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Comment by ptah | Hacker News Reader

I think it is fair that the increased usage of public infrastructure warrants a substantial increase in taxes

And the correct activity to tax is the delivery itself, or some close proxy for it. Ideally taxed to the business doing the delivery so they have a harder time faking lower prices or otherwise making it seem like the higher costs are for any reason other than the way they're doing business.

While we're at it we could make trucking companies pay for the actual amount of wear they put on the roads and the costs to build truck-supporting infrastructure. And I'd like a pony.

good point, the tax on a truck should be proportional to the wear and tear of that truck on the road

Trump adminstration is trying to increase tolling on trucking companies because they don't pay proportional to wear and tear.

Care to share a source on this?

> And the correct activity to tax is the delivery itself [...] Ideally taxed to the business doing the delivery

Congratulations! You have discovered gas taxes ;-)

Those aren't going to be super useful as the shift to electric continues.

Also, gas taxes don't account for different vehicle damage rates to roads. Gas taxes impose effectively a constant per pound-hour tax on road use, which is fine, but roads are damaged based on what is called the 4th power law, so 1000kg axel weight does 16x more damage than 500kg axel weight.

The pitfall is that gas taxes are apparently not strongly correlated to road wear. A gallon of gas in a passenger vehicle does dramatically less road damage than a gallon of gas in a delivery truck.

You're right, but it's somewhat offset that a delivery truck uses more gas per mile than a passenger vehicle.

Besides, we should discourage passenger vehicle use anyway, so raise the gas tax until it covers per mile delivery vehicle road wear.

Not offset enough. a hummer does 21x the wear/tear that an average car does.

a 9ton big-rig does 410x the damage

https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

We need to fix our urban housing problem, or provide further positive incentives for non-ICE vehicles so we aren’t creating a regressive tax. Newsflash: most people don’t like driving a lot, they do it because they feel like they must.

Hmmm. Last mile deliveries are generally a mixture of passenger cars and small vans, whereas deliveries to stores are done using large trucks with disproportionately more road wear. Maybe store deliveries should be taxed higher than home deliveries?

The ideal would be something like, per vehicle, measure mileage and multiply that by a road-wear lookup table indexed with gross vehicle weight rating & number of axles. Cost would be passed down to the consumer and then the market would sort it all out.

> A gallon of gas in a passenger vehicle does dramatically less road damage than a gallon of gas in a delivery truck.

How? I don't follow this logic.

Heavy vehicles put exponentially more wear. Especially if the road was not built for having that weight on it. Let's say you build a drive way for a car. You could park a 2 ton car every day for decades with no damage. Yet a massive truck parked once may fuck it up due to it's sheer weight.

that would make sense if roads are built for 5 trips of a car than 1 trip of truck. ( Because car is travelling longer with that one gallon of gallon.)

Is that true though that X cars travelling a mile of road would do less damage than 1 truck traveling on that same road?

The problem is big load, even if for a short amount of time. Just like for bridges. If a bridge can sustain a car a minute, that doesn't necessarily mean that it could sustain a truck once...

I'm pretty sure online shopping dramatically reduces use of public infrastructure, i.e. roads and parking.

Every UPS truck that goes out with 100 packages means, what -- conservatively, maybe 50 separate car trips that it replaced?

And so that much less traffic, congestion, pollution, gas used, etc.

I guess it's potentially a little more nuanced than that since people are ordering higher quantities with greater frequency.

I am going to venture the hypothesis that people will make the same number of car trips - just to other destinations.

Similar to how building more or wider roads do not reduce congestions - more traffic takes its place.

You're right in that the, say, 20 min saved per person is going to go to some other activity.

And certainly some of those activities can involve driving, like going to visit friends. But many other activities will just be spending more time at home -- e.g. coming home straight from work instead of running errands, or staying home Saturday afternoon to read or play video games.

To your point: in areas where traffic congestion is already extreme, it may not make a difference because there's so much pent-up demand for car trips. But in most of the rest of the country (suburbs, rural, etc.) that doesn't suffer from congestion, I think package delivery would have to result in reducing traffic to some measurable degree.

Amazon's sprinter vans that do deliveries. are 6k pounds. curb weight, can carry up to 12k pounds

so 5x road wear of normal car when unloaded. 81x the wear when fully loaded.

Well, public transportation buses typically weigh even far more than that, at 25-35K pounds, yet society seems to agree they're better overall than the 20 or 40 cars they replace, despite their greater overall road wear.

I don't think anyone considers road wear to be a major deciding factor here. Congestion and pollution are.

I was curious to compare.

Public Transit bus weighs 44k fully loaded. Assuming only seated passengers, it holds 44 people so 1000lb per person. A car is 4000lbs on average. Fully loaded (with standing) holds 92 people. 478lb/person.

So if you’re curious, you’ll enjoy knowing road wear isn’t linear with weight — it’s exponentially proportional. Almost all road wear comes from large trucks and buses. So linear division doesn’t actually have relevance here. Buses are far, far worse than the equivalent number of cars in terms of road wear... but again, it's a non-issue because road wear isn't a main consideration.

https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/

the first comment about the sprinter vans shows that its exponential for road wear. Youre arguing roadwear doesnt matter but arguing against busses.

I just wanted to see what weight per person was. Doesnt matter as much for road wear, but as you were saying, pollution etc matters too, and weight per person matters for the other factors. Not weight per axle like road wear

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