The True Costs of Driving | Hacker News Reader

The True Costs of Driving

theatlantic.com

Not one mention in the article about the impact of trucks vs. cars on road wear and tear. The road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the damage by 9600 cars [1]. If you want to be serious about recouping the cost of transportation on road infrastructure, you have to tie the tax to the weight of the vehicle. But that would increase the cost of goods a fair amount due to the added transportation costs, so it's not popular.

[1] http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf

Is road damage from vehicles the main cause for road maintenance? In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the freeze and thaw cycles in winter. I suspect deserts have something similar going on with hot summer days.

There are roads I know of that almost never see a car (say a few a month, weird dead-end roads).. and they wear down just as fast as main streets.

One confounding problem in that observation is that weird dead-end roads may simply not be built as well as major arteries.

Also true.

In this case the road I am thinking of is almost a highway (4 lanes, wide median, fast speed limit).. and the short dead end roads were built to connect to another busy road - but never finished. Sort of ended up as 20 feet of highway and then a grass field. So in this case, the assumption is that the road was built to the same spec (and on the surface it appears identical).

I agree. Please read my reply to the parent.

> In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the freeze and thaw cycles in winter.

On the other hand, the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks generally cruise) sure wear out faster. I think it's more that freeze/thaw and snow plows exacerbate and accelerate ongoing wear and tear.

Or the Chicago streets around bus stops are often warped and wavey.. whereas the lane away from the bus stop is flat.

So obviously heavy things can do damage.. but roads do wear out even if they just sit.

> the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks generally cruise)

I'm not sure which lanes you mean by that. Or did you mean to say "passing lanes"?

It's entirely possible I used the wrong terminology, I'm talking about the "right" lane, the one next to the passing lane on a divided highway. You'll very often find that if the surface of the road is old at all, that lane (where the heavy long-haul trucks tend to travel most) is more worn. In the parts of the midwest that get a lot of snow, it's very noticeable.

I guess it depends on the weather. I do get the feeling that roads are in worse condition here (Northern England) than they were back home (Southern Spain) but it's just that a feeling, on the surface it makes sense but not sure how accurate it is, nor indeed how comparable the state of the roads on both countries

Poorly built roads will do this, yes. However roads with proper and deep foundations will crack very little due to frost heaves and other assorted phenomenon.

The difference is night and day when going between my hometown in Montana and a similarly sized city in Iowa. Our asphalt roads are well kept and maintained, but the roads in Iowa are a buckled nightmare.

> Is road damage from vehicles the main cause for road maintenance? In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the freeze and thaw cycles in winter.

Both of them. Where I live, in a mountain region in France, temporary restrictions are put in place during a handful of days between the last winter cold and the first spring sun: heavy vehicles are forbidden to go over smaller roads, as the ongoing defrosting is a weakening factor and not every road is as though as a motorway.

This is also common in the US (at least in Minnesota).

That's already being done.[1] I have no idea if all the costs are recouped, but the heavier the vehicle the higher the registration fee.

[1]https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_...

Yes, but not at nearly the right levels to actually be proportional to the road damage caused. Here's a chart of actual registration fees in NY, for example [1]. If we were actually charging fees corresponding to weight-induced damage, an 18,000 pound truck would have a registration fee in the thousands of dollars, not the <$300 it actually is.

[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/commercial-vehicle-registrat...

If you really want to tax damage caused, you have to measure distance driven over public roads, and to be really precise, also the load of the vehicle (empty trucks aren't as bad for the road as fully loaded ones), and the way the truck is driven (aggressive acceleration and deceleration damages roads more)

I guess that would make the fee for trucks even higher, as trucks generally make more miles than private cars.

If you tax/toll on per-axle weight, trucks will add axles, reducing road wear.

18-wheelers tend to use a lot more gas than light cars. Plus, they use diesel, which I believe is taxed higher than petrol.

> But that would increase the cost of goods a fair amount due to the added transportation costs, so it's not popular.

Yeah, I've never understood that policy logic. The price has to be paid somehow. Why not do it in a way that shows up in the price of goods, to the extent that they are responsible for the cost, so that people (like in any other sane market) have an incentive to cut back on those goods?

