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The road degradation will be significant, whether from heavier EVs or the much older trend of cars generally getting bigger. Streets may be less safe, and cert

The road degradation will be significant, whether from heavier EVs or the much older trend of cars generally getting bigger. Streets may be less safe, and certainly less easy to navigate as big heavy cars squeeze past one another. And presumably it's harder and less efficient to accelerate and decelerate heavy cars. I wonder if a road tax assessed on (in part) the car's weight, will be necessary.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
Rather than giving any government more excuses to tax the individual, perhaps we should look into forcing governments to spend their money wiser and not write so many blank checks.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  A road tax wouldn’t be about the revenue collection or government expenditure. It would be a pigouvian tax to disincentivise gigantic vehicles and their negative impact on everyone around them.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    IMO doesn’t even need to be framed as pigouvian. It’s just trying to match better what a person pays for a public service and what they consume from it, in this case road wear and tear.
    - jackvalentine 3y ago
      Road wear and tear is the starting point, but I worry more about increased road trauma and the loss of amenity that bigger vehicles cause. Letting them just ‘pay their way’ isn’t enough - we need to reverse course.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  What? Presumably we need roads and it’s a fact of physics that heavier vehicles put more wear on them.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    I didn’t say we need to remove roads. I said governments should prioritize roads rather than wasting money unnecessarily.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      So until the government (which?) meets someone’s (whose?) intuitive guess (how?) at what an appropriate degree of efficiency is, then we should not have public investment? Given almost any degree of govt efficiency I’d prefer more of it, but we do in fact need to be able to walk and chew gum. It’s just not the case that letting roads deteriorate will increase discipline in whatever area of govt your particular hobby horse lives.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  Calibrating road tax based on vehicle weight as a proxy for road maintenance costs is a step away from taxing the individual, which is the current situation with more-or-less flat road tax rates.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    The problem is that any talk of additional taxes is unnecessary if governments can’t do their jobs with the money they have. Just recently, my small town had their roads paved. It cost $35,000 to bring a miller in, and the county engineer made a mistake where only 1 of our roads were being milled. It took another $35,000 to bring it back to do the rest. Adding taxes can’t fix government inefficiency, in fact they make it worse.
rnabel 3y ago
It looks like the current road tax frameworks of many countries use either CO2 emissions or car price as a main factor for road tax, which presumably correlates with weight - except for EVs. Seems like at least the CO2 bit will have to change with EVs becoming more mainstream.
- mgbmtl 3y ago
  Montreal (and presumably inspired from elsewhere) are moving to car weight as a metric for pricing parking permits (begin of a trend in that direction, I think). Although they do use different thresholds for EVs and ICEs, not to penalize EVs. They mostly wanted to tackle the problem of lost space from larger cars, and would have taken car dimensions if the data was available, but apparently weight and size often correlate (previously they use car cylinders, but nowadays there are huge cars with tiny motors).
VK538FY 3y ago
I don't have the statistics at hand but I remember a study about road degradation based on vehicle type. The difference between industrial vehicles and passenger vehicles (including pickup trucks) was enormously skewed so that industrial vehicles were responsible for 80% of the degradation, Pareto-like. Meaning that heavier passenger vehicles might not make a difference.
- jabl 3y ago
  The rule of thumb is that the road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago

Rather than giving any government more excuses to tax the individual, perhaps we should look into forcing governments to spend their money wiser and not write so many blank checks.

jackvalentine 3y ago
A road tax wouldn’t be about the revenue collection or government expenditure. It would be a pigouvian tax to disincentivise gigantic vehicles and their negative impact on everyone around them.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  IMO doesn’t even need to be framed as pigouvian. It’s just trying to match better what a person pays for a public service and what they consume from it, in this case road wear and tear.
  - jackvalentine 3y ago
    Road wear and tear is the starting point, but I worry more about increased road trauma and the loss of amenity that bigger vehicles cause. Letting them just ‘pay their way’ isn’t enough - we need to reverse course.
ethanbond 3y ago
What? Presumably we need roads and it’s a fact of physics that heavier vehicles put more wear on them.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  I didn’t say we need to remove roads. I said governments should prioritize roads rather than wasting money unnecessarily.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    So until the government (which?) meets someone’s (whose?) intuitive guess (how?) at what an appropriate degree of efficiency is, then we should not have public investment? Given almost any degree of govt efficiency I’d prefer more of it, but we do in fact need to be able to walk and chew gum. It’s just not the case that letting roads deteriorate will increase discipline in whatever area of govt your particular hobby horse lives.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
Calibrating road tax based on vehicle weight as a proxy for road maintenance costs is a step away from taxing the individual, which is the current situation with more-or-less flat road tax rates.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  The problem is that any talk of additional taxes is unnecessary if governments can’t do their jobs with the money they have. Just recently, my small town had their roads paved. It cost $35,000 to bring a miller in, and the county engineer made a mistake where only 1 of our roads were being milled. It took another $35,000 to bring it back to do the rest. Adding taxes can’t fix government inefficiency, in fact they make it worse.

rnabel 3y ago

It looks like the current road tax frameworks of many countries use either CO2 emissions or car price as a main factor for road tax, which presumably correlates with weight - except for EVs. Seems like at least the CO2 bit will have to change with EVs becoming more mainstream.

mgbmtl 3y ago
Montreal (and presumably inspired from elsewhere) are moving to car weight as a metric for pricing parking permits (begin of a trend in that direction, I think). Although they do use different thresholds for EVs and ICEs, not to penalize EVs. They mostly wanted to tackle the problem of lost space from larger cars, and would have taken car dimensions if the data was available, but apparently weight and size often correlate (previously they use car cylinders, but nowadays there are huge cars with tiny motors).

VK538FY 3y ago

I don't have the statistics at hand but I remember a study about road degradation based on vehicle type. The difference between industrial vehicles and passenger vehicles (including pickup trucks) was enormously skewed so that industrial vehicles were responsible for 80% of the degradation, Pareto-like. Meaning that heavier passenger vehicles might not make a difference.

jabl 3y ago
The rule of thumb is that the road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.