4 ms·

Sort of but road erosion is to the fourth power of weight while fuel consumption is approximately linear with weight, so the tax is not exactly proportional to

Sort of but road erosion is to the fourth power of weight while fuel consumption is approximately linear with weight, so the tax is not exactly proportional to use.

fisherjeff 2y ago
Do you have a source for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were supralinear but that feels high to me. Like we have a short segment of road in my town that’s almost exclusively and regularly used by garbage trucks, which are ~10x the weight of a car. I don’t think the road gets repaved 10,000x more often than other roads though?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- matthewmacleod 2y ago
  It's even got its own Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
  - fisherjeff 2y ago
    Aha, 4th power of axle load - that makes more sense. Thanks!
- SECProto 2y ago
  Not all road structures are equal (it's easy to design a road to last 20 years before resurfacing almost regardless of the loads put on it, and the cost variances aren't that major). Temperature variations are a bigger limiter of life of a road, especially freeze-thaw cycles