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Trucks pay "Heavy Vehicle Use Tax" or HVUT

sudosysgen 5y ago
That's 100-550$. Peanuts compared to the actual cost.
MertsA 5y ago
To elaborate on why this doesn't bridge the gap between heavy trucking road wear and all other traffic, road wear primarily comes down to environmental causes and impact loading. Wear from impact loading scales with IIRC roughly the 4th power of axle weight. The ruts you see in asphalt aren't from wearing through the surface, it's from slowly deforming it due to cyclic loading slowly shifting the subsurface and road surface on top. That basically doesn't happen with any vehicle that doesn't require a CDL. As a counterpoint the environmental wear is basically inevitable and in colder climates that's going to dominate the road work schedule anyways so it doesn't matter as much. Even with freeze thaw wrecking the road heavy loads still shorten the life of the road surface. Any way you slice it though, the current taxes and fees that heavy trucks pay do not come close to covering the share of maintenance work they're responsible for. Gas taxes effectively subsidize the trucking industry.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
The damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Take a look at this chart: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels/ https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh... and this article https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-road-damage/ https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa... From the article: "Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)" Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.

That's 100-550$. Peanuts compared to the actual cost.

To elaborate on why this doesn't bridge the gap between heavy trucking road wear and all other traffic, road wear primarily comes down to environmental causes and impact loading. Wear from impact loading scales with IIRC roughly the 4th power of axle weight. The ruts you see in asphalt aren't from wearing through the surface, it's from slowly deforming it due to cyclic loading slowly shifting the subsurface and road surface on top. That basically doesn't happen with any vehicle that doesn't require a CDL. As a counterpoint the environmental wear is basically inevitable and in colder climates that's going to dominate the road work schedule anyways so it doesn't matter as much. Even with freeze thaw wrecking the road heavy loads still shorten the life of the road surface. Any way you slice it though, the current taxes and fees that heavy trucks pay do not come close to covering the share of maintenance work they're responsible for. Gas taxes effectively subsidize the trucking industry.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

The damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Take a look at this chart: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels/ https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh... and this article https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-road-damage/ https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa... From the article: "Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)" Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.