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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 consump

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.
  - causi 4y ago
    I can't find any data on what products make up what proportions of the gross weight of land shipping. Without that data it's not productive to debate who would be most hurt by shipping trucks losing their road-wear subsidy.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      > Without that data it's not productive to debate It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the people who have a 4Runner for a household with one kid but their stupidity might just be collateral damage of an otherwise decent overall system.
      - causi 4y ago
        It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying I can't find data backing up your statement. It would be good if you were right because that would mean the world as it is currently is slightly better than if I was right. Regardless, disincentivizing total shipped mass is not entirely a bad thing. It disincentivises planned obsolescence and poor quality products in favor of reliable, repairable goods.
  - est31 4y ago
    The current system might cause the entire economy to spend more on transportation overall. A 2 times as heavy truck might be able to transport 3 times as much as a "baseline" truck (these numbers are off, but it usually scales sublinearly), but it causes 16 times the wear of one trip. That means that switching to that heavier truck model causes 5.333 times of the wear on your country's roads. Now if you let everyone pay a mostly flat tax, it means that there is no motivation for logistics companies to have a larger number of trucks, because it means they have to pay for more drivers, etc. Say that all logistics companies switch to the bigger trucks and now only pay half of their costs, so e.g. 3 billion instead of 6 billion per year. Now assume that road maintenance used to cost 1 billion annually. With the new system it will cost 5.33 billion. So you have savings by the logistics companies of 3 billion per year contrasted by additional maintenance expenses of 4.33 billion per year. So your economy now spends 1.33 billion more per annum on transport, if it's through a higher base rate on your car's license or through more income taxes being redirected for road maintenance instead of building schools or whatever. These numbers are totally made up for me, and were only meant to demonstrate that not internalizing externalities can lead to inefficiencies. It's true that if you increase taxes for heavy trucks, customers will notice it via grocery store price increases. That's maybe the problem why it's not being done, because voters notice it way less that a road repair is more expensive and thus a school can't be renovated or something.
- TimPC 4y ago
  I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.
  - avar 4y ago
    Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles. Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect. Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year. 1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.
    - TimPC 4y ago
      I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
      - avar 4y ago
        Let's leave the specific numbers aside and just assume that there's a huge gap, e.g. ~$10 to ~$30k. You still haven't explained why that "doesn't work". Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for. Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb. If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.
Ajedi32 4y ago
Road wear isn't the only consideration though. Cars take up space on the road while driving, and as anyone who's ever been in a traffic jam knows, there is a limited amount of road space available. Maybe it'd make sense for trucks to fund the majority of wear-induced maintenance costs, but for new construction and improvement projects (e.g. increasing the number of lanes on a highway) cars should pay a significant portion of that.

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.
- causi 4y ago
  I can't find any data on what products make up what proportions of the gross weight of land shipping. Without that data it's not productive to debate who would be most hurt by shipping trucks losing their road-wear subsidy.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    > Without that data it's not productive to debate It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the people who have a 4Runner for a household with one kid but their stupidity might just be collateral damage of an otherwise decent overall system.
    - causi 4y ago
      It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying I can't find data backing up your statement. It would be good if you were right because that would mean the world as it is currently is slightly better than if I was right. Regardless, disincentivizing total shipped mass is not entirely a bad thing. It disincentivises planned obsolescence and poor quality products in favor of reliable, repairable goods.
- est31 4y ago
  The current system might cause the entire economy to spend more on transportation overall. A 2 times as heavy truck might be able to transport 3 times as much as a "baseline" truck (these numbers are off, but it usually scales sublinearly), but it causes 16 times the wear of one trip. That means that switching to that heavier truck model causes 5.333 times of the wear on your country's roads. Now if you let everyone pay a mostly flat tax, it means that there is no motivation for logistics companies to have a larger number of trucks, because it means they have to pay for more drivers, etc. Say that all logistics companies switch to the bigger trucks and now only pay half of their costs, so e.g. 3 billion instead of 6 billion per year. Now assume that road maintenance used to cost 1 billion annually. With the new system it will cost 5.33 billion. So you have savings by the logistics companies of 3 billion per year contrasted by additional maintenance expenses of 4.33 billion per year. So your economy now spends 1.33 billion more per annum on transport, if it's through a higher base rate on your car's license or through more income taxes being redirected for road maintenance instead of building schools or whatever. These numbers are totally made up for me, and were only meant to demonstrate that not internalizing externalities can lead to inefficiencies. It's true that if you increase taxes for heavy trucks, customers will notice it via grocery store price increases. That's maybe the problem why it's not being done, because voters notice it way less that a road repair is more expensive and thus a school can't be renovated or something.
TimPC 4y ago
I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.
- avar 4y ago
  Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles. Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect. Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year. 1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
    - avar 4y ago
      Let's leave the specific numbers aside and just assume that there's a huge gap, e.g. ~$10 to ~$30k. You still haven't explained why that "doesn't work". Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for. Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb. If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.

Ajedi32 4y ago

Road wear isn't the only consideration though. Cars take up space on the road while driving, and as anyone who's ever been in a traffic jam knows, there is a limited amount of road space available. Maybe it'd make sense for trucks to fund the majority of wear-induced maintenance costs, but for new construction and improvement projects (e.g. increasing the number of lanes on a highway) cars should pay a significant portion of that.