Calibrating road tax based on vehicle weight as a proxy for road maintenance costs is a step away from taxing the individual, which is the current situation with more-or-less flat road tax rates.

The problem is that any talk of additional taxes is unnecessary if governments can’t do their jobs with the money they have.

Just recently, my small town had their roads paved. It cost $35,000 to bring a miller in, and the county engineer made a mistake where only 1 of our roads were being milled. It took another $35,000 to bring it back to do the rest.

Adding taxes can’t fix government inefficiency, in fact they make it worse.

A road tax wouldn’t be about the revenue collection or government expenditure. It would be a pigouvian tax to disincentivise gigantic vehicles and their negative impact on everyone around them.

IMO doesn’t even need to be framed as pigouvian. It’s just trying to match better what a person pays for a public service and what they consume from it, in this case road wear and tear.

Road wear and tear is the starting point, but I worry more about increased road trauma and the loss of amenity that bigger vehicles cause. Letting them just ‘pay their way’ isn’t enough - we need to reverse course.

What? Presumably we need roads and it’s a fact of physics that heavier vehicles put more wear on them.

I didn’t say we need to remove roads. I said governments should prioritize roads rather than wasting money unnecessarily.

So until the government (which?) meets someone’s (whose?) intuitive guess (how?) at what an appropriate degree of efficiency is, then we should not have public investment?

Given almost any degree of govt efficiency I’d prefer a more efficient one, but we do in fact need to be able to walk and chew gum. It’s just not the case that letting roads deteriorate will increase discipline in whatever area of govt your particular hobby horse lives.