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To fix the potholes and crumbling roads, federal, state and local governments rely on fuel taxes, which raise more than US$80 billion a year and pay for around three-quarters of what the U.S. spends on building new roads and maintaining them.
I recently purchased an electric car, the Tesla Model 3. While swerving down a particularly rutted highway in New York, the economist in me began to wonder, what will happen to the roads as fewer and fewer cars run on gasoline? Who will pay to fix the streets?
Will toll roads become universal to bridge the funding gap?
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How Electric Cars Could Make America's Crumbling Roads Even Worse
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday February 27 2019, @06:49AM (7 children)
1. Faulty logic: Whether or not trains are subsidized is irrelevant to the question of whether trucks pay their fair share.
2. Faulty logic: the fact that trucks already pay a lot of tax does not mean they pay their way.
3. You conflate policy issues (should trucks pay the full cost of the damage they do) with factual issues (do trucks pay the full cost of the costs they cause).
Here is another article:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-0215-sunday-cars-weight-20150215-story.html [latimes.com]
Does that $50,000/year represent 9600 times the amount paid for the average car?
More links:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/06/02/trucking-industry-imposes-up-to-128-billion-in-costs-on-society-each-year/ [streetsblog.org]
Older article:
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/25/us/study-asserts-heavy-trucks-cause-big-damage-to-roads.html [nytimes.com]
This looks like the source for the 9,600 times average car costs:
http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf [gao.gov]
More recent:
https://www.overdriveonline.com/do-truckers-pay-enough-for-highways-white-house-suggests-not/ [overdriveonline.com]
Is that enough citations for you? There are plenty more.
I fully expect you will reply with some bullshit with no citations, no facts behind your claims. But maybe you will surprise me.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 27 2019, @03:18PM (5 children)
Citation needed for that 9600 number. You are aware, I believe, that some asshole told Congress that fewer than 1% of opiate prescriptions resulted in addictions. No one seems to know where that lie came from, but it was used to justify all kinds of stupid shit. What is the source for that number? The government estimated it? Citation desperately needed.
You do offer something good with that second link - shipping by rail. I like the idea. Back when it cost roughly fifty cents per ton to ship stuff by truck, it then cost two cents per ton to ship by rail. Rail is cheap, cheap, cheap. Are you aware of any problems with shipping by rail? No? Well, let me help you. Rail shipment is about as dependable as a teenage daredevil driver with ADD, epilepsy, narcolepsy, alcoholism, AND a drug addiction. That is - you ship it, and you may or may not ever see it again.
I enjoyed my coast-to-coast runs. Take something or other out to San Diego, hop back across the mountains to Nogales, and load up lettuce or whatever. When you're loaded, haul ass for Miami, Elizabeth City, New York City, Rhode Island, Quebed, Toronto - or wherever. I could have that lettuce or whatever at the market in 3 1/2 days - 5 days if going to Nova Scotia. Try that with a train. Railcars might show up this summer, some time. And, when it arrives, you may have to open a valve and let that lettuce run out on the ground.
Yeah - put that shit on a train. And, you better start growing lettuce locally, or you'll do without.
That next link - NYT publishes a private study. Uh-huh - haven't we seen enough private studies used to push something to make someone rich? Private studies are never political, are they?
The Overdrive article is interesting. Trump wants toll roads - that should surprise no one, Trump likes rich people, and toll roads will help to make more rich people. Put the highways in private hands, and those private hands can skim trillions off the economy. The ATA prefers to raise alrady existing taxes. No new rich bastards in the making that way.
That PDF from the GAO is 146 pages - it will take more than a minute or two to read it. I'll give the GAO some credibility. I'll note that the title of the article is "Excessive truck weight: an expensive burden we can no longer support." Which leads me to believe that they may not be talking about legally loaded and legally operated trucks at all. But, I'll go through it . . . BBL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:54AM
Dunno exactly where that 9600 figure is from (I've seen it around, but never seen a source or justification). It's a little optimistic or pessimistic, depending on your perspective, but just barely in the range of credibility.
Road wear is generally considered proportional to axle weight4. If a passenger car has axle weights of, say, 2500/2500 pounds, and a tractor-trailer has axle/tandem weights of 15,000, 30,000, and 30,000 pounds (i.e. 15,000 per axle), that's a factor of 1296 per axle, and with 2.5x as many axles, a total of 3240. (If the load distribution is less even, it gets worse: 15k/26k/34k yields factors of 1296/2x731/2x2138 -- vs 1/1 for that 50/50 passenger car, that's a total factor of 3517.)
The 9600 figure seems like either somebody took the whole weight to the 4th power (inadvertently pretending 50k pound trucks have only two axles) or is comparing a maxed-out truck or rig to a fairly light passenger car. For instance, it's roughly what you'd get if you compared a 4000-pound car and the heaviest legal 2-axle truck fully loaded to its 40k GVWR (both with 50/50 weight distribution).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:03AM (3 children)
Oh, and I forgot to get back to dollars, but if you take a more realistic 3000-4000 ratio... $50k/year for a truck would be equivalent to $12-$17/year for a passenger car.
