8 ms·
What's interesting is that road wear is proportional to the FOURTH POWER (!!) of axle weight[1]. If it were taxed accordingly the taxes would be extremely diffe
by stevenpetryk 3y ago
What's interesting is that road wear is proportional to the FOURTH POWER (!!) of axle weight[1]. If it were taxed accordingly the taxes would be extremely different for personal cars versus 18-wheelers.
1: https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design-parameters/equivalent-single-axle-load/ https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design...
- stefan_ 3y agoBut then we would actually transfer goods via rail instead of tiny amounts via trucks, and then what would happen to the cultural icon of the american trucker and his incredibly loud, unsafe at all conditions vehicle.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIn the USA we transfer a lot of freight by rail. Trucks are used when rail isn't practical or doesn't exist.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agout yoir rail is not electric, even thoigh its the first mode of transport we electrofied over 100 years ago
- ghaff 3y agoYeah. There are already strong economic incentives to use rail for long-haul land transportation of lower value/less time-critical goods in the US. I don't know the numbers but I suspect you see relatively few goods transported coast to coast by truck in the US.
- romafirst3 3y agoI’m pretty sure this isn’t true. Lots travels by rail, but a hell of a lot travels by truck. I ship a lot ltl (pallets) If you want to do a quick test yourself , next time you are on a highway look at the places the trucks are from (obviously they can be registered elsewhere but it gives you an idea). If you import to a port it usually travels by rail after (cause ports have great rail links) but if you are going business to business in the US it’s often by truck
- stetrain 3y agoRail [Edit: in the US] generally prioritizes slow freight, and has moved more in that direction over time. Precision scheduled railroading favors fewer, longer, slower trains to increase the ratio of freight to crew and maintenance costs. It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail. Whereas in days past the railroad covered a significant amount of mail and parcel shipping due to higher service speeds and frequencies. I do wonder if there could be room for better logistics and an expansion of rail to cover faster (ie < 2 weeks) shipping scenarios, but this would require investing in the rail and signaling infrastructure and opening and infrastructure to competing service providers.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail My package from China has arrived by rail, it took about 3 whleeks, and Aliexpress tracking showed it going through kazahstan and Russia
- stetrain 3y agoYes, I should have specified in the US. In places with shared passenger and freight traffic (ie a lot of Europe and Asia), freight services can't hyper-optimize on very long, very slow, infrequent service. This does result in usually less tonnage transported by rail, but service that is more flexible to faster shipping.
- ghaff 3y agoExpectations have changed too. FedEx was a pretty premium thing when it debuted. Now I'll order a new widget from Amazon because I'll get it as soon as I would have if I waited until I got around to driving to the Walmart 10 minutes away (and for the same price). For a lot of things, consumers are like "What do you mean I won't get it for 2+ weeks?" CANCEL.
- stetrain 3y ago
- jgbmlg 3y agoRail isn't practical for some routes because the highways are maintained by the government but the tracks are maintained by the rail carriers.
- stefan_ 3y agoIf only that was true, but it's been regressing for 15 years: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+United+States+rail+freight+versus+gdp https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+United+States+rail...
- scythe 3y agoThe major driver of inefficient shipping in the United States is the Jones Act. Rail is used whenever possible.
- o11c 3y agoThe main problem with rail is that the last-mile infrastructure is really not suitable for single-car quantities. How would you detach a single railroad car from the center of a train and move it to the town's sideline?
- bluGill 3y agoI'd stage the train so the car was at the end not in the middle. Then you detach it via a new coupler that doesn't exist but could, and let the car coast to the swtich and move to the town. Pickup is more difficult though.
- MisterTea 3y agoIncredibly loud means illegally modified. Even the staccato sound of the engine brake (compression release aka jake brake) is very subdued in a properly muffled vehicle. This is how they come from factory as it is mandated. Plus the DPF+SCR cats added to the muffling ability and are sometimes all in one.
- VHRanger 3y agoWhich is why electric SUVs are actually a step backward on a lot of fronts except CO2 emissions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 3y agoDirect, operating CO2 only. In terms of embodied CO2 from manufacturing, and indirect impacts from increased demand for parking, demand for larger parking spaces, demand for charging infrastructure, and induced travel leading to sprawling urban forms, electric SUVs are a regression.
- slashdev 3y ago> embodied CO2 from manufacturing, indirect impacts from increased demand for parking, demand for larger parking spaces Why would electric cars be any worse than combustion cars for these?
- baq 3y agoBatteries, mostly. Copper and lithium mining. Sprinkle with rare ears for magnets etc.
- jeffbee 3y agoIt doesn't really have much to do with the mining. The embodied carbon of the battery comes mostly from the fact that it has to be baked to dehydrate the materials. Carbon, because there is not enough renewable energy in the places where these batteries are made. As time goes on the carbon embodiment will decrease. The overwhelming problem with giant electric SUVs is the opportunity cost. Given limited capacity for battery making, and considering that we are using the last bit of our emissions budget to make them, it is obviously better to make them as small as possible. Slapping a 180kWh battery pack in a Rivian is ridiculous. With the same materials you could make 500 electric bicycles.
- calt 3y ago18-wheelers already pay taxes very differently than consumer cars. I don't know how much higher they actually are. Maybe someone with knowledge can weigh in here.
- singleshot_ 3y agoInternational Fuel Tax Association will be a good search term for you. Wait until you hear about Tennessee.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoIn the UK a forty ton artic pays about a 1000 GBP per year for Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) plus Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) Levy. Cars pay different amounts based on emissions generally between one tenth and half what the biggest HGV pays. So the HGV is not paying anything like enough to compensate for the extra road wear. A typical medium sized car weighs about 1 600 kg and has two axles, so an axle weight of 800 kg. The artic has six axles and weighs 41 000 kg, 6 833 kg per axle. The artic has over 5 000 times the effect on the road.
