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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

Diesel should cost a lot more, almost all of the road damage is by heavy trucks. Trucking is being subsidized by all of us.

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And the advantages are being enjoyed by all of us, at least in the US.

If you’re the kind of person who eats food, uses toilet paper and paper towels, and lives inside a building made of lumber, insulation, HVAC, pipes, and electrical components, those all got to your point of use on a truck.

The US has a really good freight train network. Yet there's a good chance the products you discussed didn't use the much more efficient train for the long distance portion of their transit.

If it's more efficient, is that not an arbitrage opportunity?

- it's less convenient. If the cost difference is small because trucking is cheap people will pay more for convenience.

- the cost difference is smaller than it should be. Trucking is highly subsidized, since diesel taxes don't come anywhere close to paying for the roads. OTOH railroads have to maintain their own infrastructure.

... Usually on the best land they were gifted for building the railway line on the first place, so heavily subsidized as well

They were gifted the land when the land was close to worthless because the transport costs for western products were higher than their value. The train is what made western land valuable. That land had value before the train came through was almost pure speculation -- people bought and settled land assuming that it would have value once a train arrived.

It was a real subsidy, but it was small and it was > 100 years ago.

OTOH, the land the freeways and roads were built on already had significant value before it was expropriated for road construction and wasn't paid for with diesel tax revenue, so it's yet another subsidy for truck traffic.

It's efficient in terms of energy, but slow after decades of neglect. People pay for fast.

Ah yes, the "free market" fallacy.

Watch this:

- My trucks require roads and do more damage to roads than trains do to rail tracks? No problem, roads are paid for by the taxpayer, while the rail companies have to pay to build and maintain their tracks.

- My trucks produce harmful emissions and particulates that trains don't? No problem, I don't pay for any of that.

- My trucks kill people in accidents? Again, no problem, not paying for any of that.

Yay, we've successfully optimized out any inefficiencies of trucks by externalizing literally all that's possible to externalize. Isn't the free market great?

It has a good rail freight system but it’s running at capacity. Trucks are still needed for connections.

This is where the road subsidy becomes much more apparent. We use appropriation and tax dollars to expand the road network, but the railroads generally don't have access to either. So they're not expanding other than by running longer and longer trains.

As for connections, electric trucks would work great for that.

> We use appropriation and tax dollars to expand the road network, but the railroads generally don't have access to either.

The federal government leases tracks using Amtrack money (among other public agencies). They get low interest rate loans as well. Definitely nothing near Chinese level of subsidies.

Businesses will have an incentive to transport goods efficiently, if the costs are not subsidized by consumers.

Why does that matter? If you consume more toilet paper and paper towels and lumber, insulation, HVAC, pipes, and electrical components, then you would end up paying proportionally more.

Just because everyone benefits from it doesn’t mean it’s good to subsidize it.

This is basically the definition of something that should be subsidized. Same story for public education, health care, clean drinking water, etc

Those others have far fewer externalities than burning diesel to move heavy trucks.

Different kind of "everyone benefits from it." There's "individual people benefit when they pay for themselves and everyone does this" and then there's "everyone benefits from each individual receiving it." Public education etc. is the second one: we all as a society benefit when little Timmy gets educated, so we subsidize it in order to maximize that benefit. Transportation of goods is the first kind. I and all of my neighbors benefit from it, but we each benefit individually. When Bob down the street indirectly pays a few dollars to have some item transported to a store by truck, that doesn't benefit me at all. Likewise Bob doesn't benefit from my usage. "Everyone benefits" just because it's ubiquitous.

In economics terms, you want to subsidize things with positive externalities, because they'd otherwise be used less than the most efficient amount. I don't think trucking has positive externalities. It definitely has negative externalities, which would be an argument for taxing it (which of course we already do in various ways) rather than subsidizing it.

Not when subsidizing it prevents us addressing the bigger problem. Subsidize electric trucks, subsidize using cargo trains for 99% of the transportation of goods instead.

We need energy, therefore we should subsidize coal plants.

Diesel, or rather energy, is also a way bigger part of every single aspect of our modern world. Let's take drinking a can of coke as an example:

First degree: It came into your home from the factory through the shop. 80% product + 20% diesel.

Second degree: Product is aluminum can + water + ingredients. Aluminium came to be a can through 70% refined aluminum + 15% diesel (transport) + 15% electrical energy (pressing the can). Water was pumped locally: free from the ground + 100% electrical energy. Ingredients came from a farm: 80% local product + 20% diesel.

Third degree: Electrical energy came from 40% gas turbines, 30% hydro, 30% wind farm. Ingredients from farms came from soil 40%, 35% nitrogen fertilizer (== gas), 25% diesel (machines)

... and so on

If you decompose everything all the way, the global tally is either matter, which is given to us by nature for free. Or energy; The sources of which being vastly composed of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel prices affect everything.

These fossil resources being finite we can also conclude we're experiencing a centuries-long hay-fire. But hey, we're merely plateauing right now; and most of us won't be here for the harder part of the crash.

