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In the sense that passenger cars aren’t causing really any wear and tear to our major roadways, this is absolutely true. However, the value of having those maj
by zaroth 7y ago
In the sense that passenger cars aren’t causing really any wear and tear to our major roadways, this is absolutely true.
However, the value of having those major highways is still extremely high to passenger cars and trucks alike.
I benefit greatly from well maintained roads, even if my use of those roads is not damaging the road basically at all.
So you need a weighted analysis of use and value as well as wear & tear to come up with a “fair” allocation of costs.
Even people who don’t own a car benefit greatly from those roads, due to their logistical necessity for everyday life, not to mention mail and package delivery to their homes. To the extent that passenger car drivers overpay for their commensurate road wear & tear, car owners are subsidizing non-car-owners because the goods they buy are cheaper than they would be if they had to pay for the true fully loaded logistics cost.
You could charge the trucking companies more. Then prices of transported goods would just increase to compensate and we’d all be roughly back in the same place maybe? Non-car owners would be worse off.
To the extent that roads are being subsidized more than rail then this would distort the market and limit freight volumes. I have a feeling that the markets are not tremendously out of balance, and that it’s not like we’re sitting on massive unused rail freight capacity that just can’t operate profitably because roads aren’t expensive enough? But that’s a whole different topic.
- ska 7y agoRigh, the system as a whole is useful. But if truck traffic wasn't as heavy/damaging, you would pay less to enjoy the same benefits, give or take. I think the argument made by some transport people is that if we made (particularly) the trucking industry pay more directly, as you say we would be roughly back in the same place except variant freight methods (e.g. rail for long distances) might become competitive enough to bring overall costs down. I don't know the truth of this, but we've been subsidizing trucking long enough that I don't think current rail capacity is a good indicator one way or another. It seem plausible - it's clear there is a market distortion but not clear exactly what it is. One nit-pick, it's not clear the non-car owners would be worse off so long as whatever payment mechanism we used didn't create a free-rider class of passenger vehicles.
- zaroth 7y agoTo the extent that car owners are subsidizing the trucking industry, and to the extent that trucking industry subsidies flow through to the cost of goods delivered by trucks (the same thing as saying that increased trucking costs flow through to goods delivered by truck), then shifting the balance necessarily means car owners paying less and non-car owners paying more. I will admit I stumbled upon this conclusion and felt it was ironically juicy and a bit provocative, but it seems like pretty solid macroeconomics to me!
- ska 7y agoAgreed, I worded that badly - what I meant is that non-car owners could still save more by not driving than the delta on the goods, potentially, as they are paying only the fractional cost that they are actually consuming, if everything else was "correctly" redistributed. This is all complicated though by the way we actually pay for all of this, so it's not as simple as car owners subsidizing. It's not like the gas tax covers this.