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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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The "problem" with that tax is that if it's applied fairly, it gets very big very fast. The damage to the road goes up with weight, but not linearly. Not a square factor, either. Not even cube. It's to the fourth power.
Start applying that to long haul trucks and the whole industry will be bankrupt in a month. The implication being that we are all subsidizing that industry with taxes on roads. Including that one trucker with a "who is John Galt?" sticker on the back.
That said, this is also a very good argument for improving cargo trains to the point where most long haul trucking goes away.
And frankly, I'm really ok with this.
Trains should be the backbone for shipping. They are WAY more fuel efficient, like 3 to 4x more efficient than shipping by truck. Rail requires far less maintenance. And there's always the option install a 3rd rail and use electricity instead of fossil fuels to ship.
Speaking of road tax, you know that bad-faith argument about how cyclists need to pay our "fair share?" Well, I would be happy to pay 1¢ for my 10 kg bicycle if everybody with a car had to pay fairly by weight^4^.
Maybe it's because I don't really know anyone passionate on either side of this issue, but I've never heard of this argument. I know you said it's a bad faith argument, but I can't really imagine what a cyclist's fair share would be aside from maybe widening a road to add a bike lane lol
You see it a lot on in the comment sections of local newspapers or the city specific subs on Reddit.
Makes sense, that's where my local NIMBYs hang too.
I heard it on Top Gear.
No reason the tax had to scale exactly to match the damage though. At least make it painful enough so people consider whether a larger vehicle is worth it.
What I'm suggesting is to ramp up the tax on roads over several years in order to pay for the initial outlay on new train infrastructure. Then you don't need 90% of the trucking industry at all.
Which would be great for many other reasons.
Train infrastructure is being removed around the world - good luck convincing people to build more.
The fact is a train turns one trip into three trips - truck to the railway station, train to another station, truck to the final destination. That often adds days to what otherwise might be a 3 hour delivery - because trains are only cheap if you send about a hundred or so trucks full of cargo on a single trip.
Only really makes sense for really long trips but more and more of those are done by ship or airplane. Trucks aren't going anywhere.
What if it's not a larger vehicle, but transitioning from a petrol burning vehicle to an electric vehicle?
We don't want to give people reasons to hold on to old combustion vehicles any longer than they have to, but the roads of course need to be made safe for passengers and pedestrians and wildlife, I agree.
If they hold on to their existing vehicle than thats just another upside. If they buy a new gasoline car instead of an EV this is bad. But EVs dont have to be insanely heavy if we stop the whole cars getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger crap. They will still be heavier than their gasoline counterpart but one solution might be 2 tax brackets: One for gasoline cars and one for evs that has the same taxation levels but allows for, lets say, 500kg more weight in them
So much of that freight should be moved by rail.
Tax based on weight to 4th power would work if we nationalized railways like roads.
Only if rail can figure out their shit and hire enough workers and give them all time off. Too many train derailments from precision scheduled railroading.
Actually maintained rail shouldn't have this problem, but the private companies like Norfolk Southern spend the minimum amount to keep them operational.
With a budget just a fraction of highway upkeep and expansion they should be able to be kept in good repair.
Why bother with maintenance when the EPA handles the cleanup?
Yeah, I think turning highways back into methods of travel instead of "rolling warehouses saving Walmart a few bucks not storing anything on site" is a good thing.
There's no need to have the tax be the exact same for every vehicle class. Proper long haul trucks have to be heavy, private cars do not.
The US already has 8 or 10 different vehicle classes defined by weight, the lightest being 6000lbs (which is still ridiculously high, my VW Up is 2200lbs).
Oh well. I guess they’ll just have to go bankrupt then.
And now you starve. None of the stores will stay open long without them.
That should mean they don't go bankrupt though. If their service is vital, people will pay for it even if the prices rise. It would mean an increase in prices for goods admittedly as the stores try to recoup the increased logistics costs, but intuitively I'd imagine the financial impact on the end customer wouldn't be as much because they're paying for the road upkeep either way, just via higher taxes in the current state and via increased prices in the new one.
That's not a supply and demand thing though. There just wouldn't be product to buy because there's no way to get it to the stores. It's less about the bankruptcy and more about availability.
I mean the supply and demand for the trucking companies. Shipping is a vital service, if it had high taxes, it would have to dramatically increase prices for their shipping service, but they shouldn't go out of business because everyone else would still pay those dramatically high prices, because they'd have to
Think of the shareholders!