And I didn't even mention climate change.

> Or energy; The sources of which being vastly composed of fossil fuels.

But we can choose to change this. This is too often presented as though it's inevitable but it isn't, we went from "This can't work in theory" to "OK it works in theory but can't work in practice" to now "OK it works in practice but it's too expensive".

Fossil fuels aren't magic, if we actually wanted Crude Oil we could make it, we don't, but the "Without fossil fuels there is no plastic / fertilizer / etc. is fear mungering, we can just make these things. As you explained the matter is right here already, we're standing on damp rock, which if you wanted uh, water or rock means you couldn't come to a better place. If you need Helium, yeah, that's not great, making Helium from scratch is relatively difficult, but the vast majority of things we need but are today made from fossil fuels, including jet fuel, fertilizer, plastics we could make with things we didn't dig out of the deep Earth if we use energy to make them. It's not impossible it's just expensive, and last I checked Mother Nature didn't invent money, that's our fault - so expensive isn't even a real problem, we made it up.

This should be a per-mile fee that varies based on weight, modeling road damage. Set the tax to specifically counteract the implicit subsidy.

Otherwise you are taxing diesel sedans and tractor trailers the same amount per gallon when a gallon to the latter does far more road damage.

Actually fuel it’s a good proxy for that: its use is proportional to mileage and weight

But fuel usage it not proportional to mileage and weight across vehicle classes, and damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power.

A diesel sedan might use 1.25 gal for 100 ton-miles, while a tractor trailer might use a third of that (though, to be fair, I thought this would be a bigger delta before I looked).

But then if you look at "Equivalent Single Axle Loads", a tractor trailer is ~2 ESAL while a diesel sedan is ~0.0003 ESAL. So we're talking maybe 0.13 ESAL/gal for the former vs 0.0001 ESAL/gal for the latter.

there are two sides of this argument.

only way we are able to eat affordable food is because some diesel truck is transporting it.

so maybe we must subsidize diesel fuel, to decrease grocery prices?

Why should food being transported further be subsidized more than locally sourced food?

Local food often has higher transportation costs than food from further away. Long distance food transportation is done by highly efficient ship & rail. The last mile transportation costs typically dominate. And semi-trailer from warehouse to grocery store is far more efficient than half-ton truck from farmer to farmer's market.

And then both are dominated by the drive from the grocery store to your house. If you care about food carbon emissions, walk/bike to your grocery store. That'll have far more impact than food choice.

Type of food still has sizeable impact even if the food miles issue has been misleading. Cutting red meat and dairy likely beats cycling for errands for example.

The switch from an ICE car to an EV (and assuming a standard US amount of driving) probably beats possible diet changes.

You can of course do all of these things.

> only way we are able to eat affordable food is because some diesel truck is transporting it.

I would also add to that affordable food is being first produced by agricultural machinery running on diesel, which is then transported by trucks running on diesel on roads build by machinery running on diesel. There is a good youtube video about this from channel driving 4 answers.

Yes, but if you don't tax it correctly you will misallocate resources.

Diesel will get used excessively and you will get more road wear, as the user proposed. If you tax it, you will pay more directly for goods, but as costs rise people will be incentivized to find more efficient transport solutions.

It might still be worth it if road wear is cheap or the predictable misuse is predictable and that saves money somehow, but in all likelihood little harm would come from a fair treatment of diesel vs. gasoline etc. taking into account road wear of each vehicle class. It would be more natural to tax vehicle weight, hours driven etc. directly based on a sound model of societal cost though.

You are not wrong in theory, but this reads like an econ 100 short answer. It ignores all the political and social aspects of a very complex system.

Yes, I agree, and of course I sort of try to qualify it a bit. I think cheap, easy transportation has its own value. Creating a sort of fluidity, competition and so on, and it's not like one can't imagine a situation where somebody is the guy who controls all the rail deliveries to a town, or where he has bought all the rail transport demand in the past, so now he gets to be first. Roads, meanwhile, are open to everybody.

At the same time, I really do think that it could be beneficial to shrink trucks down, automate them, or create something which has so many bogies that the road wear is not greater than on a car, so I sort of argued for what I saw as theoretically fair without actually being sure that the outcome would be what I hoped for.

> only way we are able to eat affordable food is because some diesel truck is transporting it.

False, if poor people can't afford food, there are already food stamps and various programs in other countries.

This 'affordable' food is causing obesity, a combination of diesel subsidies, agricultural subsidies. Cheap food causes metabolic syndrome, and a range of chronic diseases, which we pay as healthcare, 20% of GDP and the fastest growing sector.

If its cheap food we want, stop ethanol subsidies. All that land (hundreds of millions of acres) can grow very very affordable food.

This foolishness is being repeated everywhere. India started E20 (Ethanol) mandate and price of eggs went up.

False, unhealthy and healthy food both take diesel to farm and transport at scale.

It's bad policy to influence prices by subsidizing one particular input that has much broader uses. Subsidizing diesel means you're indirectly subsidizing rice and flour, but also luxury cars and fancy watches.

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