5 ms·

Tax vehicles based on actual wear to the road surface and add it to the annual tag renewal. Of course, that would stop us from conveniently ignoring the fact th

by causi 4y ago

Tax vehicles based on actual wear to the road surface and add it to the annual tag renewal. Of course, that would stop us from conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of road wear comes from semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles.

tigerlily 4y ago
I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.
- cocoflunchy 4y ago
  Found this discussion while looking for a source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899
  - tigerlily 4y ago
    Ah, thanks that’s where I must’ve read it.
- unglaublich 4y ago
  That's why a bike lane, being a fraction of a highway's thickness, doesn't need maintenance for decades.
  - asdff 4y ago
    In California a bike lane is probably good forever once its laid. There are vehicular roads in my neighborhood that are from the 1920s. These are roads that see construction vehicles and cement trucks abusing them for the past 100 years to infill more housing into the neighborhood, along with your standard semitruck based home movers, delivery vehicles, garbage trucks, fire, etc, and still work fine for roads. A bike lane on the other hand deals with at most probably a 300lb vehicle. Bike lanes in CA especially would probably last as long as the Appian way if not longer.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax, which isn't necessarily bad but that's outside scope for here) Additionally, despite a lot of people saying they want to use taxes to "handle externalities" or some other sort of "pay per usage" type manner like that what they actually want is to tax people who are on the fence between bus pass and used cheap car solidly into the bus pass camp and taxing for road wear would not accomplish that. Additionally, when it comes to all forms of public infrastructure there's a common good argument to be made for a tax that's effectively very flat. The whole point of government funded things is that we all kick in a little and then all can use the resulting things as much or little as we want and that this low cost per use has societal benefits. Edit: For these kinds of activism driven discussions it's generally accepted that road wear is correlated to weight ^4 cyclist -> 100 ^4 (very) compact car -> 1000 ^4 electric hummer -> 5000 ^4 medium duty commercial truck -> 10000^4 Pick what you think is a reasonable bill for any one of those and then compute what the resulting bill for the others would be. Even if you want to do variable rate monkey business you're gonna have a hell of a time overcoming the whole "^4" bit.
- causi 4y ago
  That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax) That is the entire point. Why are we subsidizing other peoples' bad decisions? If you want to go shop for fast fashion every other day or drive a 9,036-pound electric Hummer the rest of us should not pay the price for your jackassery.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    I think you’re trivializing the effect that shipping costs have on every day necessities. Far more trucks haul produce and other groceries around my neighborhood than ‘fast fashion’, and as we are seeing right now significant increases in those prices have an outsized effect on the most vulnerable.
stefan_ 4y ago
Conveniently ignoring the fact that roads have terrible capacity as a transport system and therefore many many many miles of terribly expensive road only exist to accommodate the space taken up by a comparatively small number of vehicles, with semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles often a minority. Count the heavy vehicles: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/1191295205187686400 https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/11912952051876864... Don't get me wrong, the tax system is setup as a massive subsidy to trucking on roads that should be eliminated so this stuff can move onto trains where it belongs for everything but the last mile, but a big part of the cost is also just the space and area consumed by it all.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. They simply make people hateful, angry at everyone and generally unhappy. And an awful lot of space is wasted for them to stay parked most of the time. Between 15 to 50% of the existing roads should be dedicated to non motorized use (depending on the geography, moutains can pose some challenges at times), the rest to a dense network of autonomous buses and last miles autonomous delivery trucks. Long range goods transport should be allowed only on railways, we could remove space used by multilane highways to reallocate them to rail.
  - causi 4y ago
    Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. Append "in any area with a population density over 5,000 per square mile" and I'd agree with you.
    - supertrope 4y ago
      That seems to be the point of road diets. Removing free and easy parking on public right of ways, 25 MPH speed limit, narrow lanes, adding prominent pedestrian crossings. All that combined has the dual effect of making cities livable when dismounted and discouraging automobile through traffic.
  - 4y ago
zackmorris 4y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Road wear comes from heavy transport fleets, not commuter vehicles, so all of the infrastructure to monitor semis and tax shipping fuels is already in place. The shipping industry doesn't want to pay that tax, which is why they're lobbying to pass the tax onto the rest of us. Privatize profits, socialize costs.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  I would guess that huge SUVs and enormous trucks represent a not-insignificant proportion of road wear, since those vehicles are more common than semis. Agreed that a road wear tax based on weight makes sense though. It might make sense to use a function of weight + miles driven per year to get an even more accurate measurement of road wear contribution.
zip1234 4y ago
While we are at it, add tax for other externalities such as noise and air pollution.
asdff 4y ago
You could also tax semitruck brakes and tires accordingly, and inspect them for tread and pad depth at weigh stations and during registration.

