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How Electric Cars Could Make America's Crumbling Roads Even Worse

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the exceedingly-crumbly dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:54AM (#807907)

    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).