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Comment by joethebob | Hacker News Reader

The GVWR on a F350 is around 10-14,000, so somewhere between 5-7k axle load.

Yes that's the gross weight, i.e. carrying its maximum rated load. Personal vehicles are very rarely loaded up to their maximum weight, and mostly are driven relatively empty.

Even driven at gross weight, it's doing 5% of the damage per axle of loaded semi. The semi also has 4-5 axles, so it's more like 2% of the damage of the semi.

Mind you, we're talking here about the most damaging personal vehicle loaded to its maximum weight, and the semi is still doing 50x the damage of the personal vehicle. It's reasonable to say that essentially all road damage is done by semis.

For the most part I agree. The other issue is psi load produced by different tread patterns. Going from some minimal water channels to a mud terrain cleated style will reduce surface area a good bit. If you have experience with rural areas you don't need a calculator to observe the highest direct damage is usually from agricultural tractors. Deformation from a single pass can be observed (and often felt) with the naked eye in many cases.

Well, after all, the whole point of these tires is to dig into the "road" to get better traction than is possible with normal friction, so it's not too surprising that they dig in to a lesser extent on hard surfaced roads.

That said, this type of tire is a very tiny fraction of the total miles driven on public highways, and so if you're looking for someone to tax based on the costs they create, it's all heavy trucks.

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