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No, heavy trucks wear out the road significantly more than cars and result in asphalt having to be replaced more frequently. This is another case where the gas
by pathseeker 6y ago
No, heavy trucks wear out the road significantly more than cars and result in asphalt having to be replaced more frequently.
This is another case where the gas tax isn't really adequate for funding road issues due to the disproportional increase in costs to the increase in fuel usage by trucks. All of the light vehicle drivers subsidize the heavy trucks in all mileage/fuel based tax schemes.
- Valgrim 6y agoFor this reason, in northern latitudes, weight limits for trucks drop significantly during the spring season. Shipping water bottles, ice salt and windshield washer in stores becomes a real pain in the ass.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoFor what it’s worth, you can buy windshield washer concentrate online. In months where the temperature gets cold, though, you want the alcohol based stuff that won’t freeze and burst a line.
- melling 6y agoSounds like we need to expand our rail capacity. Our current rail freight capacity is near 100%.
- gruez 6y agoWhy not tax each mode of transportation proportionately to their true cost, and let the market decide?
- melling 6y agoHow do you price in the fact that heavy trucks destroy the road faster, causing them to be replaced more often, causing more pollution? In other words, how do you price in the pollution? And do you really want to?
- Taek 6y agoYes, you really do want to. It would be lovely if we could charge proportional to the externalities. As for how... beats me. Best we can do is rough approximation, and accept that we will continually find out we were wrong and have to adjust the cost structure.
- epistasis 6y agoWe could get the approximations quite wrong and still get massive economic improvements from where we currently are! However the challenge isn't the approximations, but the political difficulties. Even taxing based on mileage would cause an uproar. And taxing large pickups proportional to their economic toll on infrastructure would probably start a violent revolution.
- lostapathy 6y agoLarge pickups aren’t an appreciable part of the problem here - 18 wheelers are.
- epistasis 6y agoThere are a lot of smaller roads where 18 wheelers never travel, and where a 2x weight increase means 10x the road wear (between the cube and fourth power of weight, according to simple models in this thread).
- shawnz 6y agoCharge the asphalt companies a carbon tax, and let municipalities create road taxes based on vehicle weight/usage to pay for the extra costs created for road maintenance
- lkbm 6y agoThe how is difficult -- studies like this are part. "Do you really want to?" is a clear yes. It's called a Pigovian tax, and it's the most unambiguously "correct" way to tax things: you tax things in accordance to their harm to third-parties (and subsidize things in accordance to their benefits to third-parties). Markets only work if we internalize the externalities, which can most efficiently be done through taxation. Pollution is one of the standard examples of an externality.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoBecause there is no "true cost" and it's all subjective. You can ratchet up the tax on heavy trucks because "muh road wear" but then you'll have a world where everything is delivered in small trucks and there will be problems with that. At the end of the day it comes down to a subjective question of which problems get which priority.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoor transportation of goods like food become more expensive so people rely on their local farmers instead of getting avacados shipped in from the moon
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoIf you do anything to a low level of the economy (e.g. fuel or energy prices) to the point where consumption at the upper levels is reduced then you're also screwing the poors hard enough that you are either going to get voted out of office or shot in short order (depending on how your system of government handles power transitions).
- NeutronStar 6y ago*Citation needed Are you suggesting that the poor drive more and buy more stuff than the rich?
- sgc 6y agoI agree, but none of this is remotely just or fair without a minimum wage that is a living wage. And what that is needs to be reassessed if policies change the cost of living.
- calvinmorrison 6y agothat's life - frank sinatra
- 6y ago
- CameronNemo 6y agoRail networks have massive network effects. Might be best to let the market not have that one. What with the huge risk of regulatory capture and all.
- jabl 6y agoLooking at e.g. the UK, having some mixed public-private rail system doesn't seem to work that well. The most efficient freight railways in the world are probably in the USA, and passengers in Japan. Both private vertically integrated things, with the one company owning both rails and trains. But yeah, massive potential for problems as well. I don't really have a good solution. I'd guess the best industry structure is just "it depends", nothing that is superior to other ways of doing it in all circumstances..
- anonymoushn 6y agoI sort of wonder if private train companies in the US would achieve the sort of interconnection we have in Tokyo. The train station nearest to my house is owned by one company, but after going East two stops the stations and rails are all owned by another company. The station that's part of both of these companies' lines is also a major transfer station to a major line owned by a third company. As a user of transit I mostly don't have to care about this, but I ended up calling three companies when I lost something on the way home.
- pathseeker 6y agoThis was sort of figured out during the massive railroad booms in the US throughout the 1800s. You can let the market have parts of it but you need guardrails so you don't have some asshole that owns a bridge holding everything up for a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Avenue_Bridge#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Avenue_Bridge#Histo...