In Australia (and I assume other similar countries) trucks have tax concessions to avoid the cost of food fluctuating too much with the cost of diesel. This tax doesn't need to be any different.
Long haul trucking shouldn't exist.
As a truck driver, I would like to ask, how would you acquire all the “stuff” you have bought over the years? I am reasonably sure most of it was not produced locally to you. And the raw materials almost certainly aren’t locally sourced. Trucking and logistics generally has its issues, and you only have glimpsed a fraction of them, but it is absolutely necessary for modern society. Unless you’re proposing we kill off 2/3rds of humanity and go back to hunter-gatherer. Not a fan of that idea.
He's proposing trains should do the 'Long Haul' portion.
Which have their own issues. Namely, to my knowledge, upfront cost and lack of flexibility. I’m sure there are others.
Here in the US, you are unlikely to find enough people willing to think far enough ahead for that to happen. Too many emotions guiding actions.
The cost has already been paid. Even small farming communities have rail line access that's mostly been abandoned because the line owners switched business models.
As for flexibility, again, that's mostly an issue with how rail line management has evolved. From shorter more frequent trains to ultra long infrequent trains. Mostly to cut the cost of staffing.
The solution is simple, nationalize the rail service. Put it under the USPS and have them figure out scheduling to optimize the speed of goods shipping.
The current state of the rail system is entirely due to the monopolistic nature of ownership. The incentive is to increase prices as much as possible while shipping to the fewest stops possible. Profit motives are in direct conflict with generalized shipping.
The reason trunking works today is the public nature of roads. Well, why shouldn't rail lines be equally public? We practically gave the property away to the current rail owners with the notion it was for the public good... They've failed that.
But if the true costs were quantized in the formula and not just externalized maybe it would suddenly make more sense. After all, in the end, society pays for it no matter what.
Even if we put 100% of freight on trains, and expand the existing rail network 10x, the need for trucking infrastructure would not decrease by any significant amount. Trains can't stop at every single business that needs freight, and trucks are still needed to get that freight from the railport to its destination (this is called "last mile" freight, but it can be up to a few hundred miles depending on where the nearest logistics hub is compared to the destination).
By the way, we already use trains significantly. Look up the intermodal logistics network. The general concept is smaller trucks pick up freight from different businesses, consolidate it in a single warehouse, then the freight gets put on full size trucks to move to the nearest railport and the trailer is loaded on a train which carries it as far as possible, then the reverse happens at the other end. The vast majority of freight movement uses this method.
You've moved away from the part which specifies long-haul trucking. To my understanding this is an area where trains are a reasonable solution.
Last mile coverage we also have room for improvement with much smaller vehicles, like bikes.
My point is that long haul is a very small minority of long-distance freight. Anything that can fly, does. Anything else will go on a train if a route exists (this is where rail expansion would help, but there are other problems with that we won't address). The only freight that travels long-distance is truckloads that can't fly (hazardous goods that are dangerous to put on a plane, or stuff like certain foods that could be damaged by the pressure changes in flight) AND doesn't have a good train route to take. My cross-country routes were always stuff like fresh produce or other foods that would be damaged by the pressure. Everything else would travel a few states, but never from one coast to the other.
And you can't put 3 full pallets on a bike, you'll always need trucks to some extent.
Neither should lots of short haul trucking, more specifically drayage trucking, that industry sucks. We probably need to move more towards vans and stuff.
So? That money is still coming from somewhere. If the freight industry can't afford to pay then it means we are subsiding them CURRENTLY. They by the very nature of capitalism deserve to go out of business
True but unfettered capitalism is a terrible model.
If you look down further, I'm just saying you can't deal with the problem in this specific way.
Trucks already pay a lot more in tax and regulatory expenses. In my state, annual car registration is $30-ish. Annual registration for a full-sized 18-wheeler is $1350 for the truck and $30-300 for each trailer. They also have to pay annual fees at the federal level which can be $600+/year, and an additional fuel tax on top of the existing state sales tax on diesel which I don't know the rate of right now. All of that applies to every single power unit and trailer in a fleet.
Trucks should be taxed much higher than cars, but too many people don't know or just don't care that this is already the case, and it has been this way since the 1940s.
They are taxed a lot. Are they taxed to the fourth power of axel weight? Not even close.
Based on your math, you'd be charging almost $2 million per year per truck. With that much money, you'd be building an entire nations worth of brand new infrastructure several times over each year.
To be fair, it's the fourth power of the axle weight, not vehicle weight. So it's not as extreme for long haul trucks as you make it sound, but still much higher than for a car