alt Hacker NewsWhy do we need public funds to build a private authority that pays people absurd amounts of money who don't actually do anything instead of just you know.... building the road like we always have. For the public.
If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits?
Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks.
A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
Replies
> A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
Similarly, a Honda Civic is ~360 million times more damaging to the road than a bicycle, according to the fourth power law.
No reasonable fee structure should let car drivers use roads for free.
And that's before we get into the amount of valuable public land car drivers use for personal storage.
The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).
The means of collection and treatment of it as something other than tax revenue are problematic for sure. Those should be solvable problems, though.
Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.
A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption.
Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely)
Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No
I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.
Not literally exponentially, but the damage is proportional to the FOURTH power of the axle load. Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.
Honda Civic weighs 0.7t per axle, or 0.24tttt of wear.
F-150 weighs 0.9t per axle, or 0.65tttt of wear.
A school bus weighs 7.5t per axle, or 3164tttt of wear. That's more than thirteen thousand Honda Civics' worth of road damage. Imagine the driver of the Honda had to pay 1c per mile. The school bus would have to pay $130 per mile. Yes, it's carrying 78 passengers, so the cost would be $1.67 per mile per student, but I think most people would just drive their kids to school.