6 ms·

bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even su

by belorn 4y ago

bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear and tear comes from nature, water in particular, which mean wear and tear isn't based on usage. When it come to tire pollution those would be better taxed on the tires themselves. Bike tires tend to be much much smaller than cars so the taxation wouldn't be that big of a deal to cyclists.

7952 4y ago
I think road wear is axle weight to the fourth power. So lorries are massively more damaging than cars. And cars are massively more damaging than bikes. Anecdotally the issue with bike and pedestrian paths is intruding vegetation which slowly narrows the width.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  It's not just a matter of "massively more" -- with those numbers the damage from anything other than large commercial vehicles is a rounding error which, if accounted for proportionally, would cost more money to collect than the amount collected.
  - brippalcharrid 4y ago
    It's the fourth power of axle load according to the AAHSO report (https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/ https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-...) A 30-ton 5-axle HGV would be 6 tons per axle, a BMW 7-Series would be 1 ton per axle, and a heavy cyclist on a heavy bicycle would work out to around 0.05 tons per axle, so while a car might cause ~1/1000th of the wear of a heavy truck, a bicycle would cause less than 1/100000th of the wear that is caused by a car, and that's before you consider the wear that's caused according to the speed that a vehicle is traveling (it is roughly linear). So while it might conceivably be possible to tax motorists according to the level of damage that they cause to roads (with trucks paying far more than they do now, and with revenues not exceeding the costs of collection), it certainly wouldn't be possible to tax cyclists.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      The point is that it's not worth doing even for cars. If the toll for the truck was $50, the proportional toll for the car would be one half of one cent.
      - brippalcharrid 4y ago
        On the other hand, trucks are often speed-restricted and the tax might need to be on the order of $50k for a 60-foot truck (which would still equate to around $50 for a car). The costs would be passed down to all of the things that trucks are used for, so I suppose the average person wouldn't really pay any less for combined transport+groceries+fuel+household goods, but it might incentivize the use of smaller trucks with lighter axle loads, but that would also mean more drivers/poorer fuel efficiency/more accidents per ton per mile. At the least we should be mindful of the way that motorists are providing a subsidy to the logistics industry (which we indirectly benefit from, as well).
        diordiderot 4y ago
        I'd rather pay costs where they're owed personally
        AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        It most certainly would not cost $50k for any size truck to travel down one road once, which is what matters if you're paying the cost to build infrastructure to track usage. It might cost a semi truck $50k a year, but this also points in the direction of not tracking specific usage even for trucks: Just check the odometer during the annual inspection and then distribute the highway funds to states proportionate to estimated use. Toll collection is stupid inefficient and privacy invasive.
        brippalcharrid 4y ago
        Yes, obviously I was talking about an annual charge ("a tax") based on vehicle road wear; I don't think anyone had suggested that we charge a truck driver $50k for driving down one road, once. It's very common for the odomoters of heavy goods vehicles to be checked and for mileages to be logged regularly (this is probably a legal requirement in many cases, if not just a standard industry practice). I agree that toll collection would be unsuitable. My point was that charges for the use of large goods vehicles would need to be orders of magnitude higher than they are now, but that the charges for cars would still be sufficient to more than cover the cost of collection. And if people wanted, the President of the National Cycling Federation could present the Secretary of Transportation with a $5 bill in an annual ceremony.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Except not all roads are built to handle heavier vehicles, such roads experience significant wear from common weight automobiles. I don't think the cost of maintenance for such roads is a rounding error.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      Most roads are built to handle heavier vehicles and the few exceptions rarely if ever see enough traffic to result in maintenance costs not dominated by nature and weather.
pydry 4y ago
There is no road tax, only vehicle excise duty which bicyclists dont pay. It goes straight into the treasury so it's not even really "used" per se it's just a way of exerting downward pressure on inflation (which is how it should be, IMHO).
- tomgp 4y ago
  thats a strangely abstract way of looking at it. i think of it as a way to capture some of the externalities of car use, the environmental, social and public health damage.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    The obvious way to do that is via the fuel tax, where the more you pay the more you use. The reality is probably that it's not that well coupled to any cause, and really it's just a way to farm money from the majority of the country, who need to use motor transport to live their lives. The advertised political reason will change depending on the concerns of the populace at the time.
lol768 4y ago
> bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. Isn't car wear and tear minimal to HGV wear and tear?
- cogman10 4y ago
  Yup. Though cars still put out a fair bit more pollution from tire wear than bicycles do.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  It also depends highly on your local weather, I imagine. I'm willing to bet that a harsh winter does more road damage than all traffic combined.
tzs 4y ago
> bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. That is the case, which came as a surprise to me. For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage because total weight would be all that mattered. But for damage at or near the road surface I'd have expected bikes to do more. My reasoning was simple: although cars weigh a lot more they are spreading that weight over a larger contact area. My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. My bike, before I replaced the tires with wider tires, had two tires each at 110 PSI. Any given small patch of road I drive or ride over would only get about 29% as much force on it from the car as it would from the bike at any given time a tire is on that patch of road. It would get that force for more time from the car than from the bike if the car is going less than ~3.4 times the speed of the bike and for less time if the car is going faster than that, and more different small patches of road would get force from the car than would get force from the bike. This is similar to why if I were to put a flat metal plate on my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would not hurt, but if I were to set hold a dagger against my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would likely hurt a lot. But something is wrong with my reasoning, and it turns out that road damage goes as something like the fourth power of the vehicles axel weight. Whether the tires are narrow high pressure tires or wide low pressure tires, from what I've read, is not relevant. I'm not sure if that is because I was just wrong about top layer damage, or if it is just that lower level damage is just much more important and expensive, so any difference in top layer damage due to tire size is lost in the noise.
- bagels 4y ago
  This analysis based on tire pressure seems faulty. If you place your hand on a bike tire, you do not experience thousands of pounds of force. To estimate the pressure exerted on the road, you want to compare vehicle system weight/tire contact area. Velocity also plays a role.
- kingaillas 4y ago
  >My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. The air pressure of your car/bike tires doesn't matter - all tires could be flat. Try comparing (vehicle weight + your weight) / (vehicle contact surface area) where vehicle is either your car or your bike.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Having lived in New York with really high rates of pedestrians, sidewalks are never being replaced from normal wear and tear from use. Usually it’s * retrofitting for ADA compliance * fixing heaving from freeze-thaw * fixing heaving from the root systems of trees in street planters

