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Sort of but road erosion is to the fourth power of weight while fuel consumption is approximately linear with weight, so the tax is not exactly proportional to use.

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Do you have a source for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were supralinear but that feels high to me.

Like we have a short segment of road in my town that’s almost exclusively and regularly used by garbage trucks, which are ~10x the weight of a car. I don’t think the road gets repaved 10,000x more often than other roads though?

It's even got its own Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Aha, 4th power of axle load - that makes more sense. Thanks!

Not all road structures are equal (it's easy to design a road to last 20 years before resurfacing almost regardless of the loads put on it, and the cost variances aren't that major). Temperature variations are a bigger limiter of life of a road, especially freeze-thaw cycles

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