traffic) instead of city/suburbia none issue, perhaps we'd all be a bit better off.

Polylactic_acid 7y ago
The proper solution would be to tax trucks exactly the amount of damage they cause. This would cause the cost of imported goods to go up and the cost of local goods to go down. In the short term you would see the extra cost and lower taxes cancel each other out and in the long term, local goods become more common than imported.
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  Thats certainly one solution, and a perfectly reasonable one at that. It seems to be an excellent way by which we can also encourage more rail development, and reduce the overall amount of waste in the transport chain.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  You'll also see trucks use more axles with wider, softer tires. It's easy to get more than an order of magnitude in damage reduction.
- alamortsubite 7y ago
  This is the right idea, but let's not stop there. Why not also tax privately registered vehicles to some degree by their mass? I also like the idea of making fines for moving violations somewhat proportional to vehicle mass. The danger posed to others by a 150 lb moped pales in comparison to that of a 4500 lb pickup truck. At least in the U.S., a ticket for speeding 50% over the limit through a residential neighborhood is the same for both, for example. Neither is OK, but considering the disparity in the potential for damage and injury to others, imposing equal fines is insane.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    Because "privately registered" vehicles don't matter for purposes of road damage. A fully loaded semi is 18,000 lbs per axle. A really huge personal vehicle, an F-350, is 4000 lbs per axle. That's 4.5x the weight, 4.5^4=410, so the semi is doing 410x as much damage. There's really no point in trying to tax personal vehicles for road damage when over 99% of the damage is being done by trucks.
    - alamortsubite 7y ago
      Where are you getting your "over 99%" figure?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - beerandt 7y ago
        You need to approach or exceed a roads per-axel weight limit to do any damage or serious wear. Trucks and permit loads are pretty much the only things that get close. Beyond the elastic limit, damage is an exponential function of the pavement loading, but only once that certain minimum psf is hit. For the majority of a highway's loading curve, the damage-per-force is essentially nil. Plastic deformation and serious fatigue only start as you approach the design limits. It's 99%+ because cars don't do any real wear or damage to pavement from typical use.
      - cameldrv 7y ago
        A semi is doing 400x as much damage as essentially the heaviest personal vehicle driving. For a more typical car at 4000 lbs (2000 lbs per axle), the semi does 6000x as much damage. If semis are 2% of all traffic (true in my observation), they're doing over 99% of the damage to roads. It makes no sense to care about road damage at all from any vehicle other than a heavy truck.
    - joethebob 7y ago
      The GVWR on a F350 is around 10-14,000, so somewhere between 5-7k axle load.
- joethebob 7y ago
  Which is always easier said than done and a bit simplistic. The primary factor derived to date has been to tie the wear factor to axle weight. Meaning an empty vehicle made for transporting goods would be in the range of passenger vehicles. In addition to simple overloading, improperly balanced loading represents more damage for the same total vehicle weight. So each axle must be weighed in a loaded state on each individual trip to determine the presumptive proportional tax burden. All of which creates overhead in the form of people to be paid, equipment to build/own/maintain, time lost at all stages, the usual political influence problems, jusrisdiction of different areas of road, implementing policy, and corruption. Most of it will end end up as pass through cost to individuals either way as both consumer goods and roadways are deemed essential. It's ultimately a fairness exercise of tax distribution so like most things in the public interest the arena any idea must be fought in is politics.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    Don't we already weigh trucks as they enter and leave the state, as well as sometimes in the middle of the state? I don't know what goes on there already, but we could certainly charge trucks based on loaded miles in the state, which should be pretty easy to calculate since they have very predictable driving patterns and take fairly detailed logs. For local deliveries, we could just charge based on the max load and allow drivers to prove anything otherwise. And yes, consumers will pay regardless, but at least the difference is reflected in the cost of goods. It could very well be that certain local goods are cheaper than imported goods after road costs are properly factored in, which could change how much is imported. However, this feels a bit regressive since poorer people will pay more of the cost since roads are largely funded by income tax, but that can be accounted for by shifting other taxes. The idea isn't too punish poor people or shipping customers, but to allow the market to work more efficiently.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Shouldn't roads that are heavily trafficked by trucks by made out of concrete instead of asphalt? Surely it's known that it lasts much longer, I guess the question is if it's economically viable considering long term costs.
pedantsamaritan 7y ago
For the curious, "Road damage ... is estimated to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight". [0] A chart shows it nicely: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels/ https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh... [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Importance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Imp...
- beerandt 7y ago
  Also, it's an elasticity problem. There is essentially no damage and minimal wear until the forces exceed the elastic limit on the stress-strain curve. A road is a spring, and will behave elastically, with almost no deformation, unless you exceed a certain point on the stress-strain curve. This is why the main concern of highway departments is not exceeding maximum axel loads. Worrying about the amount of wear commuters are responsible for is just a distraction. It's like a toddler jumping on your mattress vs a 350 lb offensive-lineman doing it. They both technically cause some amount of wear, but it's not worth figuring out the proportions.
joe_the_user 7y ago
Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them. I can't see a plausible argument that cities consume a disproportionate amount of the country's truck traffic. It seems like Suburban malls and supermarkets require pretty much exactly proportionate truck traffic to their city counter-parts. Moreover, manufacture is not particular concentrated in cities so that too gets equal coverage in suburbs. And all of this stuff requires proportionately more miles driven in the suburbs due to the lower density. I don't know if cities consume more Kambucha than suburbs but if they do, I assume that suburbs consume some other equivalently.
lmm 7y ago
The 80,000lb trucks aren't supplying the inner-city bodegas, they're supplying the out-of-town malls the suburb model relies on. I agree with getting road use charged in line with what it costs, but the result is going to be that the cities stop subsidizing the suburbs so much.
- gjs278 7y ago
  no they’re not. the suburbs are not buying your kombucha. get a grip on the numbers. all the fucking food is going to feed the millions of people packed up like rats.
asdff 7y ago
Traffic on roads could stop tomorrow and you'd still need to resurface the entirety of the road network anywhere with a winter season every 5-10 years. Thermal expansion and contraction are serious forces for infrastructure, outweighing traffic in most places I imagine (if most places aren't large cities). Didn't matter much back when we used brick or dirt.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Sure, but they do contribute to the cost of maintaining roads. We need to figure out roughly what percentage of road maintenance costs come from vehicles and charge individual vehicles based on their rough contribution to maintenance costs. It's not a terribly hard calculation, especially since you can directly compare with roads that are infrequently used by trucks.