by belorn 4y ago

7952 4y ago

I think road wear is axle weight to the fourth power. So lorries are massively more damaging than cars. And cars are massively more damaging than bikes. Anecdotally the issue with bike and pedestrian paths is intruding vegetation which slowly narrows the width.

AnthonyMouse 4y ago
It's not just a matter of "massively more" -- with those numbers the damage from anything other than large commercial vehicles is a rounding error which, if accounted for proportionally, would cost more money to collect than the amount collected.
- brippalcharrid 4y ago
  It's the fourth power of axle load according to the AAHSO report (https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/ https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-...) A 30-ton 5-axle HGV would be 6 tons per axle, a BMW 7-Series would be 1 ton per axle, and a heavy cyclist on a heavy bicycle would work out to around 0.05 tons per axle, so while a car might cause ~1/1000th of the wear of a heavy truck, a bicycle would cause less than 1/100000th of the wear that is caused by a car, and that's before you consider the wear that's caused according to the speed that a vehicle is traveling (it is roughly linear). So while it might conceivably be possible to tax motorists according to the level of damage that they cause to roads (with trucks paying far more than they do now, and with revenues not exceeding the costs of collection), it certainly wouldn't be possible to tax cyclists.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    The point is that it's not worth doing even for cars. If the toll for the truck was $50, the proportional toll for the car would be one half of one cent.
    - brippalcharrid 4y ago
      On the other hand, trucks are often speed-restricted and the tax might need to be on the order of $50k for a 60-foot truck (which would still equate to around $50 for a car). The costs would be passed down to all of the things that trucks are used for, so I suppose the average person wouldn't really pay any less for combined transport+groceries+fuel+household goods, but it might incentivize the use of smaller trucks with lighter axle loads, but that would also mean more drivers/poorer fuel efficiency/more accidents per ton per mile. At the least we should be mindful of the way that motorists are providing a subsidy to the logistics industry (which we indirectly benefit from, as well).
      - diordiderot 4y ago
        I'd rather pay costs where they're owed personally
      - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        It most certainly would not cost $50k for any size truck to travel down one road once, which is what matters if you're paying the cost to build infrastructure to track usage. It might cost a semi truck $50k a year, but this also points in the direction of not tracking specific usage even for trucks: Just check the odometer during the annual inspection and then distribute the highway funds to states proportionate to estimated use. Toll collection is stupid inefficient and privacy invasive.
        brippalcharrid 4y ago
        Yes, obviously I was talking about an annual charge ("a tax") based on vehicle road wear; I don't think anyone had suggested that we charge a truck driver $50k for driving down one road, once. It's very common for the odomoters of heavy goods vehicles to be checked and for mileages to be logged regularly (this is probably a legal requirement in many cases, if not just a standard industry practice). I agree that toll collection would be unsuitable. My point was that charges for the use of large goods vehicles would need to be orders of magnitude higher than they are now, but that the charges for cars would still be sufficient to more than cover the cost of collection. And if people wanted, the President of the National Cycling Federation could present the Secretary of Transportation with a $5 bill in an annual ceremony.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Except not all roads are built to handle heavier vehicles, such roads experience significant wear from common weight automobiles. I don't think the cost of maintenance for such roads is a rounding error.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    Most roads are built to handle heavier vehicles and the few exceptions rarely if ever see enough traffic to result in maintenance costs not dominated by nature and weather.

