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Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

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

Congratulations! You have discovered gas taxes ;-)

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...

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.

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