Are you sure about that? I see garbage trucks, delivery trucks (package, furniture, appliance etc.), lawn service trucks, salt trucks, snow plowing trucks etc day-in, day-out.[1] And to do their job, they probably need traverse 95% of the paved roadways on a regular basis. Granted, you don't typically see 18-wheelers tooling around most neighborhoods[2] but there is quite a bit of truck traffic through even moderately populated urban and suburban areas every day.

[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.

We're talking about California. There are no major cities in California in possession of snow plows and salt trucks. A garbage truck goes down the street once per week, yes. The overwhelming majority of traffic on most city streets is cars and light trucks. The main cause of damage to most city streets is the mere passage of time, and rain.

We are talking about California. What rain? :-P

Thankfully CA is now finally pretty well drought free, after getting pretty decent rain the past couple months. https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article226462260.html

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.

The salt and plowing trucks are part of the maintenance of the road needed for the cars. You defeat your own point here.

Not at all. I was making the point that there are lots of trucks on most roads all the time, not that they aren't necessary.

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.

Even then, the same phenomenon means that the dominant source of damage to those streets is the delivery vehicles; smaller cars still cause a disproportionately small fraction of the damage and are overpaying via taxes. Ubers are not externalizing here.

How does this account for all the upkeep on the residential roads where a large truck almost never travels. Sure, large trucks may account for the vast majority of wear on roads where they travel, but I imagine the majority of the roads in a city rarely see large trucks, and still need regular upkeep.

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?

Without much better data the best you can say is that Ubers are benefitting from externalities at a rate lower than other, heavier vehicles. It's still likely they aren't paying their fair share.

A vehicle twice as heavy per axle is doing 16x the damage. Unless the taxes on delivery vehicles scale like that, a sedan is subsidizing the costs.

A road that's never driven on suffers damage from the elements, and the passage of time.

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.