pydry 4y ago

There is no road tax, only vehicle excise duty which bicyclists dont pay. It goes straight into the treasury so it's not even really "used" per se it's just a way of exerting downward pressure on inflation (which is how it should be, IMHO).

tomgp 4y ago
thats a strangely abstract way of looking at it. i think of it as a way to capture some of the externalities of car use, the environmental, social and public health damage.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  The obvious way to do that is via the fuel tax, where the more you pay the more you use. The reality is probably that it's not that well coupled to any cause, and really it's just a way to farm money from the majority of the country, who need to use motor transport to live their lives. The advertised political reason will change depending on the concerns of the populace at the time.

lol768 4y ago

cogman10 4y ago
Yup. Though cars still put out a fair bit more pollution from tire wear than bicycles do.
dahfizz 4y ago
It also depends highly on your local weather, I imagine. I'm willing to bet that a harsh winter does more road damage than all traffic combined.

tzs 4y ago

> bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. That is the case, which came as a surprise to me. For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage because total weight would be all that mattered. But for damage at or near the road surface I'd have expected bikes to do more. My reasoning was simple: although cars weigh a lot more they are spreading that weight over a larger contact area. My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. My bike, before I replaced the tires with wider tires, had two tires each at 110 PSI. Any given small patch of road I drive or ride over would only get about 29% as much force on it from the car as it would from the bike at any given time a tire is on that patch of road. It would get that force for more time from the car than from the bike if the car is going less than ~3.4 times the speed of the bike and for less time if the car is going faster than that, and more different small patches of road would get force from the car than would get force from the bike. This is similar to why if I were to put a flat metal plate on my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would not hurt, but if I were to set hold a dagger against my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would likely hurt a lot. But something is wrong with my reasoning, and it turns out that road damage goes as something like the fourth power of the vehicles axel weight. Whether the tires are narrow high pressure tires or wide low pressure tires, from what I've read, is not relevant. I'm not sure if that is because I was just wrong about top layer damage, or if it is just that lower level damage is just much more important and expensive, so any difference in top layer damage due to tire size is lost in the noise.

bagels 4y ago
This analysis based on tire pressure seems faulty. If you place your hand on a bike tire, you do not experience thousands of pounds of force. To estimate the pressure exerted on the road, you want to compare vehicle system weight/tire contact area. Velocity also plays a role.
kingaillas 4y ago
>My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. The air pressure of your car/bike tires doesn't matter - all tires could be flat. Try comparing (vehicle weight + your weight) / (vehicle contact surface area) where vehicle is either your car or your bike.

bobthepanda 4y ago

Having lived in New York with really high rates of pedestrians, sidewalks are never being replaced from normal wear and tear from use. Usually it’s * retrofitting for ADA compliance * fixing heaving from freeze-thaw * fixing heaving from the root systems of trees in street planters