If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.
http://co-asphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TrashTruckD...
Reference 1 lead me to this: (Page I-11) https://habib00ugm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/aashto1993.pd...
From that: "The load equivalency factor increases approximately as a function of the ratio of any given axle load to the standard 18 kip single axle load raised to the fourth power."
That is also cited here, on page 14: https://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/dmv/agri-eq-veh/ag-study/...
Because the damage scales with the 4th power, then the damage ratio is the 4th power of the axle weight ratio:
(16k/2.5k) ^ 4 = 1677x as much damage.
Edit: Sorry, that oversimplifies it a bit. For the same vehicle, the damage scales that way, but for a fair comparison, you'd have to account for the fact that the weight is distributed over more and bigger tires on each axle. Still, that should show you how the math works.
Which is why the California tax on gasoline is 48.7¢/gallon and the California tax on diesel fuel is 67¢/gallon.[1]
Federal tax on gasoline is 18.4¢/gallon, and diesel fuel is 24.4¢/gallon.[2]
I'm not defending the trucking industry. I think more stuff should go by train instead. But truck fuel is taxed more heavily than car fuel. (For those of you in other countries, the number of cars running on diesel in the United States is about 3%.)
[1] http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/l561.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
> don't have to travel as far by road
It doesn't have to. It can (and it does because it's better).
Then many trucks could be adjusted to have more axles and lighter loads, saving money on both ends.
The end result is a better system.
"like 1000 times more" is not a full proposal. Yes you would reduce car taxes appropriately. Yes you would figure out the actual amount to balance the budget.
This would adversely affect the poor as they drive less and still need milk.
so unless you have a solution with no drawbacks, there's nothing you can do to not 'affect the poors'
Also, we need to get much better at helping the poor.
Part of getting better at helping the poor is helping them directly rather than using extremely inefficient and indirect subsidies on various industries to do so.
Imagine a package-switching network comprising an (electrified) rail backbone with roads spreading from terminal nodes to the destination points, fully automated package store-and-forward, electric self-driving trucks.
This would cost loads of money and loads of jobs. It might also solve parts of the problem. Maybe Amazon's successor is already thinking of something like this?
That is not true. Road gets you to where the road serves, just like rail. With a good enough coverage, virtually all transportation needs are met.
If we could properly price externalities (not just road wear but also ground water contamination, CO2 emissions etc.) there are many parts of our economy which could be made dramatically more efficient and less harmful without that much overall change to human quality of life.
For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion.
There is no way to do what you are proposing without massive price increases in electricity, gasoline and virtually every other good. I wouldn't be surprised if when you priced all of this in you discovered that people couldn't really afford electricity anymore.
Also this economy would never be able to have exports because the price of producing goods would just be insane.
The truth is we can't afford the externalities without an economic implosion that would realistically end with an extreme political group taking control in the ensuing chaos and undoing everything you are proposing.
Think 85 trillion USD, real value. That's about 1/3rd of the total current wealth of the entire world, by my back of the envelope calculations.
So you could cleanup one of the worst "spills" in history with a mere 10 years of a single company's profits?
That sounds perfectly OK.
How much of our wealth is being wasted this way? I'm guessing that it's a lot.
[1] If your argument is that these are all 'light' vehicles, my city disagrees with you. They recently cited road damage from the variety of garbage hauling services as a reason to limit our options. Not that I entirely buy that as the only or even main reason they did so... local politics and all that.
[2] However they have been known to use secondary streets when they shouldn't.
Drought map https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
Reservoirs are doing well http://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=rescond....
Of course, this is an El Niño year, so we’ll see whether we return to severe drought in the coming years.
Also, while salt makes the road drive-able in the winter, it actually does long term damage to the road (increases the number of freeze/thaw cycles.) Similar with plows: they increase the rate at which the road surface deteriorates. While they both are necessary to keep roads operable for vehicles in the winter, they are the opposite of maintenance longer term as far as the road surface is concerned.
Without some sources to back up your claims, I'm not sure if it's accounting for that or not. Can you supply your sources so we can look into exactly what that statistic means?
A truck does more damage then a car? Great. But there's an upfront road maintenance (not to mention construction) cost that you have to pay, regardless of who uses the road. Gas taxes do not come close to capturing that.
The state effectively charges for the use of roads both to pay for maintenance and to make sure that the road remain usable to a reasonable cross-section of people. This is just as landlords charge for the use of land even when that land isn't consumed.
We do however all have spikes on the cars in winter, I'm guessting this helps a lot. The trucks usually does not have spikes. There is a lot of trucks too, hauling wood out of the forests.
The damage done by cars is usually from snow tires.
California's crusade on sedans to cut down on pollution is a joke.
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100USI5.pdf
Medium and Heavy duty trucks: 425 Tg CO2
Light-Duty Vehicles (passenger cars + SUVs, pickup trucks, etc): 1,106 Tg CO2
[citation needed]
Which is why I always laugh when I hear people complaining about evil subsidized high-speed rail in America. That's just talking points from the airline and trucking industries, which are already far more heavily subsidized than rail.
There's only one major state where you can build cost-effective high-speed rail in the US - Texas. They're going to do what California couldn't and at ~1/4th the cost per km of rail. 20-30 years from now Texas will probably have high-speed rail between all of its major cities.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/spring/news/ar...
You are also incorrect suggesting that $5 per gallon is “about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel.” In France, it’s $2.77 per gallon. In the UK, it’s $2.83 per gallon. Netherlands is $3.5 per gallon. Sweden is $3.51. In Australia, it’s $1.12 per gallon, New Zealand is $1.58. None of those countries are even close to $5 per gallon.
As for transporting air conditioning units, trailers and cargo bikes are a thing. You can move a refrigerator by bike
https://www.bikesatwork.com/blog/moving-a-refrigerator-by-bi...
Electric assist bicycles can transport even more cargo.
This is incorrect, in the UK at least. The best price I get is about £1.21 per liter. Which is $1.61 per liter Or $7.31 per Gallon.
So we are well over $5 a gallon. Don't forget the USA is pretty much the only country to measure liquid volume in gallons, we all use liters - 1L = 4.54609 Gallons
Though I had forgotten that the US used a different one. So my maths is off above. Thanks for pointing that out!
Using the US Gallon: £1.21 per liter == $1.61 per liter == $6.09 per Gallon.
Use a trailer? While not possible for everything, we could easily do with 1/10000 of the cars we have.
I still regret having bought an expensive percussion drill to install a bathroom vanity, when I could have just rented one from the local hardware store chain. [2]
This comes to $6.72 per US gallon for gas. More than half of this price is VAT and duty. On top of this we pay road taxes based on the weight and fuel type of your vehicle, about €50/month for a small (1000kg) gas powered car.
Compare the UK and the USA, conveniently adjacent in the table. Both have refineries, so the untaxed price should be similar, but the UK taxed price is $4 higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_and_diesel_usage_and_...
It definitely adds up to around £1 a litre in the UK of tax (59p duty plus 30p VAT) depending on exact wholesale prices. This works out at around $5 per (US) gallon.