EVs are starving states of tax money to fix potholes and build roads | Hacker News Reader

EVs are starving states of tax money to fix potholes and build roads

fortune.com

We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for.

The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road.

A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle.

A truck causes 16 billion times more damage than a bicycle.

A truck causes 31,000 times more damage than a Prius.

We built roads mainly for trucks. Because this infrastructure ensures, that we have food in the supermarkets, material on the construction sites and in worst case, tanks quickly in the areas needed. So if it was me, trucks can use the streets for free all day long and tax me for that, to build and maintain this infrastructure.

But for private leisure like biking an extra pathway, no thanks, they can pay for that themselves. Its nice to have.

Those trucks are doing things for people, and different people cause different amounts of trucks. If you have some cool use case for a ton of trucks--as a consumer, buying a kind of product or service that causes trucks to go back and forth to satisfy your interests--you should bear more of the cost of maintaining the roads for those trucks than I do, or you get a tragedy of the commons where the cost of constantly rebuilding roads is thrown at everyone and no one is incentivized to lower their use of trucks.

There are well over 300,000,000 million people in America, each needing food, clothing, and entertainment in order to be productive members of society.

The sheer number of humans necessitates the existence of trucks.

The fairytale alternative that some people spout where everyone walks or uses bicycles and roads last forever is perfect as long as almost everyone dies first.

Either that or the world as we know it must be destroyed so that this fictional better one can take its place.

While we all do need trucks, some people and some businesses cause the need for more trucks than other people. Just because something is provided by government doesn't entirely divorce it from capitalism.

Bike paths get people to drive less, saving road maintenance money.

Interesting you've omitted buses. My math says they cost more than an uber.

But otherwise - just like sibling said - roads are already built for trucks... I guess then we should give discounts to light cars?

Maybe you'll start getting trucks with more wheels to compensate (in urban areas).

Or just smaller vehicles for the last mile.

In many (most?) states, large trucks are taxed on this basis.

Do they pay proportionally to the 4th power of their weight?

https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

> Freight trucks cause 99% of wear-and-tear on US roads, but only pay for 35% of the maintenance. This $60B subsidy causes extra congestion and pollution, and taxpayers pay the bill.

> It seems obvious that the heavier the vehicle, the more damage it does to roads over time. A 40,000 pound big rig probably does a bit more damage than your average 3500 pound consumer vehicle, right? It turns out that vehicle road damage doesn’t rise linearly with weight. Road damage rises with the fourth power of weight, and this means that a 40,000 pound truck does roughly 10,000 times more damage to roadways than the average car [1]!

> In other words, one fully loaded 18-wheeler does the same damage to a road as 9600 cars. According to the American Trucking Associations (ATA), the trucking industry represents 11% of all vehicles on the road in the US, while paying 35% of all highway taxes. But if trucks represent 11% of vehicles, their heavy loads cause them to do 99% of all road damage! [2] The trucking industry paid $35 Billion in highway taxes in 2005, according to the ATA. Since most of the $100 Billion in highway taxes paid goes to maintenance (and US infrastructure maintenance is far behind), this implies that the trucking industry receives a $60 Billion annual subsidy from other drivers.

Numbers are old, but extrapolate truck miles, dollars, and damage accordingly.

This is kinda true, but places blame in the wrong place.

The TL;DR is that the stress caused by EV's being heavier is miniscule in practice on any road with any meaningful truck traffic.

Whoever is heaviest should be paying most of the cost of creation and maintenance. Sometimes this would be "any EV" + ICE trucks. For most of the roads being talked about, it would be larger trucking companies.

Why?

Roads are weird - the stress caused by axle load is a fourth power law.

So one 5 axle truck causes as much stress as 10643 cars.

Don't confuse stress with damage, because as the trucking associations (correctly) point out , properly designed and maintained roads aren't damaged by loads they are meant to handle - environmental factors matter as much to deterioration as anything else.

But building, maintaining, and updating the roads so they can handle the load and not be damaged does cost much more for these roads than other ones.

This is because roads with a single 5 axle truck has to be built to handle as much load as 10000 cars in order to not be damaged. It also has to be maintained in that state. So it's a bit of a red herring to say the trucks don't cause damage - this is true on roads designed for them (and not true on roads not designed for them) - but doesn't change the fact that they are causing most of the cost to build and maintain roads that can support large trucks.

In the end, because of 4th power law here, the cost should be apportioned to who you have to design and maintain for. Nobody should be freeloading, whether it's ICE trucks, EV's, or larger trucks.

Anything else is just one group externalizing costs onto another. For examples, in states that just use "mileage driven" and charge everyone the same, most drivers are subsidizing truckers and larger vehicles, and because of the 4th power law, often to an insane degree.

Maybe that makes sense, but i've not seen good arguments as to why.

There are multiple factors. There is vehicle related degradation and also weather related. In areas with a freeze that cycle road maintenance has a flat cost component. Someone needs to pay for roads.

I agree someone has to pay - but as I said, it should be in proportion to who is causing the cost.

In places where it is totally flat, or even close to flat, cool, charge everyone (EV, non-EV). In places where it is not, charge everyone differently.

Good points, but I'd also add - ICE cars depend on continuous fuel delivery, done using heavy trucks. So this throws in another layer.

California has an EV-specific registration fee. It started at $100/year, is now $200, and will be $274 starting in 2028.

I don't have data on what fraction of CA's gas & related taxes go to actually building and maintaining roads. (CA does divert money from the transportation fund, which is funded by one of the gas taxes, to "not road" transportation and road stuff for "not cars/trucks.")

It's $7.3k USD for 100k miles in NZ... Same as 3.5 tonne diesel truck.

Texas does something similar with EV registration fees. The first time fee is $400 and then it’s $200 a year after that.

Presumably efficient ICE and hybrids have cost even more, given the US's sluggishness in adopting EVs and it being based on fuel sales.

A lot of EVs have big 19" or 20" wheels, which get damaged easily on bad roads. I would think people who can afford a Lucid or whatever would also appreciate having surfaces to drive on that don't bend their rims. Just a small counter-vailing factor.

Didn't read the article.

Washington State is actively exploring taxing all drivers by mileage driven, self reported, to accommodate this shift.

Honor-system based taxes; Do they actually work?

It could if they make it so that the tax is also applied based on the miles driven whenever the car changes ownership or is disposed of at the end of its life. Cheating on the self reported mileage would only defer the tax, not avoid it.

I forsee even more dead vehicles ending up in blackberry thickets if that happens.

Washington State currently has a flat $225 in electric vehicle fees.

https://dol.wa.gov/vehicles-and-boats/vehicles/vehicle-regis...

...currently broken out as two separate "Electric Car" fees at $100 and $50, and a "Transportation electrification fee" at $75.

This article is bullshit. The gas tax hasn’t kept pace with inflation anyway, so states just raid their general fund. There so few EVs on the road in comparison to ice cars that the difference is even more negligible.

Assuming EVs are actually the cause, this seems like a problem with an obvious solution: make the vehicle registration fees for EVs higher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com