I don't know about other states, but I'm sure paying more than double that here in IN.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)
I meant to reply to this earlier. Your vehicle registration doesn't play into this discussion, really. You pay somewhere between 20 and fifty dollars for your registration, whereas 18-wheelers pay somewhere between 150 and 500. Probably more than that now, but there were times when I was routed through Illinois to renew plates on a tractor and/or a trailer. $100 a pop for the trailers, and I think it was $120 for the tractors. That was registration only, and did not contribute to highway taxes, fuel taxes, the bingo card fees, business tax, or anything else.
Similarly, someone mentioned the purchase price of a private vehicle being comparable the taxes paid by a big truck. Except, that has no bearing on the discussion at all. The purchase price of any vehicle goes to the manufacturer, the dealer, a bit of sales tax, and nothing to road use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
Not clear if you're saying it doesn't count because it goes into the general fund rather than specifically going to road upkeep, or just because it's a smaller number than commercial vehicles pay?
If the former, note that Indiana allows counties to levy a excise and wheel taxes that get paid along with, and in addition to, your state vehicle registration fee, specifically to cover road upkeep. (In my county, this is an extra $25/year for passenger cars.) Besides, fuel taxes and the like often go into the general fund as well -- if that's the criteria for exclusion, it becomes impossible to have a meaningful discussion of whether any class of vehicles pays "their share", since no matter how much anyone pays, the politicians can (and too often do) spend it on other stuff and leave the roads unrepaired.
If the latter, well, what I'm seeing is, tractor-trailers pay 10x as much, while doing 1000+x the road damage. So add that tiny $500 into your $50000 figure you mention, and it's still significantly less than passenger cars are paying in proportion to road wear.
But even disregarding registration/excise/wheel taxes entirely, look at just the gas tax. Indiana's state gas tax is 29 cents/gallon. At 30 mpg and 15k/year, that's 500 gallons per year, or $145. (We additionally pay normal sales tax on gasoline, but I'll ignore that because I know most states don't.) The state taxes diesel (and other non-gasoline fuels) at 48 cents/gallon, so combining the increased per-gallon with increased fuel consumption, of, say, 4mpg, a tractor-trailer might be paying 12 cents/mile in fuel tax vs 1 cent/mile for our passenger vehicle. Again, paying ~ten times as much, but doing thousands of times the road wear.
Same story for tolls -- tolls on I80 are $11.10 end-to-end for passenger vehicles, and up to $130.80 for 7+ axles. Once again, it looks like tractor-trailers are doing multiple orders of magnitude more road wear, and only paying one order of magnitude more.
I'm open to being convinced that there's really some hidden subsidy for cars, or some tax I'm not understanding for commercial trucking. But so far, the numbers just don't seem to be adding up.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 01 2019, @12:42AM
Go with the former. All taxes, fees, etc, had some intended use when they were passed by the legislature. To my knowledge, no registration fees were ever intended for highway maintenance. Those monies were intended for other things. Fuel tax, highway use tax, mileage tax, etc were all intended for infrastructure upkeep. All of that is a generalization, I suppose, and I probably shouldn't have brought it in here.
I've not heard of that wheel tax - it would definitely count in this discussion.
But, we're kind of distracted here, because politicians don't use our money for it's intended purpose, often as not.
I'll restate my argument against that 9600 times as much damage, for clarity. I found that number in the PDF that was offered. That PDF was published in 1978, and it very specifically discusses overweight trucks. It discusses trucks in one instance that are routinely 30,000 pounds overweight. It also discusses the individual states failing to enforce federal laws, both on federally funded roads, as well as state funded roads. In the context of the discussion in that PDF, I can, and do, believe that some trucks in that era were probably causing that much damage to the infrastructure.
There is no fault with the concept that heavier vehicles cause more damage than lighter vehicles. The Federal DOT has a rather complex formula for determining permissible weights on the axles, as well as gross weights. Those trucks that are operated legally, and conform to federal guidelines are certainly causing hundreds of times as much damage as the typical privately owned vehicle, and maybe even a thousand times. But, that almost ten thousand times as much damage is out of the question. It's an obsolete number from a bygone era.
Long story short, I've argued primarily against that high shock-value number, which is simply not true.
I still believe that trucks pay their fair share, but you have made a case for re-examining that idea. Maybe they don't pay their full fair share. If you or I were to make the effort to find out, I'm still certain that it's pretty close to fair. That was what the federal government was shooting for when they imposed the current weight limits and taxing scheme, after all.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 27 2019, @03:31PM
Oh, the PDF is from 1978 or so. It's obsolete. The trucking industry is almost unrecognizably changed from those days. Some things have changed for the better, some for the worse, but it's a whole new world out there today. I did see that magic number of 9600 in the PDF, so obviously, that number has been around for a long time. Still want a citation: where did it come from? The PDF focuses on overweight trucks, and I can imagine that a grossly overloaded truck might cause as much damage as almost ten thousand cars.