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Comment by sharkmerry | Hacker News Reader

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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