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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

>>>> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.

Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use. For instance most local roads in cities and counties are paid for with property taxes. Income taxes cover a fair amount of road construction. The county bike paths have a fee. We're not allowed to ride on the Interstates, and we tend to avoid "big" roads for safety / comfort reasons.

My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking.

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Some motorists seem to forget that cyclists don't need a 30m wide, 40cm thick, heavily reinforced highway with stabilized foundation that has to be revised every year to account for the damage caused by heavy vehicles.

The costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.

No one ever says "why don't we charge pedestrians fees for sidewalks," for good reason. Bike infrastructure should be thought of as the same way. A paved bike path is going to be like a sidewalk: it will last as long as the elements permit it no matter the amount of usage it sees. Versus a road used for vehicular traffic that is heavy enough to degrade the road, that sort of usage makes a lot more sense to tax.

That isn't true. Pedestrians put more pressure on the ground than cars do. Google it if you don't believe me.

The reason sidewalks last so long is they're made of cement rather than asphalt. If you made roads out of cement they would last just as long if not longer.

And the reason they make sidewalls out of cement is they have to. If they made then out of asphalt they would decay very quickly.

"Google it if you don't believe me."

Or, just calculate it?

Car contact patch is 4 x 160cm2. https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=... Car avg. weight is 1800kg. https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-car-weight/

Pressure = 28kPa

Human is 100cm2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedobarography Average human weight is 75 kg.

Pressure = 8.5kPa.

So it's simply not true what you say.

People don't normally walk barefoot.

Run the numbers for high heels, and keep in mind they might put their entire weight on the heel.

Have you ever seen an asphalt bike lane age? It never gets potholes. The top layer just expands and contracts or is invaded with tree roots. Over time the elements wear out the tar and the gravel loosens.

Compare that to a road where the truck literally forms grooves into the asphalt. It ripples like the viscous material it is in those conditions under multiple tons of weight. An intersection by me looks like its plaid with the grooves from perpendicular trucking traffic. And cement roads do last a long time but they aren't indestructible. I live on one. Trucks damage them and crack them up over time and the city has to fill in potholes. The more construction going on the more damage. Any big apartment build just destroys the concrete apron and sidewalk on the lot with the equipment because its that heavy. Orders of magnitude heavier than any human on a bike can be.

Only if they are all wearing high heels... It isn't pressure that typically causes damage though, it is shear stress or frictional power.

The thick, heavily reinforced roads with stabilized foundations generally have much nicer surfaces to cycle on than narrow cycle paths though, at least around here. Probably because a lot of the deterioration is caused by weather rather than traffic and the cost reduction is mostly through having lower standards and accepting more deterioration.

I'd take a rough separated cycle path over a shared car road any day.

Depending on what type of bike you have. On a mountain bike, anyday. On a road bike with paper thin tyres that easily puncture, maybe not so much.

Bikes are a lot less delicate than people seem to think. My daily driver has road bike rims and tires. They're quite durable. The region has some bike paths that are crushed limestone on hard clay, and sometimes I find myself on gravel roads, off-road shortcuts, or even "easy" mountain bike trails.

The main issue is comfort. Riding rough roads on hard tires gets old after a while. Also, real MTB'ing, where the trails are designed to be challenging, is its own beast.

I also prefer avoiding car traffic if possible.

It's me that is not durable, if I had to ride daily on 80psi road tires I'd shake to bits!

Funnily enough I do MTB, and I have a full suspension and a fully rigid frame both offering their own challenges.

Road bikes aren't really designed for being in traffic in the first place so that places some of the downsides of that on the user. I've used one for many years, so don't get me wrong, I love riding one but it is abundantly clear to me that when my bike tires fits into the slots of a drain that that is my problem and not the problem of whoever designs and maintains the road.

In many places a road bike isn't actually street legal (no bell, no fenders, no lights, of course you could add those).