- MisterTea 3y ago> So the HGV is not paying anything like enough to compensate for the extra road wear. Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill? I can see this becoming an issue for EV's but that can be fixed by taxing mileage and weight. Though the mileage part is tricky as its going to be a cat and mouse game of fraud and privacy concern.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago> Though the mileage part is tricky as its going to be a cat and mouse game of fraud and privacy concern. It's not a privacy concern. The mileage is already recorded as part of the periodic safety test, annually in the UK, every two years in Norway (and the rest of EFTA I think). > Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill? No that goes into the general treasury funds, as far as I know. It's about 0.60 GBP per litre in the UK. Typical fuel economy gives about 3 km/l so a tax of 0.20 GBP per km. UK HGVs travel about 25 x 10^9 km per year so the income is about 5 x 10^9 GBP/year. The UK spends over 11 x 10^9 GBP per year on roads, mostly maintenance, more than double the income from diesel fuel duty.
- alwayslikethis 3y agoRealistically, this would put all the tax burden on heavy trucks and two axle buses. But not all trucks are fully loaded all the time, since some goods aren't dense enough or there might just not be enough demand. There needs to be a way to account for the actual weight of the vehicle, instead of the nominal max load, otherwise this just incentivizes reducing the nominal weight while opportunistically overloading the vehicles. It may also incentivize alternate designs such as increasing the number of axles.
- antognini 3y agoThere are already weigh stations for trucks along highways so the actual weight is already available.
- ejb999 3y agoI haven't seen an open truck weighing station in many, many years - lots of them are built - they are almost never used.
- antognini 3y agoI think that there is usually one open along a long route. It seems they close them to keep traffic moving. From what I can tell there are now mobile scales that they often use instead.
- akira2501 3y agoIt's standard procedure at most outfits to get weighed immediately after taking on a load. You have an overall weight limit on the full vehicle, but you also have individual axle weight limits, and after taking on a load under the legal limit, you may still need to "slide your tandems" to re-balance your weight. So.. you're almost always going to stop at a "CAT scale" and get a "weight ticket." You're going to hold onto that ticket because if you do get stopped at a state checkpoint, and they show your weight differently than the scale ticket, the scale company will cover the cost of your ticket if their scale was in error. Most companies will either make this a policy or will _very_ strongly encourage their drivers to always get a scale ticket.
- Aerroon 3y agoOne of the biggest arguments you will hear in favor of government taxation is "Who will pay for the roads?" But very little of taxes goes to actually building and maintaining roads. We need new and innovative taxes on top of the other taxes to pay for the roads!
- ajmurmann 3y agoAnd then we give higher tax deductions for vehicles over 7000lb..
- giantg2 3y agoJust be aware that the 4th power law is a rule of thumb that would also need the same same total contact surface and equal distribution to be useful. Eg, if you have 4 narrow tires vs 4 wide tires, vs 18 tires. I suspect that there is also some floor to the minimum weight required to do any measurable damage depending on the material and also on the natural timeliness for repair due to environmental factors like freeze thaw. Yes, semis would have much higher taxes under that scheme. We also have to acknowledge that would be a largely regressive tax given that's they way most basic goods are transported and the cost would be passed on to consumers equally, most of which are less than wealthy. Edit: why disagree?
- Ensorceled 3y agoI think you are being downvoted for the "well actually" first paragraph. Also, the point of these specific types of regressive taxes is to change behaviour ... e.g. back to trains from cross state/country trucking
- giantg2 3y agoI was just pointing out that we need to understand the rule to effectively and intelligently apply it. Usually you want progressive taxation - where the burden falls on those with more money. Regressive taxation doesn't mean changing behavior back, but rather where the burden of the tax falls.
- hwillis 3y agoRoads also break down on their own, though. The large majority of roads will see very little or no semi traffic, and their upkeep is entirely for the sake of light vehicles. In the north, where freeze-thaw costs much more, the impact of trucks is much smaller. One potential easy fix is to zero the federal tax on gas and make up the difference in diesel tax: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10 Then mandate that vehicles over X weight can't use gasoline unless they have a special exemption. Not ideal, since the revenue still only vaguely goes towards the highway system and doesn't pay for the whole thing, but hugely improved. The exemption thing is possibly an issue but I don't think it would price out new diesel light vehicles (and IMO, that possibility is just... unimportant) if you were careful about removing the tax on pumps that aren't accessible to heavy vehicles. I believe some states do similar things already, but most of them instead have some weird reimbursement process.
- felixfbecker 3y agoThat's how you get almost every regular car to use Diesel like in Germany, which are much cheaper for fuel, but way worse for air quality in cities.
- ars 3y agoSeveral people got confused about this. It doesn't go according to weight of the vehicle but rather ground pressure of the vehicle. So if you add more axles or more wheels or make them wider all these things can reduce the ground pressure. A very easy way to compare between vehicles is to check the PSI that you fill the tire. Trucks can fill up the 90 psi in some cases while cars are closer to 35.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThat's a good point, though even a truck with 80 PSI tires would do so much more damage, >27x for a unit area, multiplied by the much larger area the tires contact the ground, that it could be hundreds of times more.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoIts not so simple. Reinforcement, subbase, and other factors are used in the design of roads. https://archive.org/details/TheHandbookOfHighwayEngineering/Highway_Engineering/page/n251/ https://archive.org/details/TheHandbookOfHighwayEngineering/...