3 ms·
Righ, 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
by ska 7y ago
Righ, 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.