It sounds peculiar that some places would have requirements for bells and fenders in order for a bike to be "street legal"; this strikes me as more of a quaint historical holdover than anything else. Some cyclists might be more comfortable with ringing their bell a than raising their voice if they need to urgently signal the attention of another road user, but a requirement for a bell on any bike is mystifying to me. Likewise fenders; cycling on wet roads can cause dirty water to be sprayed onto a vehicle that is driving close behind a cyclist, but people don't tend to cycle on road bikes in wet weather in the first place (unless their bike has been adapted), and people should maintain a safe stopping distance, especially in wet conditions. But the use of lights when cycling at night is a perfectly reasonable legal requirement (more or less universal in my experience), and perfectly effective temporary lights can be easily attached to road bikes if necessary.

Just put some good tires on your road bike and you wont deal with flats. I have used gatorskins which have always been indestructable, tubes last for years and are only replaced when I put new tires on the bike. I'm moving to the continental gp5k for the next set because apparently the puncture resistance is good enough these days in those more standard road bike tires. Unless you manage to hit an upright nail you shouldn't worry too much.

Usually the concern is getting hit by car traffic.

At least in the US, drivers don’t drive well around cyclists, and sometimes that’s intentional to boot. Better to not share the road with people who are actively trying to hurt you with a metal object weighing several thousand pounds.

Definitely concur, for commuting I ride a pretty wide tire for that reason. I've actually really enjoyed cross-bikes for city commuting, since they're designed for a bit more of a pliable ride and more comfort while still running pretty fast overall.

No they don't, cyclists prefer concrete bike paths which both last longer and have a smoother surface.

> The costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.

That's not true The ground pressure of a bicycle is higher than the ground pressure of a car.

Some bike tire pressures exceed 100 psi. Only the largest trucks have ground pressures that high. A typical passenger vehicle has a pressure of around 36 psi.

The ground pressure of someone in heels is even higher than that. There's a reason sidewalks are made of cement while roads can be made of cheaper asphalt.

Ground pressure is not the only way a road wears.

  > My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking.

Road wear grows at the 4th power of vehicular weight, assuming similar tire pressures. An F-150 that weighs one and a half times what your Mazda 3 weighs, does 5 times the road wear.

Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their fair share of road wear?

Based on [1] this first result on Google, a truck can carry about 300,000 tomatoes. I don't think those tomatoes are going to add up very soon. A loaded truck of about 80,000 pounds (11.5 times the weight) would have 17490 times the road impact compared to the same trip driven back home. Distributed over 300,000 tomatoes, the cost wouldn't be all that much. Despite inefficient engines and truck construction, bulk transport is actually very efficient. Generally speaking: the bigger the trailer, the better, even with the weight increase.

Even better would be using this as an incentive to expand and improve the quality of the much more efficient rail network (or transport over waterways, where available) to improve the entire supply chain. That would require the government to act in the interest of its people, though, so I don't think we'll see the effects of such a programme too soon if it ever makes it.

Every tax-paying citizen is already paying this heavy price! Only instead of the damage inefficient transport causes to our infrastructure being reflected in our everyday expenses, it's hidden from plain sight in taxes.

The only industry I'd expect to see killed by paying for road damage would be package delivery vans. They're driving long distances with comparatively almost no weight at all for the convenience of not needing to go to a centralized store to pick up your stuff. With the way Amazon and friends have their drivers pee in bottles, I don't see why we should subsidize those vans.

[1]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-26-mn-26434...

The issue isn't that 17490 / 300000 is a small number. The issue is that the road wear is not being paid by the entity creating that wear, and is disproportionately being borne by those actually trying to solve climate change problems by driving smaller, electric vehicles.

If there is currently not enough taxes being collected to maintain the roads, then start taxing those who do the most damage. That entity can then amortize the tax over their 300,000 tomatoes.

The problem with that is that the heavy electric cars are actually damaging the road more than their ICE counterparts because of their huge batteries. For some countries this isn't much of a problem, just buy a normal car instead if an SUV and you should get the cost difference back, but for others the mileage of current smaller electric cars just isn't practical.

We could make exemptions for electric vehicles powered by green energy like we do right now for trucks and other large equipment, but that'll mostly hit the poorer populations who can't afford an electric car. Tacking road maintenance costs onto other general goods in the form of taxes disproportionately hits people who try to avoid using a car for the environment and the liveability of their city, for example by taking public transport or a bike.