Polylactic_acid 7y ago

The proper solution would be to tax trucks exactly the amount of damage they cause. This would cause the cost of imported goods to go up and the cost of local goods to go down. In the short term you would see the extra cost and lower taxes cancel each other out and in the long term, local goods become more common than imported.

AcerbicZero 7y ago
Thats certainly one solution, and a perfectly reasonable one at that. It seems to be an excellent way by which we can also encourage more rail development, and reduce the overall amount of waste in the transport chain.
Dylan16807 7y ago
You'll also see trucks use more axles with wider, softer tires. It's easy to get more than an order of magnitude in damage reduction.
alamortsubite 7y ago
This is the right idea, but let's not stop there. Why not also tax privately registered vehicles to some degree by their mass? I also like the idea of making fines for moving violations somewhat proportional to vehicle mass. The danger posed to others by a 150 lb moped pales in comparison to that of a 4500 lb pickup truck. At least in the U.S., a ticket for speeding 50% over the limit through a residential neighborhood is the same for both, for example. Neither is OK, but considering the disparity in the potential for damage and injury to others, imposing equal fines is insane.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  Because "privately registered" vehicles don't matter for purposes of road damage. A fully loaded semi is 18,000 lbs per axle. A really huge personal vehicle, an F-350, is 4000 lbs per axle. That's 4.5x the weight, 4.5^4=410, so the semi is doing 410x as much damage. There's really no point in trying to tax personal vehicles for road damage when over 99% of the damage is being done by trucks.
  - alamortsubite 7y ago
    Where are you getting your "over 99%" figure?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - beerandt 7y ago
      You need to approach or exceed a roads per-axel weight limit to do any damage or serious wear. Trucks and permit loads are pretty much the only things that get close. Beyond the elastic limit, damage is an exponential function of the pavement loading, but only once that certain minimum psf is hit. For the majority of a highway's loading curve, the damage-per-force is essentially nil. Plastic deformation and serious fatigue only start as you approach the design limits. It's 99%+ because cars don't do any real wear or damage to pavement from typical use.
    - cameldrv 7y ago
      A semi is doing 400x as much damage as essentially the heaviest personal vehicle driving. For a more typical car at 4000 lbs (2000 lbs per axle), the semi does 6000x as much damage. If semis are 2% of all traffic (true in my observation), they're doing over 99% of the damage to roads. It makes no sense to care about road damage at all from any vehicle other than a heavy truck.
  - joethebob 7y ago
    The GVWR on a F350 is around 10-14,000, so somewhere between 5-7k axle load.
joethebob 7y ago
Which is always easier said than done and a bit simplistic. The primary factor derived to date has been to tie the wear factor to axle weight. Meaning an empty vehicle made for transporting goods would be in the range of passenger vehicles. In addition to simple overloading, improperly balanced loading represents more damage for the same total vehicle weight. So each axle must be weighed in a loaded state on each individual trip to determine the presumptive proportional tax burden. All of which creates overhead in the form of people to be paid, equipment to build/own/maintain, time lost at all stages, the usual political influence problems, jusrisdiction of different areas of road, implementing policy, and corruption. Most of it will end end up as pass through cost to individuals either way as both consumer goods and roadways are deemed essential. It's ultimately a fairness exercise of tax distribution so like most things in the public interest the arena any idea must be fought in is politics.