- Spooky23 6y agoMotor carriers operate with tight margins and require a heavy regulatory hand. There are multiple overlapping jurisdictions, etc. Law of averages make fuel tax work, but there are holes... if you buy fuel in Delaware, less revenue comes to Pennsylvania, etc. Shitty operators will do anything to save a buck -- trucks with no brakes operating overweight will travel at night to avoid enforcement based on knowledge of enforcement. Others will find holes in enforcement to avoid penalties -- shady trucks operating in Manhattan will be registered in places where unpaid New York tickets won't impact their registration, for example.
- themaninthedark 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fuel_Tax_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fuel_Tax_Agreeme... If you have a commercial vehicle you are supposed to be tracking how many miles you travel in each jurisdiction and how much fuel you buy in each jurisdiction.
- Spooky23 6y agoI'm sure the "flag of convenience" states that operate cut-rate truck registrations are very diligent in auditing compliance. </s>
- oblio 6y agoDon't y'all have these amazing rivers that aren't really used any more for transportation? Maybe you should couple that up with rail transport :-)
- falcolas 6y agoBarge traffic on rivers has been and still is a thing. Maintaining the rivers isn't cheap or easy, of course.
- 205guy 6y agoI know the comment was tongue in cheek, but the area in question (Los Angeles) doesn't have navigable rivers. In fact, the Los Angeles river is better paved (lined with cement for various reasons) than some roads in the area. And as a sibling comment points out, where the US does have good rivers/lakes, notably the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio network and the Great Lakes, they are used extensively for transport. The only one I can think of that is disused is the Hudson and canals that connect to the Great Lakes. But the same is true for Europe: larger rivers allow larger, more efficient ships and are still used for transport, and the canal system is too narrow and so mostly recreational now.
- Someone 6y agoYou can always (sometimes at large cost) dig wider and deeper canals, or make existing ones wider and deeper. https://www.britannica.com/technology/canal-waterway/Major-inland-waterways-of-Europe https://www.britannica.com/technology/canal-waterway/Major-i... has plenty of examples of recently dug or now large canals supporting large ships.
- oblio 6y agoHow solid is rail transportation in California?
- toast0 6y agoFor freight? It's pretty solid. In calendar year 2019, the alameda corridor [1] processed about 4.8 million twenty foot equivilent units (TEU) [2] and the ports of los angeles and long beach processed about 9.3 million [3]. So around about half of the container trips to or from the port are by rail rather than truck. Some of the containers may just get put on trucks at the rail yards at the other end of the corridor to avoid trucking congestion in the port, but I don't think there's a lot of that. (I could be wrong) For passengers? It's pretty iffy outside of commuter rail, Amtrak operates on freight lines, and is deprioritized, and there's a lot of freight volume, so there's a lot of delays for passengers. I don't know the right keywords to find data for the ports of Oakland and Stockton. They probably have a decent rail volume too, but they have more challenging geography to get east than in southern california. [1] the rails between the port of la/long beach and major rail yards exiting los angeles [2] http://www.acta.org/pdf/Monthly_TEUREV_History.pdf http://www.acta.org/pdf/Monthly_TEUREV_History.pdf [3] https://kentico.portoflosangeles.org/getmedia/a43d3038-7713-4ebd-8c6a-dc72195a65f1/2019-facts-figures https://kentico.portoflosangeles.org/getmedia/a43d3038-7713-...
- mirkules 6y agoThe way you frame this makes it seem like a road tax is in our future. That, in turn, makes me more skeptical about this study, the funds for which were granted by the EPA. I’m not really insinuating the EPA is after your tax dollars, but the fact that a government agency funds a study that can have tax implications should at least raise an eyebrow. I don‘t know how common this is. The problem I have with this is that the gas tax was [Edit: this is apparently not true, as was pointed out below] created because exhaust fumes were damaging the environment and reducing air quality - and I agree with that. But now that we have made significant strides towards reducing emissions - both in the way of more efficient vehicles and battery-operated vehicles - causing a decrease in gas tax dollars flowing in, suddenly we have another source of emissions which would require another tax. I can’t help but feel that at least on some level this will be a money grab - even if the underlying study is confirmed long-term.
- CameronNemo 6y ago>the gas tax was created because exhaust fumes were damaging the environment and reducing air quality Do you have a source for this? Everything I have read states that gas taxes were first enacted to finance road construction (thereby leading to more exhaust fumes), and gas taxes in place today often dedicate the majority if not all of their funds to road building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
- mirkules 6y agoActually, I don’t have a source, it was just my assumption, so you’re probably right. But seeing the downvotes roll in, I should have known better than to question the financial motivation for an environmental study on HN.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoPairing those questions with skepticism of government certainly didn't help.
- 6y ago
- cameldrv 6y agoYou could get a decent approximation of the right tax by taxing diesel more. Especially after dieselgate, there are hardly any light vehicles that use it.
- adwww 6y agoExcept in Europe, where Diesel peaked at almost 50% of all vehicles sold - pre dieselgate.
- lostapathy 6y agoThat same hammer would also hamper innovation in new light diesel vehicles. All three auto makers now make diesel half ton trucks and Jeep is expanding it into more vehicles. We should encourage that.