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Everyone benefits almost equally from the road system, regardless of whether they drive. Emergency services, food and other goods, the entire economy depends on
by blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Everyone benefits almost equally from the road system, regardless of whether they drive. Emergency services, food and other goods, the entire economy depends on the roads. Taxation to fund road maintenance should be central and universal, and not directed at individual vehicles, other than perhaps a sales tax based on weight.
- Zigurd 6y agoThat sounds "fair" but amounts to a massive subsidy of diesel powered heavy trucking. TBF, it is possible to build roads that trucks do not quickly destroy, and maybe the expense of doing that makes sense in some cases. Everything except heavy trucking would pay much less to maintain roads, but for trucks wearing them out. While you suggest a tax based on vehicle weight, which might also seem "fair," that still does not capture the disproportionate wear, order of magnitude more, caused by heavy trucking.
- tomp 6y agoSo? You need trucks to deliver stuff (food etc) if you want to live in a city. The correct way of looking at this isn’t by asking “what’s fair” but instead “what we want to incentivise”. People moving out of cities? Ramp up city property taxes. People moving into cities (more efficient)? Subsidise transport of goods. More green energy? Tax CO2 / fuel, subsidise (clean) electricity. Less trucks, more railways? Tax trucks more, but this hardly makes sense unless rail a viable alternative (i.e. there’s enough railways leading to the city).
- Dylan16807 6y agoThere are different ways to ship by truck. Maybe you want to encourage more axles and a slightly lighter max load, which could easily drop the damage by a factor of 10.