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Don't we already weigh trucks as they enter and leave the state, as well as sometimes in the middle of the state? I don't know what goes on there already, but we could certainly charge trucks based on loaded miles in the state, which should be pretty easy to calculate since they have very predictable driving patterns and take fairly detailed logs. For local deliveries, we could just charge based on the max load and allow drivers to prove anything otherwise. And yes, consumers will pay regardless, but at least the difference is reflected in the cost of goods. It could very well be that certain local goods are cheaper than imported goods after road costs are properly factored in, which could change how much is imported. However, this feels a bit regressive since poorer people will pay more of the cost since roads are largely funded by income tax, but that can be accounted for by shifting other taxes. The idea isn't too punish poor people or shipping customers, but to allow the market to work more efficiently.
hanniabu 7y ago
Shouldn't roads that are heavily trafficked by trucks by made out of concrete instead of asphalt? Surely it's known that it lasts much longer, I guess the question is if it's economically viable considering long term costs.

pedantsamaritan 7y ago

For the curious, "Road damage ... is estimated to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight". [0] A chart shows it nicely: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels/ https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh... [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Importance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Imp...

beerandt 7y ago
Also, it's an elasticity problem. There is essentially no damage and minimal wear until the forces exceed the elastic limit on the stress-strain curve. A road is a spring, and will behave elastically, with almost no deformation, unless you exceed a certain point on the stress-strain curve. This is why the main concern of highway departments is not exceeding maximum axel loads. Worrying about the amount of wear commuters are responsible for is just a distraction. It's like a toddler jumping on your mattress vs a 350 lb offensive-lineman doing it. They both technically cause some amount of wear, but it's not worth figuring out the proportions.

joe_the_user 7y ago

Look all you want, but road maintenance costs are primarily a subsidy for the trucking industry, and by extension the businesses that rely on them. I can't see a plausible argument that cities consume a disproportionate amount of the country's truck traffic. It seems like Suburban malls and supermarkets require pretty much exactly proportionate truck traffic to their city counter-parts. Moreover, manufacture is not particular concentrated in cities so that too gets equal coverage in suburbs. And all of this stuff requires proportionately more miles driven in the suburbs due to the lower density. I don't know if cities consume more Kambucha than suburbs but if they do, I assume that suburbs consume some other equivalently.

lmm 7y ago

The 80,000lb trucks aren't supplying the inner-city bodegas, they're supplying the out-of-town malls the suburb model relies on. I agree with getting road use charged in line with what it costs, but the result is going to be that the cities stop subsidizing the suburbs so much.

gjs278 7y ago
no they’re not. the suburbs are not buying your kombucha. get a grip on the numbers. all the fucking food is going to feed the millions of people packed up like rats.

asdff 7y ago

Traffic on roads could stop tomorrow and you'd still need to resurface the entirety of the road network anywhere with a winter season every 5-10 years. Thermal expansion and contraction are serious forces for infrastructure, outweighing traffic in most places I imagine (if most places aren't large cities). Didn't matter much back when we used brick or dirt.

beatgammit 7y ago
Sure, but they do contribute to the cost of maintaining roads. We need to figure out roughly what percentage of road maintenance costs come from vehicles and charge individual vehicles based on their rough contribution to maintenance costs. It's not a terribly hard calculation, especially since you can directly compare with roads that are infrequently used by trucks.