4 ms·
Yes, 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 approximat
by Taek 6y ago
Yes, 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).