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Minimizing environmental impact requires considering the vehicle count as well. Having a more light duty trucks zipping around because we've regulated fewer me

Minimizing environmental impact requires considering the vehicle count as well. Having a more light duty trucks zipping around because we've regulated fewer medium duty truck out of profitability for that use case is likely not environmentally efficient. When you're talking about roads expected to last X years with a certain % traffic of semi trucks in the 80k ballpark pretty much nothing you do in the 40k ballpark and below matters. Also, you have to differentiate between wear on the road surface and the road bed. The road surface doesn't care how much weight you have. It just cares about contact pressure. The road bed is going to care more about overall tonnage because by the time the force gets to the road bed it's spread over such an area the contact pressure is low regardless. It's hard to generalize these things because mother nature plays a large role what the depreciation curve of a road looks like and local wealth plays the deciding role in where in the depreciation curve you justify replacing it.

myself248 6y ago
> Having a more light duty trucks zipping around because we've regulated fewer medium duty truck out of profitability for that use case is likely not environmentally efficient. Really? I thought it was personnel-inefficient but pretty much ideal for the roads, for the aforementioned power-law reason. Lighter trucks are gentler on the roads even if there are more of them. Do I misunderstand?
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  There's carbon, particulate and road wear (and noise and traffic). You can prioritize whatever you want in whatever order you want to make whatever state you want seem like the best. If the road has to be built to handle X% semi trucks for 10yr and mother nature will destroy it in 20yr no matter what you do you lose nothing by driving a bunch of medium duty trucks on it.

myself248 6y ago

> Having a more light duty trucks zipping around because we've regulated fewer medium duty truck out of profitability for that use case is likely not environmentally efficient. Really? I thought it was personnel-inefficient but pretty much ideal for the roads, for the aforementioned power-law reason. Lighter trucks are gentler on the roads even if there are more of them. Do I misunderstand?

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
There's carbon, particulate and road wear (and noise and traffic). You can prioritize whatever you want in whatever order you want to make whatever state you want seem like the best. If the road has to be built to handle X% semi trucks for 10yr and mother nature will destroy it in 20yr no matter what you do you lose nothing by driving a bunch of medium duty trucks on it.