It's kind of confused to oppose a tax restructuring that penalizes road impact "because it increases the cost of goods". Goods that require more resources should show up as more expensive! That's how economization works! You're not saving anything by distributing the cost to everyone!

I can certainly understand why the beneficiaries of a subsidy don't like losing it, but that should fall in the category of "aww, but we invested so much in infra to dig holes and re-fill them". Sure, maybe subsidize the retooling so it's not a big shock, but ffs, don't keep the policy!

Taxation, as aptly expressed by Terry Pratchett, is about getting the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. Highly visible taxes that affect consumers directly are politically very unpopular compared to diffuse taxes that occur higher up the production chain.

I think the article deviously wraps up a whole host of issues and presents them as "if we didn't have these dang cars around, all these costs would go away."

First, without cars, keeping commute times reasonable requires that you either live very close to your job (which I admit is ideal anyway) or that you have a very, very robust intercity commuter transportation system. Something we're not even close to having.

Second, we can't move everyone and their brother to city center, or even within the city limits. A very large fraction of workers live outside city limits. Moving all these people with in a distance of rail stations that makes building lots of them cost effective would be very difficult from a city planning perspective.

Third, our economy has been operating on the notion (for quite sometime) that home ownership is ideal. Since people have a lot of their personal wealth wrapped up in their home, asking them to move is not really fair either. This affects "non-car users" too when that move is going to raise the prices of housing where the non-car users live.

Fourth, allowing people to move about easily from any city to any city means that there is liquidity in the job market. This is both for car owners and not. The fact that you can buy a car and go somewhere a train or bus doesn't means you can take a new job when the current one doesn't meet your needs.

There are also other costs that are saved (both monetary based and time based ones) for non-car users. Having fewer people in the city limits means that your wait times for services is lower than it could be. It's easier to get in and out of the city on a weekend.

That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of owning a car if it made people feel better.

You're assuming that the thesis is that we need to move to a 100%-car-free society tomorrow. I doubt anyone is calling for that, mainly because, like you say, that's impossible. Everything we've built for the last 80 years has been built under the assumption of pervasive car use.

I take the thesis more like: "Cars are really expensive. We should stop pretending that they are not."

Pushing for expansion of remote working would do a world of good with regards to points 1,2 and 4.

I think it addresses number three too! If I can live anywhere I want, I can buy anyhouse I want, and sell it to someone who is looking for similar house-features instead of location, location, location.

> That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of owning a car if it made people feel better.

I appreciate that— based on the letters section of my local paper, many people completely take for granted the cost of their car ownership, and feel extremely bitter about being asked to take on some of the costs of public transportation upkeep.

It is not an overnight solution. It took many decades to get to where we are today, and it will take many more decades to reverse.

Second, most American cities are really not that dense. So, yes you could move many more people within city limits or at least closer. The reason people are so far away in the first place is because of subsidized costs.

Third, I agree with you. And that is not quite fair. I am pretty sure when we saw gas prices spike a few years ago, you could also see a dip in house prices for the far out subburbs of cities.

Fourth, If driving were much more expensive, more trains and buses would exist to fill the need and take you many more places.

The article glosses over this, but the taxpayers suffer from many non-monetary costs which often are overlooked: injury risk, noise and air pollution, limited walking mobility, to name a few.

I think the point is that one reason why we've ended up in the situation you describe is because car use has been subsidized. In the early 20th century every major city in the U.S. had a large streetcar network (with 'streetcar suburbs') and access to intercity rail for longer distance commutes / trips.

e.g. Indianapolis served 200 trains a day at its central station in 1900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Union_Station

It now serves 7 Amtrak trains a week.

> Drivers will make use of roads, especially new ones, but only if the cost of construction is subsidized by others.

Doesn't everyone benefit from the transportation system though? I like to get food and other goods on a regular basis like everyone else. My gut reaction says there are more drivers than non-drivers. We have 797 cars per 1000 people.

Yet these same people will complain about public money being spent to subsidize public transport.

The governments isn't spending billions widening roads out to the exurbs because that's needed to get food and other goods around. If road construction was limited to what benefited everyone--instead of subsidizing particular lifestyle choices--there would be far less of it.

