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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> the weight fees charged trucks don't remotely pay for it.

Source?

Don't have one. I just recall reading years ago that the fatigue damage cause by trucks loaded to the legal weight limit was 9,000 times that of a passenger car (and trucks are often overloaded). The flexing of the roadbed causes it to crumble away after a while. You can feel the roadbed go down when a truck passes.

The main damage passenger cars do is erosion from snow tires.

I was able to find this from the Congressional Budget Office

> Estimates of pavement damage by trucks, the largest per-mile external cost of truck use, range from about 5 to 55 cents per mile depending on the weight of the truck, the number of axles over which its weight is distributed, and where it operates....

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...

The fuel tax is 30 cents/gallon of diesel, which for an 18-wheeler getting a typical 6 mpg is about 5 cents / mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

So at the absolute highest end of that estimate you need to increase fuel taxes to $3/gallon, i.e., double the price of fuel to ~$6/gallon. That would make trucking 40% more expensive (since that's the fraction of operating costs devoted to fuel).

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-trucki...

And a more realistic number might be closer to 20% or 30% more expensive. This would change things on the margins, but it's not clear to me that it would be transformative in pushing transport to trains.

20 to 30% is quite a bit. And road repairs are only part of the cost subsidy to trucks. Property taxes are assessed on the tracks, but not on the highways, for another.

Certainly 30% is a big impact if it's your day job, but it's unlikely that the transportation infrastructure of the US would be dramatically different. (After all, gas prices had $2/gallon fluctuations that persisted over many years without much impact.) Also worth pointing out that the OP article lists labor as 75% of the cost (which is very different than the source I used).

I'd be very glad to see truck taxes/fees adjusted to better match reality. If that means less truck and more trains, all the better. Still, it's not clear to me that trains don't also get implicit subsidies (that are just less discussed because trains don't inspire as much politics), or that the positive externalities of trucks are important, or whatever.

20-30% is huge. And when trucking is no longer a huge source of employment, the political will to assess realistic taxes on the environmental/ infrastructural costs of trucking might increase. No worries of truckers staging protests that tax increases will come out of their paychecks.

Yeah, damage to roads goes up superlinearly with weight.

I think it's to the fourth power with axle weight.

That sounds familiar, but I couldn't remember with enough confidence to say. But yeah, trucks are really disproportionately bad for the roads.

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