More importantly if we focused more on making transport costs in-line with the damage they do to the road surfaces (not to mention the environmental impact of long and short haul trucking, plus the traffic) instead of city/suburbia none issue, perhaps we'd all be a bit better off.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Imp...
A road is a spring, and will behave elastically, with almost no deformation, unless you exceed a certain point on the stress-strain curve.
This is why the main concern of highway departments is not exceeding maximum axel loads.
Worrying about the amount of wear commuters are responsible for is just a distraction.
It's like a toddler jumping on your mattress vs a 350 lb offensive-lineman doing it. They both technically cause some amount of wear, but it's not worth figuring out the proportions.
I also like the idea of making fines for moving violations somewhat proportional to vehicle mass. The danger posed to others by a 150 lb moped pales in comparison to that of a 4500 lb pickup truck. At least in the U.S., a ticket for speeding 50% over the limit through a residential neighborhood is the same for both, for example. Neither is OK, but considering the disparity in the potential for damage and injury to others, imposing equal fines is insane.
A fully loaded semi is 18,000 lbs per axle. A really huge personal vehicle, an F-350, is 4000 lbs per axle. That's 4.5x the weight, 4.5^4=410, so the semi is doing 410x as much damage. There's really no point in trying to tax personal vehicles for road damage when over 99% of the damage is being done by trucks.
Even driven at gross weight, it's doing 5% of the damage per axle of loaded semi. The semi also has 4-5 axles, so it's more like 2% of the damage of the semi.
Mind you, we're talking here about the most damaging personal vehicle loaded to its maximum weight, and the semi is still doing 50x the damage of the personal vehicle. It's reasonable to say that essentially all road damage is done by semis.
That said, this type of tire is a very tiny fraction of the total miles driven on public highways, and so if you're looking for someone to tax based on the costs they create, it's all heavy trucks.
Trucks and permit loads are pretty much the only things that get close.
Beyond the elastic limit, damage is an exponential function of the pavement loading, but only once that certain minimum psf is hit.
For the majority of a highway's loading curve, the damage-per-force is essentially nil. Plastic deformation and serious fatigue only start as you approach the design limits.
It's 99%+ because cars don't do any real wear or damage to pavement from typical use.
I just wonder what would happen if we charged trucks based on weight.
All of which creates overhead in the form of people to be paid, equipment to build/own/maintain, time lost at all stages, the usual political influence problems, jusrisdiction of different areas of road, implementing policy, and corruption. Most of it will end end up as pass through cost to individuals either way as both consumer goods and roadways are deemed essential. It's ultimately a fairness exercise of tax distribution so like most things in the public interest the arena any idea must be fought in is politics.
And yes, consumers will pay regardless, but at least the difference is reflected in the cost of goods. It could very well be that certain local goods are cheaper than imported goods after road costs are properly factored in, which could change how much is imported.
However, this feels a bit regressive since poorer people will pay more of the cost since roads are largely funded by income tax, but that can be accounted for by shifting other taxes. The idea isn't too punish poor people or shipping customers, but to allow the market to work more efficiently.
I can't see a plausible argument that cities consume a disproportionate amount of the country's truck traffic. It seems like Suburban malls and supermarkets require pretty much exactly proportionate truck traffic to their city counter-parts. Moreover, manufacture is not particular concentrated in cities so that too gets equal coverage in suburbs. And all of this stuff requires proportionately more miles driven in the suburbs due to the lower density.
I don't know if cities consume more Kambucha than suburbs but if they do, I assume that suburbs consume some other equivalently.
Even if this $1.5m figure is wildly inflated, calculate how few people live on a given mile in the suburbs, a conservative estimate on how much it costs to maintain a road, and the numbers just don't add up.
The suburbs were a ponzi scheme and the bottom is about to fall out.
Come on, some remote villages in the third world have paved roads to them.
https://www.nap.edu/read/21935/chapter/1
very limited discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272140
A well built gravel road will have a decent amount of rock which drains in the rain without turning to mud, culverts are needed on the steeper slopes to limit erosion.
While the total cost is much less than asphalt, dirt roads do need more regular maintenance which municipalities frequently try to skimp on.
A good read of the pro's and con's: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents...
If a suburb can attract some retail or office space or manufacturing, they can be like Irvine or Tysons or Bloomington -- the suburbs that have made it. Those that cannot will accumulate the same problems with fiscal sustainability that inner cities once did.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=Disaster+and+d...
I didnt read much judgement in th parent post, but it does imply suburbia is subsidized because it has higher infrastructure cost per dollar of tax revenue. The was a study on that very thing a couple years ago IIRC and they found the most solvent towns and cities are actually the higher density ones even if they are lower income areas.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/1/the-surprising-...
It turns out that having more of them per acre is more cost effective.
It's like I'm happy to have the walkable grocery store and 24/7 piss smell, but when feeling adventurous driving out to the suburbs to set up camp in your garden.
I think most urban commuter parking is paid, whether public or private, and the expectation is that a city charges appropriate property taxes on commercial buildings to cover any costs imposed by commuters.
However, I don't think your argument justifies that American policy prejudice towards cars and suburbs. Suburbs involve more roads - trucks may the force that mainly consumes roads but of course the higher the road-to-people ratio is, the more those roads are going to be consumed by those trucks. Which is to say, of course cars and trucks both go to the far suburbs and the nowhere's villes around the country and of course these trips are part of maintaining these places.
Moreover, if we moved to more rail transit, the little towns would be more in trouble because rail tends to require larger loads and so would raise the price of goods in far suburban malls and such.
Definitely not a small number considering the installed road base…
Half of that design chart is for reconstruction and repaving. What else are you looking for?
>an enormous civilizational overhead
You could eliminate suburbia overnight, and demand for those suburban and rural highways will still be there, since cities generally need things delivered from outside (like food) in order to continue being cities.
Consider the amount of road that has been built out in the US relative to the populations that road is serving. Maintenance and expansion is paid out mainly from state and local taxes. That's an enormous civilizational overhead the US contends with, not to mention the economic cost of a large portion of household capital being tied up in rapidly depreciating assets: cars.
I'm looking at you, suburbia.