All the single-occupancy drivers out there that are causing jams are in fact hindering the flow of goods. Trucks stuck in that traffic waste fuel, pollute more and bring up the cost of goods.

I'd argue that we are way beyond this being a problem. In many cases the highways were designed with a much lower traffic count in mind. When the population was half what it is now.

The problem to me it seems is that highway planners did not design for continued growth. Or when they did, growth outstripped capacity.

Additionally, single car drivers is the absolute worst case - why not design for that?

Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't. This causes people to have to move a great distance everyday just to get to work.

What makes this all really laughable is that many people drive a great distance just to sit infront of a computer where most of their work is done on some sort of computer network or over the telephone. I think a nationwide telecommuting first policy would do more to reduce traffic than any of the other alternatives available.

> Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't.

This! No city loves car entering their perimeter. But no city chooses to push enterprises/services/commerces out of their perimeter.

Talk about having your cake and eating it - or, as we say in Italy, having your wife drunk and the barrel full :-)

> Additionally, single car drivers is the absolute worst case - why not design for that?

One possible reason is that catering to the worst case of single car drivers is politically unsavory. In the green future, they are all supposed to go away.

It's not as easy as you might think to determine what benefits everyone, though. Even if you live in the city near your employer and avoid using the roads, it's still to your benefit to build roads to the suburbs where the local shops and restaurants you patronize can hire cheaper labor.

Well, when you make something nearly free, it's no wonder the adoption skyrockets.

Ha! You got my brain going on the idea of the public "free" infrastructure as being a startup that gets millions of users but doesn't know how to monetize them, continues to struggle with how to manage bad drivers all while trying to grow even larger.

What a silly article. Is the only taxable value of somebody getting to work the money they spent on tolls and fuel? No, of course not, it's made up and beyond through gross product.

Direct taxes (at least here in the UK) are more of an influencing factor to try to push people towards other infrastructure.

Does this mean that non-drivers are paying for roads? Sure, but they're also getting value and indirect revenue from the system too.

It's not a silly article. Whenever the idea of subsidising public transport people try and claim that we don't need to subsidise cars so why should we do it for public transport. If the true costs of cars were taken into consideration public transport would actually be seen to be saving money.

True, but this is partly why buses are so much cheaper than regional rail in the United States. Subsidies change behaviour. When each point on the margin represents billions in infrastructure spending by public and private coffers, implicit preferences should be closely considered.

I don't think your first line entirely invalidates the article. Yes, the transportation sector has all sorts of knock-on benefits to productivity, but they aren't free.

In the current system the direct tax revenue from transport doesn't cover its costs, so we're shuffling money around from other sectors. A lot of those other sectors probably benefit from the knock-on effects mentioned, so why not shift all the costs of transport into direct taxation?

Such a change would create a 1-1 mapping between the usage cost an individual/organization pays and the usage cost our entire economic system pays. Lining up selfish and collective interest usually improves efficiency.

Now, the price we pay for that efficiency coming from our current system is that the distribution of those costs changes. However, the cost is the same either way so now we're really just arguing redistributive policy.

I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense), but I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that harm.

> I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense), but I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that harm.

Since this often comes up as a criticism of policies that eliminate subsidies, I want to emphasize your point that there are simple ways to counterbalance such a harm.

The easiest is you shave off some tax revenue from the wealthiest users/residents and redistribute exactly the amount back to the poor they would need to purchase the good as no-strings-attached cash. This makes poor people who choose to use the previously-subsidized good no worse off than before, but frees up those who never wanted to use it to find a different use of that money (e.g. public transit, or moving closer and paying higher rent but paying less in transportation).

So you'd remove an indirect tax, implement a new direct tax and then implement a welfare system to help people pay the new direct tax? Car stamps?

Just pulling on my reply to same, varying your tax on a person's earnings is a much better way of means testing life than by separately means testing every tax.

Not car stamps: the important distinction is that the welfare should not be earmarked for a specific use. This allows the market to behave naturally and no longer force non-users to pay the indirect tax while letting poor people who want to pay it not suffer material consequences vs. the indirect tax.