A future where everyone drives electric is going to be more expensive because of electric car technology. I'd say pay the difference with two different taxes: one for car weight/wheel load, another for pollution through (similarly hefty) gas taxes. Heavy EVs pay extra for the road damage, ICEs pay for their pollution to encourage cleaner cars, and heavy SUVs/pickup trucks pay both.

  > Tacking road maintenance costs onto other general goods in the form of taxes disproportionately hits people who try to avoid using a car for the environment and the liveability of their city, for example by taking public transport or a bike.

Those general goods will reflect the cost of actually getting them to the store. Why should I subsidize pornography magazines, canned pork, and other items that I don't use? Just have everybody pay their fair share of road wear, or at least as close to it as possible, and let the costs trickle down. If some items, e.g. baby diapers or bread, are deemed to be worthy of subsidy then directly subsidize them.

> Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their fair share of road wear?

The cost is already there, it's just extracted through taxes rather than through increased prices of transported goods.

The advantage of shifting maintenance costs over to those creating those costs in the first place is that it allows the market to properly optimize for those costs. If transporting those tomatoes by rail is actually cheaper overall once you factor in road maintenance costs, but you aren't charging those costs to the trucking companies, then they're just going to keep shipping tomatoes by truck even though it's less efficient. The invisible hand of the market cannot optimize for costs it doesn't know about.

That sounds interesting, do you have some more infos about this, how the 4th power comes about? I don't have any intuition why it would be that "high". Or some keywords to lead my google searches ;)

Start here

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

Study is here https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/sr/sr61g/61g.pdf

But raw data is hard to find

> Road wear grows at the 4th power of vehicular weight, assuming similar tire pressures.

That's fascinating, is there an equation for road wear in relation to vehicle weight and other factors?

--- EDIT ---

Ten seconds after I posted this, I see somebody else also asked this question and there is this link.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

The fourth power rule, I guess it was empirically measured.

Don't worry, I wasn't opposing the subsidy, just calling it for what it is. In a sense I'm helping reduce road wear by riding a bike. ;)

> Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use. For instance most local roads in cities and counties are paid for with property taxes.

Not true for a lot of states. Property tax is not used for roads. Georgia pays for roads using gas taxes and road use fees like registration (tolls contribute a very small amount). Florida is similar but they are much more toll heavy. Alabama is similar as too. All 3 states are in the top 10 roads in America[1]. I believe Georgia plans to charge higher registration fees for EVs at some point.

[1] https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/us-road-condition...

Georgia is 3rd in Federal road subsidies: https://www.ajc.com/news/feds-transportation-spending/ Usage/registration fees pay for less of roads than people think.

There is also this: https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/

It really depends on the road in question. I've absolutely voted for city bond projects paid for by property taxes which paid to redo intersections and sections of roads maintained by the city. There are county roads which are maintained by the county which gets most of its funding from property taxes, sales taxes, and vehicle registration taxes. Sure, some funding for some of these projects also come from the state's budgets which is often backed by gas taxes, some funding is from federal sources often by gas taxes, but some of it does come from my property taxes.

Then there are state roads, which are almost entirely funded from state and federal (gas) taxes, and federal roads which are almost exclusively funded from gas taxes.

On an average day the roads I personally drive on are probably at least 50% funded from property and sales taxes paid by my neighbors and me. Most of my miles driven are almost exclusively on streets managed by my city. For my neighbors commuting deeper into the city driving on a US highway, its probably closer to 5-10% coming from property and sales taxes.

EV fees are already much higher than the state gas tax they replace in many places, especially considering the extra sales tax on the battery, tax on electricity, and even personal property tax on the battery. The idea EVs get a free pass is a myth.

> especially considering the extra sales tax on the battery, tax on electricity, and even personal property tax on the battery.

I don't understand, do you pay an extra tax on the battery? Sales & property tax on a $60k car should always be the same, regardless of powertrain.

