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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

The damage inflicted onto roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicles weight. So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?

Furthermore, as society progresses, we're not going to need so many roads. Either we'll technologically eclipse them, or sociologically we'll reorient our society towards walking and biking. I don't see us having nearly the amount of road maintenance in future as we do now.

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> So, should average citizens be on the hook for most road repairs, or should those who utilize extremely heavy trucks?

You can scapegoat the trucks, but average citizens are utilizing heavy trucks (indirectly) by buying stuff on Amazon or Walmart (to name a few examples).

People who don't drive any vehicle take advantage of that. So it's small vehicle drivers subsidizing [via fuel tax] those who don't drive at all, yet take advantage of shipping via heavy truck.

Why preserve the opacity of that relationship? Tax trucks higher, and it will reflect in the prices of the products those trucks are hauling, fairly distributing the cost increase of their operation across the consumers of those products.

We absolutely should tax goods and services based on the negative externalities they impose. Taxing vehicles by weight is a fair tax, much more fair than doing the _exact_ opposite right now, work trucks being taxed less. Heavy vehicles used productively will remain, but spending on heavy vehicles for recreation will be less attractive, since that kind of use consumers balance against other discriminatory spending.

True, but average citizens don't _choose_ to use heavy trucks. I'm not sure of the relative costs of road repair v. fuel, but if you funded roads entirely through a tax on the fourth power of vehicle weight (if that's the right proxy for repair costs incurred), Walmart might find they could reduce total costs in the system by using fewer large trucks and shift their logistics mix.

It is pretty easy to exhibit residential streets that do not take truck traffic, and yet are in dire need of repair.

Even an unused or barely used street suffers from a freeze thaw cycle.

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