And as others are pointing out, buy and drive smaller cars.

You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.

This is simply not true. Protectionism can have massive benefits. China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it. I happen to live in Korea which is similar in ways, and here too it's an enormously good thing for the country and its citizens.

The dream that protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era.

It's a great thing because it's basically funneling money from global megacorps to local corporations - which might still be huge, but nothing compared to e.g. Coca Cola or Google. This is a positive thing for everyone except for those companies' shareholders, and in a way the US as that's where almost all these megacorps are based.

This is really an important thing to realize, and I can't stress this enough. It's exactly like the EU imposing lots of regulations on Apple et. al. Apple isn't just going to take their bags and not sell there, nor have they raised prices to EU customers as a result of these rules. They simply comply.

Imagine if, say, Germany ruled that to sell Coke in Germany as an international company, you have to set up a 50-50 owned JV with an existing German company unrelated to Coke. You think Coke is neither going to give up on Germany nor are they going to raise their prices. They're simply going to be making less of a profit in Germany. Great for everyone. It has played out this way in every country with such rules in place.

No, it's not.

You're taking a very loose rule of thumb for road surface wear and baselessly applying it to tires.

Tire wear follows the rubber the tire is made out of. Soft rubber wears faster. Once you control for that it's acceleration and braking loads (i.e. driving style) that dominate. After that is when weight starts mattering.

If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same

There are a lot of people who can't easily change their behavior, e.g. because your theory is that they should buy smaller cars but their business requires a vehicle that can carry heavy loads once a week and they can't afford to buy a separate vehicle for that so the larger vehicle has to be their daily driver. Then a tax meant to induce a change in behavior is received by them as an unavoidable tax hike, which they naturally resent and oppose, and because of the nature of politics they'll then propose the opposite of whatever you're trying to do to them.

What you really need to do is to make it more possible for them to do the thing you want. For example, right now if you want to have a modern compact car for most use and an old truck you use once a week for truck stuff, you have to register and insure two vehicles. That isn't currently economical, but it's what you want to happen so they're not just driving the truck at all times.

What you want to do is to make it economical. Only charge a registration fee for someone's primary vehicle and waive the cost for a second one, and make insurance work in such a way that having two vehicles doesn't have any higher liability premiums than driving the same total number of miles in one vehicle.

Then they can do what you want, and in fact have the incentive to, because the smaller car will save them gas most of the time but they still have the truck when they need it.

My state realized a couple of decades ago that they were going to have the same kind of problem with their pension system and recreated it to be self-funding. They still have the old pensions to cover but at least they aren't continuing to dig themselves a deeper hole.

I don't have a citation to point to, though!

edit: there are roughly 100x registered passenger cars in the US as semis

Fact: In California, the number of trucks is about 300K vs cars at 14M (about 40x).

Fact: California AADT on roads for trucks ranges from a couple of percent up to almost 50%. Very few roads have less than 10% AADT from trucks.

Fact: Damage to roads goes as fourth power of axle load.

Speculation: Given that tires are the primary means to transmit that damage to the roadway, it wouldn't surprise me if the trucks are responsible for the vast majority of tire particulates.

Reference: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/traffic-operat...

This is why states operate weigh stations — overweight trucks cause significant damage.

20% * 18 = 3.6 vs 80% * 4 = 3.2, so barring some 3rd category semi’s would have more tires. They also have a lot more weight on each of those tires.

Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.

If it's wrong by a factor of 8 in the simplest thought experiment it's not a law. You can obviously make a heavy load act like many small ones, or concentrate a light load so it does a lot of damage.

Constant * X^4 just coincidentally went through the data in a single 1950s dataset...and for some reason we're calling it a law 70 years later, when it's really just a loose trend that we could easily break with a little engineering. And we probably have broken it...tires, roads, and vehicles have changed a fair bit in 7 decades.