The electric car I drive (LEAF) costs about $12K-15K more than the roughly comparable ICE car (Versa). Taking the lower estimate, the sales tax difference in my state is $750, which is the state gas tax on just over 3100 gallons or about 100K miles of gasoline purchased for the car.

Yup, and consider that sales tax applies any time the car is sold, and often cars are sold multiple times in their lives.

I'm guessing the argument is that EV's cost more upfront (since they include a battery, etc), but have a lower cost of use. Since you get charged sales tax on the upfront cost, EV's get charged sales tax on a larger percentage of the overall "ownership cost" of the car.

Exactly. With gas cars, you pay for gasoline over time. With electric cars, you pay about 50/50 upfront on battery & over time on electricity. EV owners are being punished for paying for part of the “fuel” costs upfront. For whatever reason, capital costs for consumers are penalized with taxes more than incremental operating costs.

I mean, we don’t charge lower gas taxes to luxury cars because they pay more upfront, so I don’t know why this is now an expectation for EVs. And we’ve never had flat taxes for sales; gas is actually the only exception in the US I’m aware of, but that’s probably because of the price volatility of gas making a percentage tax hard to budget for.

> For whatever reason, capital costs for consumers are penalized with taxes more than incremental operating costs.

How so? Is the gas tax lower than the purchase taxes?

Yes, plus personal property tax. If I own the car for 8 years before selling it and the battery is about $10,000 In value and the sales tax rate is 6% or so, the tax I’m paying is already equal to the gas tax I already typically would pay driving a 30mpg the average number of miles per year in a typical state. And some localities have personal property taxes, and that $10,000 battery often puts the car in a higher bracket, so you end up paying a 4% personal property tax EVERY YEAR on the battery, which is about 5 times what state gas tax would be.

And keep in mind many states already charge EV owners a high registration fee that more than makes up for the lack of state gas taxes. So sales tax plus personal property tax plus EV registration fee… you’re already paying nearly an order of magnitude more than the typical consumer pays state gas tax.

It’s a pretty stupid idea to charge far more taxes for far lower emissions vehicles if you think climate change is real. Regardless of your rationale about use taxes or whatever. It’s just stupid.

Well I'd never heard of personal property tax before! So people are taxed for owning things, that they paid tax on when they bought them? I can see how that devalues an electric car vs an ICE alternative.

Yes, it’s pretty bad. It’s like a wealth tax for the middle class, and a pretty high rate, too.

At the state level, sure, but local roads are paid for by local governments using local general taxes, no? A random suburban residential street is not usually getting gas tax money.

A random suburban residential street could get away with being repaved every 100 years. The ones in my neighborhood bear contractor stamps from the 1920s at least. A big source of road wear is trucking traffic and usually truck routes are along state routes that get state gas tax funding for maintenance at least.

The amount of road funding in the US that comes from gas taxes and road fees varies by state between 1/3 to 2/3. Georgia is one of the lower and funds 40% of road spending from gas taxes, road fees, and tolls (using 2017 numbers.) [0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/mapping-h...

> Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use.

This isn’t true where I live. Taxes on gasoline purchases pay for the roads.

Gas taxes are a small portion of road costs, and are only for state roads. Cities generally don't receive road subsidies from the state. Cyclists drive on city roads, and city roads are generally paid for with property taxes or local sales taxes (if your city has them). And cyclists cause zero damage to roads, unlike cars or trucks

Really, cyclists are getting shafted because they have to pay for so many roads they can't use.

I'm pretty sure I know more about my area than you do and we do NOT use property taxes to pay for roads here. Property Taxes are used for things like:

* The general fund.

* Grants.

* Costs associated with assessing and collecting taxes.

* Justice Courts.

* Education.

Not maintaining local roads.

Then your city is the exception to the rule and can be dismissed as an outlier.

Ah, I see. I’m wrong, unless I’m correct, in which case I’m irrelevant.

Now you got it.

>My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking.

Which is itself a net subsidy for all sorts of other economic activity.

It's subsidies all the way down.

Indeed - if heavy trucking is subsidised then eventually the prices you're paying for something are lower.

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