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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though.

If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.

Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road:

Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.

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The vast majority of damage on the road is caused by vehicles with high axle load, e.g. trucks, especially overloaded trucks. IIRC the damage is proportional to fourth power of the axle load.

As a consequence, personal cars barely register.

It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.

To carry this further, of maintenance taxes for roads were structured appropriately, trucks would pay so much that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship across the states in Semis. We'd likely see a resurgence of rail transport.

Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon.

Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.

If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.

> If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more

We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.

Taxes on gas?

Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.

Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight.

Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.

Add a mechanism for folks to file for a rebate for distance driven on private roads (an uncle's driveway is roughly a quarter mile, so half a mile six days a week 52 times each year would equal a 156 mile reduction).

Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.

The gas tax is supposedly to pay for roads. Now that they are supposedly paying for the roads via tolls, I guess we can expect that they will not decrease the gas tax but add another tax that supposedly pays for the roads.

The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.

There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.

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