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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

>Another complaint: drivers are paying for the roads. This is untrue anywhere in the US. Drivers only partially subsidize roads everywhere.

I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, but this it needs to be noted that most road damage is done by weather and heavyweight vehicles like semis/trash/buses/delivery vehicles etc., not regular passenger vehicles.

Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.

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This is true, but it's also changing in interesting ways: the rise of both light-truck SUVs and EVs as a whole means that passenger cars are, on average, heaver than they've ever been before.

This is still a small portion of overall road damage, but it matters in places like NYC. In particular it matters on our bridges and cantilevered highways, where passenger traffic can't be easily filtered away from weight-sensitive areas like commercial traffic can.

>Semis et al. definitely do not pay taxes proportionate with the damage they cause to the roads, but then again we all need them even if we don't drive.

I don't think there would be much point. At the end of the day we'd all pay it because we all consume the goods they deliver or transport during intermediary steps in the supply chain.

I guess you could argue that the status quo is somewhat of a tax incentive that favors local manufacturing (i.e they use the roads for every step of the chain vs imported goods which only use it for delivery). I don't take much issue with that.

Repairing road damage is only a part of road cost. We do not build expensive 2-16 lane roads and massive parking lots to support trucks and buses. We build them because everyone needs to drive their personal vehicle to work each day at 8am.

Then the space taken up by unnecessarily big roads and parking lots further stretches distances between destinations out, leading to... more roads required.

I agree that semis are subsidized to a ridiculous degree, but I don't agree that we necessarily _need_ them. What we need is a way to transport things, and in a non-subsidized world, we'd probably come up with a different way which could be just as good or better.

Note that diesel is taxed nearly 40% higher than gasoline per gallon in the US. And shipping trucks use a lot more gallons of gas (total and per mile).

Should the rate be higher? Perhaps. But it's already a bit slanted towards vehicle weight based on fuel type and consumption.

Electric vehicles, and especially electric shipping trucks, are going to require finding new taxation sources.

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