4 ms·
I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rura
by balderdash 4y ago
I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rural areas) whose replacement cycle is driven by useful life vs usage. Then we have high throughput roads, that have enough volume to require usage driven replacement cycles. So if those access roads are y% of the miles and x% of the cost, then a vehicle “access” tax should be levied to cover that part of the system, and toll/usage based tax should be levied to maintain the usage based part of the system.
Side note: to adjust for the pollution CO2 element you could add a tax to the wholesale price per MW of electricity based on generation type, in addition to a lower, purely pollution priced gas tax
- 988747 4y agoThe actual problem is that government is going to lose 35 billion per year in tax revenue, and they are trying to prevent that. What they actually spend that money on is secondary, they just need a good story to tell to their voters :)
- balderdash 4y agoLol - yep, people always struggle with the concept of fungibility in this context. It’s like when we give $1b of food aid to a country and prescribe it can’t be spent on military hardware, and pretending we didn’t just free up $1b for military spending…
- AnthonyMouse 4y agoUnder this model you should also account for the amount of damage done by the vehicle. Which scales with the fourth power of axle load, i.e. ~100% of the road damage is caused by large commercial vehicles, to the point that collecting it from passenger vehicles isn't even worth the collection infrastructure. It certainly isn't worth the privacy cost.
- rgbrenner 4y agoEven if a road never sees a single truck, it will still need to be replaced and/or repaired eventually. Things like the freeze-thaw cycle destroy roads too.
- AnthonyMouse 4y agoWhich has nothing to do with usage, so shouldn't be priced with usage.
- balderdash 4y agoAgree, seems like access rates and toll rates should scale with vehicle weight, but that the slope would be lower in access rates than usage rates.