The welfare side of this is already handled quite effectively through income tax banding, though as you say, that does indirectly tax everybody for infrastructure.

But what's wrong with that? We all pay for national defence. We all pay for nationally funded arts and schooling and science. Even people without children or cancer or an interest in weird concept dance. We pay for this stuff because it makes our countries better, as a whole. Infrastructure is no different.

Even ignoring that, how do you issue this welfare to people who are paying this/these road use tax? Tax them less at the pump or the tolls? Who implements this?

And that still isn't fair. They're not paying for the roads they use. This money goes nationwide. Or does Tincanville (pop 30) have to shoulder the cost of their entire road network now?

Unless you're willing to take this to the absolute bureaucratic extreme, and make some people pay tons for low-use roads (which age naturally, regardless of use) an indirect tax of some description is the only way to keep the entire road network viable.

I think you answered your own question. Direct taxes on things that aren't "means" aren't usually means-tested. That is to say poor people would pay the same as rich people.

Some people don't have a problem with that. But pretending we're in a state with even a mildly socialist emphasis on taxes, taking most from income and redistributing across the whole system is a a much more efficient way of making sure the people who should pay more (I know, not everybody thinks that way) do pay more.

We can't pretend that rich people don't also benefit from GDP improvements. A healthy economy helps the land/home/business/etc owners most directly.

This is a great example of why taxes are so high in America. Instead of having one party be for lowering taxes and one for raising taxes, why not have both parties admit that we all want to make government more efficient with the money it does have?

Roads are surprisingly expensive to build and maintain, but sprawl requires more roads and it reduces the tax efficiency of the land. Here's a great article explaining how a classic main-street style road generates more property tax dollars than an equivalent sprawl street.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/traditional-deve...

Rail is expensive to build and maintain too, but maybe combined with ride hailing for the last mile, rail could be focused on just highly trafficked corridors that are also the most efficient people and dollar wise.

In the US, and perhaps other places, the highway infrastructure is provided not just for personal use, but also for military logistics and civil response. There's are reasons I-185 runs to the front gate of Fort Benning beyond commuter convenience and civilian commerce.

Taking only Gas Taxation as the only "user tax" is dubious at best

"User" Based taxation figures should include

1. Gas Taxes

2. Sales Taxes on vehicles

3. Registrations and Inspection Fees

4. Yearly Excise Taxation

5. Environmental Fees

an several other kinds of taxes that directly apply to operation of motor vehicles,

Further this study (that I saw) did not seem to address the MASSIVE subsidy given to commercial operations on the Interstate system, the Gas taxes paid by Commercial Trucking companies is fraction of that charged to operators of non-commercial vehicles.

There's also the positive externalities of infrastructure, and that winds up as land values. Like, my dad grew up in a house in what was, at the time, a rural area near Seattle. When we were driving down I-405, he'd point out a major commercial building that went up there after the freeway went up. The difference in property value between the two is almost entirely due to I-405 being there.

Basically, my point is that drivable places tend to be more valuable than non-drivable, so property taxes are an indirect way of capturing the value provided by infrastructure (particularly land-value taxes).

> Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use.

Why should they? Roads are not there only for those actually using them: they are meant to be always available for everyone. Imagine a road that is used only from time to time, just by emergency vehicles: don't you agree that would be a reasonable way to spend tax money?

No, not really. A helicopter would probably be faster and cheaper in that case. There's no huge push to pave wide roads up the sides of mountains just to rescue the dozen or so climbers that need it every year.

Why should they? Roads are not there only for those actually using them: they are meant to be always available for everyone.

Right, this line of reasoning leads to, why should anyone without kids pay for schools? And so on and so on. It's OK to believe that mind, it's a free country, but you would need to be consistent about it.

I would be fine with everyone paying for the roads and them being actually available for everyone. The problem is that many roads are made only for cars and do not have adequate side walks and protected bike lanes such that everyone can use them.

Why should they? Roads are not there only for those actually using them...

Okay, but a big part of the opposition to raising necessary taxes to maintain infrastructure is the notion: "I already pay for that." So pointing out that no, you don't already pay for that, you're being subsidized in this case, becomes really important.

