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Taxing the trucks hauling around freight containers? Their vehicles were always the ones tearing up the roads the most anyways, because they were heavier. Now e
by novia 3y ago
Taxing the trucks hauling around freight containers? Their vehicles were always the ones tearing up the roads the most anyways, because they were heavier. Now electric cars are heavier and giving them a run for their money, but still.
Companies opt to move their stuff on the road instead of by train, even with financial incentives to use trains, because they don't want to have to wait for their materials to be loaded onto the train. Right now the roads are too cheap for corporations not to take advantage. If they are already willing to pay the premium for faster transit, why not milk them a little harder?
- wpm 3y agoThe freight haulers have also done their part in ripping up their infrastructure or letting it rot (so you have to put your box on a truck to get it to the freight yard), running bigger trains slower and without a hard schedule, and generally being annoying to work with in the pursuit of better operating ratio. Hell, a lot of truck traffic is moving freight from one rail yard to another.
- cameldrv 3y agoElectric cars aren’t really giving them a run for their money. Road damage goes as the 4th power of axle weight [1] A fully loaded semi is 80,000 lbs and has 5 axles so 16,000 lbs/axle. A Tesla model S weighs 4500 lbs and has 2 axles, so 2250 lbs/axle. 16000/2250 = 7.1 7.1^4 = 2541 So the truck is doing 2500x the damage of the Tesla. Esentially all road damage is done by heavy trucks which is why semis have to pull over and get weighed periodically to make sure they’re under the limit, but cars never do. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law