This fact is especially pertinent when folks with their F150s demand that road bikes be taxed equally to use bike lanes.
$10 for a bike doing 1000 miles a year, so 1 cent a mile. Gross axel weight about 100lb.
So axel weight of 1000lb would be $100 a mile.
F150 at 2500lb would be $4,000 a mile.
I suggest putting the first year on the sale price, so that $200 bike costs $210, and the $60k f150 costs $60 million.
Such a tax would eliminate marginal uses of trucks but not eliminate trucks entirely (since it would be a higher but not ridiculous tax).
It also works as a reductio against any wear-based tax on bikes, since it would imply an absurd tax on trucks.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519021
(Edited over past hour to fix numerous typos.)
Oddly enough, sidewalks are the most efficient use of space, but require good public transportation and extreme density to reach that threshold.
Anyone who has done any amount of virtual traffic engineering (aka: Factorio, City Skylines, OpenTTD) knows that intersections are where the bottlenecks are.
Its incredibly difficult to design a max-throughput intersection. Roads have a huge amount of throughput, most "traffic" just gets stuck at offramps and traffic lights.
Narrowing a road to make room for bike lanes is a lower cost than people might think. If you're all going to get stuck at the next intersection anyway, it doesn't matter if you're a 2-lane, 4-lane, or 8-lane road.
If you halve the capacity of the road, you're just going to spread the same cars (and congestion) among twice as many lights...and make traffic far worse.
Isn’t this proportional to the number of lanes in the road?
While that certainly has the desired effect of reducing car traffic to the area, it also increases the difficulty and expense of travel to the area. We’re seeing this in Oakland now, where they’re putting in bike lanes and taking away parking, while simultaneously doing nothing about the limited public transportation system.
If you want to reduce vehicle traffic without seriously impacting the shops and restaurants in the area, you have to use both knobs available to increase people’s use of public transportation: make it harder and more expensive to drive a car, while also making it easier (and, preferably, cheaper as well) to take transit. One without the other is a disaster.
Oakland is littered with cars along roads in every neighborhood you go on, and the police barely enforce anything resembling traffic code (due partially to complicated historical reasons). In some neighborhoods, I've seen duplexes with more land area in cars than living space (so is it a wonder that poorer people here live in their cars when it's so easy to own and park a car?)
A bike lane or two makes it cheaper for most folks (yes including the folks living in the pop-up Oakland housing shelters, they own a lot of bikes) to safely move around, and reduces traffic from our generally saturated roads. Given the limited paving budget here (and how tectonically active the hills are), it's a wonder that bike infra has taken so long.
Moreover, the heavy private vehicular traffic in the area makes it very difficult for buses to navigate their routes in a timely manner, and taking parking off the road for bike lanes and BRT is a much cheaper way of enabling transit in the area that laying down rail.
(B) Use a trailer the kids can ride in
(C) Don’t use a bike for a 15mi commute. Better still, don’t do things 15mi away. That’s so damn far what the hell
Besides, I think the economy would be much healthier if everyone was riding their bike recreationally (healthy bodies, healthy minds). And a much bigger boost to the economy than a delivery truck driving 10 miles to deliver a $2 package.