In any case, I'd argue that pushing more of the costs of roads onto the immediate road-users would internalize now-externalized costs, produce better incentives, and ultimately more efficient use of resources of many kinds.

The argument in the article is misleading given the data it presents. What it should have said is that drivers pay for roads both via the gas tax AND by other forms of tax. The portion paid by the gas tax is itself not enough to cover road maintenance.

Of course, this means that some non-drivers and non-car-owners also pay taxes used for road maintenance. It would have been worthwhile for the author to look up those numbers and tell how much non-drivers pay. Given that most Americans drive, this argument probably wouldn't have the same impact as the one presented in the article.

Non drivers benefit from roadways too, goods and services still traverse them. But I'm all for more gas tax to maintain roads and establish a "decommissioning" to more sustainable fuels/energies.

Plus the idea that non-car-owners do not benefit from a functioning road system is laughable on it's face. Busses and Ubers need roads too, and that's not even including the trucks that bring them their food and Amazon orders or the police that protect them and the fire fighters that may one day save their life.

That all being said, it is true that the gas tax (along with most other taxes) has not kept pace with the growth of our infrastructure or inflation in general. Going in on increasing the gas tax is the best way to insure you are not getting re-elected because many Americans apparently believe that they pay enough taxes (they don't.)

Right, it's obvious that non-drivers benefit from the roads too. You could still argue for higher gas taxes or other use fees if you wanted, for example to better align incentives (extra road usage leads to directly higher costs for the user). But this article certainly doesn't make that case.

I think the article proposition is exactly what you're saying. Raise the gas taxes to cover the real cost of the infrastructure.

Again though it's political suicide. People will bitch all day about having crummy roads but if you suggest a tax increase that would amount to 2 bucks extra for every tank you'll be run out of town metaphorically, and possibly literally.

In France the tax was raised right when oil prices where down. It eases the pain a little.

Of course everyone benefits from the road network as everyone benefits from buses and commercial vehicle access, but this statement is disingenuous in not recognizing the obvious that the dominant factor by far in driving the expansion of the road network is passenger vehicles, usually driven by single drivers.

If we had high quality public transit we simply wouldn't need the wide multi lane highways that we have.

Of course roads are paid for. And of course the money comes from other taxes. The whole point of the article is the distortion in use brought on by very low user fees.

The article may imply that, but it doesn't make the case with the numbers it presents. To avoid distortion, you'd like the tax base that pays for the roads to match the usage of the roads. Because non-drivers also benefit from the roads, that means use fees alone is NOT the right tax system. Use fees may well be too low, but nothing in the article gives you any confidence to say that.

Why are you stuck on this idea that fees are not appropriate if someone else benefits from the good?

If we charge semis a use fee, then tomatoes in my grocery store go up in price, but it's still cheaper than me driving to California and buying them myself. And it gives local produce an advantage, reducing incentive for road use, exactly as it should. So, assuming no increase in net tax revenue, my income taxes would go down proportionally and I could actually save money by buying local produce, or keep the status quo by continuing to buy from Peru.

The basic thinking here is that you should always have a use fee if you can. The only true "public goods" that should be paid for by everyone equally are things that literally everyone benefits from equally, or that are just impossible to impose a use fee on. The classic examples are lighthouses (impossible to impose a use fee, even though not many people use them) and the military/police/fire (everyone benefits equally).

I don't think we disagree here, unless you are proposing to build a separate road system for use by military/police/fire.

Does this mean, when politicians at the national level say "we need more fiscal stimulus to rebuild infrastructure," that they're wasting money?

Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars and trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I mean, one of the messages we hear repeated ad nauseum from economists and politicians is that this sort of government subsidy is a good thing: it creates jobs and grows GDP. It's a win-win.

Now, are we supposed to believe it's some kind of perverse incentive and an unfair subsidy?

Which is it?

> Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars and trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I would be better if they did it. But, if they _said_ it they would immediately lose their office. So...

It's been known for a very long time in economic circles that the taxes we have are not the best taxes, or even good taxes; they are the taxes that politicians were able to get people to vote for. So, we have a staggeringly-low gas tax and make up for it with income, sales and property taxes.

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