by causi 4y ago

tigerlily 4y ago

I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.

cocoflunchy 4y ago
Found this discussion while looking for a source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899
- tigerlily 4y ago
  Ah, thanks that’s where I must’ve read it.
unglaublich 4y ago
That's why a bike lane, being a fraction of a highway's thickness, doesn't need maintenance for decades.
- asdff 4y ago
  In California a bike lane is probably good forever once its laid. There are vehicular roads in my neighborhood that are from the 1920s. These are roads that see construction vehicles and cement trucks abusing them for the past 100 years to infill more housing into the neighborhood, along with your standard semitruck based home movers, delivery vehicles, garbage trucks, fire, etc, and still work fine for roads. A bike lane on the other hand deals with at most probably a 300lb vehicle. Bike lanes in CA especially would probably last as long as the Appian way if not longer.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax, which isn't necessarily bad but that's outside scope for here) Additionally, despite a lot of people saying they want to use taxes to "handle externalities" or some other sort of "pay per usage" type manner like that what they actually want is to tax people who are on the fence between bus pass and used cheap car solidly into the bus pass camp and taxing for road wear would not accomplish that. Additionally, when it comes to all forms of public infrastructure there's a common good argument to be made for a tax that's effectively very flat. The whole point of government funded things is that we all kick in a little and then all can use the resulting things as much or little as we want and that this low cost per use has societal benefits. Edit: For these kinds of activism driven discussions it's generally accepted that road wear is correlated to weight ^4 cyclist -> 100 ^4 (very) compact car -> 1000 ^4 electric hummer -> 5000 ^4 medium duty commercial truck -> 10000^4 Pick what you think is a reasonable bill for any one of those and then compute what the resulting bill for the others would be. Even if you want to do variable rate monkey business you're gonna have a hell of a time overcoming the whole "^4" bit.

causi 4y ago
That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax) That is the entire point. Why are we subsidizing other peoples' bad decisions? If you want to go shop for fast fashion every other day or drive a 9,036-pound electric Hummer the rest of us should not pay the price for your jackassery.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  I think you’re trivializing the effect that shipping costs have on every day necessities. Far more trucks haul produce and other groceries around my neighborhood than ‘fast fashion’, and as we are seeing right now significant increases in those prices have an outsized effect on the most vulnerable.

stefan_ 4y ago

Conveniently ignoring the fact that roads have terrible capacity as a transport system and therefore many many many miles of terribly expensive road only exist to accommodate the space taken up by a comparatively small number of vehicles, with semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles often a minority. Count the heavy vehicles: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/1191295205187686400 https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/11912952051876864... Don't get me wrong, the tax system is setup as a massive subsidy to trucking on roads that should be eliminated so this stuff can move onto trains where it belongs for everything but the last mile, but a big part of the cost is also just the space and area consumed by it all.

prmoustache 4y ago
Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. They simply make people hateful, angry at everyone and generally unhappy. And an awful lot of space is wasted for them to stay parked most of the time. Between 15 to 50% of the existing roads should be dedicated to non motorized use (depending on the geography, moutains can pose some challenges at times), the rest to a dense network of autonomous buses and last miles autonomous delivery trucks. Long range goods transport should be allowed only on railways, we could remove space used by multilane highways to reallocate them to rail.
- causi 4y ago
  Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. Append "in any area with a population density over 5,000 per square mile" and I'd agree with you.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    That seems to be the point of road diets. Removing free and easy parking on public right of ways, 25 MPH speed limit, narrow lanes, adding prominent pedestrian crossings. All that combined has the dual effect of making cities livable when dismounted and discouraging automobile through traffic.
- 4y ago

zackmorris 4y ago

Came here to say the same thing. Road wear comes from heavy transport fleets, not commuter vehicles, so all of the infrastructure to monitor semis and tax shipping fuels is already in place. The shipping industry doesn't want to pay that tax, which is why they're lobbying to pass the tax onto the rest of us. Privatize profits, socialize costs.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
I would guess that huge SUVs and enormous trucks represent a not-insignificant proportion of road wear, since those vehicles are more common than semis. Agreed that a road wear tax based on weight makes sense though. It might make sense to use a function of weight + miles driven per year to get an even more accurate measurement of road wear contribution.

zip1234 4y ago

While we are at it, add tax for other externalities such as noise and air pollution.

asdff 4y ago

You could also tax semitruck brakes and tires accordingly, and inspect them for tread and pad depth at weigh stations and during registration.