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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.

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I was also going to mention Japan. All highways are tolled and Japan also has virtually zero street parking, and free parking is mostly limited to private lots owned by stores. Of course, the more rural a place you go, the less this generalization is true.

Even if you already own a car, it is in general more expensive, inconvenient and maybe even slower to choose to drive to work. As a general rule of thumb, driving long distances costs about the same as taking the shinkansen for one person, is slower and makes more sense once you have 3+ people in the car.

I think overall this is fair and leads to much better outcomes than US-style "it's my right to drive and park for free where ever I go, but I will fight any proposal to improve or subsidize transit because 'my taxes!'".

Hit the nail on the head. If only my country followed that model x)

From an outsider's perspective this actually appears to be a happy medium. You can do most normal things without the need for a vehicle or the costs incurred. But if in your free time you want to take some trip to the middle of nowhere the possibility of that still exists.

It's similar in France, maybe half that number though. It's a good system. The one's who use the highways pay for them. The highways are in a very good state in France.

The relatively high fees on French autoroutes are offset by the good quality, yes. But the principal objection may be the way in which said autoroutes were privatized after being built with public money, no?

Yes but it was long ago and people forgot. But yes, French citizens are paying for the autoroutes twice: built with public money and then again with tolls to use them.

Sure, you may multiple times but they don't just get built once either. There is non-stop maintenance for a road system.

There's maintenence in local roads too. And maintence is broadly relative to the damage caused, which is relative to the 4th power of axel weight. A 30 ton truck will cause thousands of times the damage of a 2 ton car, but doesn't pay thousands of times the price.

Presumably the privatisation process involved the transfer of cash from the companies buying them to the government, and hopefully that was more than the cost of construction.

You may be right about the resources but that's pretty steep, between 10 and 20 dollars per hour and I would think that highly discourages workers earning hourly wages of that amount or less from traveling that way very much.

In Houston about $95 per month was about all the market could stand to commute on a modern 21st century tollway. Once it got over $100 it looked to me like it was beginning to become possible for an elected official to get in based on a promise to reduce or eliminate the tolls. I don't think that's been an issue yet but the tolls have recently been reduced for the first time ever.

Actually it's the unseen waste of resources that discourages me from driving any more than necessary, rather than the cost to me of operating a vehicle.

What's the condition of the road like? I assume that it is immaculate.

I also ride motorcycles here. They’re fantastic.

It also adds to the price of food that gets transported from one place to another, and, as such, acts as a regressive tax on people who pay the biggest part of their income on their basic needs (like food). That's one of the main reasons why I don't get the "death to cars!" movement and why I regard it as mostly middle-class privileged discourse: no cars means fewer or worst roads, means food being a lot more expensive.

A truck can carry 10 or 20 times more cargo than a car. The truck toll is not 20x more.

The movement to reduce car use is about replacing them with better alternatives such as efficient local public transport and high speed rail, not going back to travelling on horseback.

> The truck toll is not 20x more.

Yes, that was my exact point. The car owners (of which I'm one) subsidise cheaper food for many not car-owners (many of them, presumably, poorer people) by paying more expensive road tolls relative to our vehicles' sizes. And that's good.

Make road toll for trucks commensurate to the real wear they're adding to the roads then you're increasing the price of food (by increasing the cost of transporting said food), hence you're making it harder for poorer people.

That's a very roundabout way to justify it though. How much would toll really affect food prices per person?

And is there really no other way to offset that?

> How much would toll really affect food prices per person?

Transportation costs (of which toll costs are a reasonable part, my brother is a lorry driver, I would know) are a big part of food costs, what's "roundabout" about it? That's how the economy works, that's how putting food on people's tables works.

> And is there really no other way to offset that?

No, one cannot offset it that by whooshing it way or by creating a clever phone app for it. This is real life, not Silicon Valley-make believe. People's lives depend on this, on the price of food, that is.

Road transport of goods accounts for a majority of wear on the roads. Rail is naturally more cumbersome because railroads are less ubiquitous than roads, but it is much more efficient in terms of both energy usage and labor.

If we subsidize road transport by letting tax payers or commuters pay for their road wear and tear, we end up with more road transport at the cost of more labor and more energy use. That's deadweight loss caused by the government distorting the market with road subsidies.

Road transport should be used where its flexibility gives it a competitive advantage, not be the default because taxpayers subsidize it.

One way to compensate lower-income earners for higher food prices is to lower taxes for those with low incomes, making the tax rate more progressive. Another is to reduce VAT for basic needs products like food.

Wouldn't say food is especially expensive in Japan or that they don't have enough roads.

Yes, exactly, because the "small" cars are paying the roads for the trucks transporting the food (through relatively higher tolls, through direct or indirect taxation applied on "small" cars' owners etc).

Take the small cars completely out of the equation (like banning them) and you're putting all the costs of building those roads on whom?

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