Trucks cause the most wear and tear on roads so I’m not entirely against capturing some of that via gross tonnage (or weight per wheel) tax of some sort.
That sounds "fair" but amounts to a massive subsidy of diesel powered heavy trucking.
TBF, it is possible to build roads that trucks do not quickly destroy, and maybe the expense of doing that makes sense in some cases.
Everything except heavy trucking would pay much less to maintain roads, but for trucks wearing them out. While you suggest a tax based on vehicle weight, which might also seem "fair," that still does not capture the disproportionate wear, order of magnitude more, caused by heavy trucking.
I think the issue with the nonlinear road wear taxation is that any fair system would have trucking paying basically 100% of the tax, and that would result in much higher goods transportation costs (I think it’s actually proportional to the 4th power of axle weight). Which I’m personally fine with, I think it’s bad policy to subsidize trucking over trains, but it’d be a big adjustment.
Road damage goes up at the 4th power of the axle weight. It would be simpler to just make commercial trucks pay the entirety of road taxes. Easy to collect, and it would spread out the cost to everyone who benefits from commercial trucking (i.e. you really do want roads even if you don't own a car).
Exactly this. Of course, if they tax per axle and tonnage combination, it’ll just be passed on to consumers anyhow as most of trucks are distributing goods which directly or indirectly end up in the hands of consumers. However, it would be quite fair to do, I think.
The public rightfully bears much of the burden for truck wear and tear because the trucks aren’t driving around for fun, they’re bringing goods and the public wants things like stocked supermarkets. If we taxed trucks at actual cost we’d either have no deliveries or an extremely regressive cost schema due to trucking companies passing on the expense.
From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.
It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.
Not one mention in the article about the impact of trucks vs. cars on road wear and tear. The road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the damage by 9600 cars [1]. If you want to be serious about recouping the cost of transportation on road infrastructure, you have to tie the tax to the weight of the vehicle. But that would increase the cost of goods a fair amount due to the added transportation costs, so it's not popular.
Heavy commercial trucks account for nearly all road wear. Until they transition away from diesel, almost all particulates and other pollutants, too. They should pay the most tax that goes to road maintenance.
If you want to tax according to wear, almost every car is pretty much free and trucks become insanely expensive. Road wear is something like axle weight to the fourth power.
It's a tricky thing to implement as the road damage is typically quoted as being proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. That means that either the heaviest vehicles would become economically unviable due to the taxation (which I think should be the case) or most consumer vehicles would be too light to make a meaningful taxation contribution.
I would guess that huge SUVs and enormous trucks represent a not-insignificant proportion of road wear, since those vehicles are more common than semis.
Agreed that a road wear tax based on weight makes sense though. It might make sense to use a function of weight + miles driven per year to get an even more accurate measurement of road wear contribution.
I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems to me that if heavily loaded trucks are causing a disproportionate amount of damage they should be taxed at a rate which allows for proper maintenance of those roads.
Trucks should pay for the damage they cause to the roads but that would put prices up which would be unpopular even though it should result in lower general taxation.
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