Significantly: externalities from co2 emissions. Which is not just money, but lives.

> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.

Why not use trains for heavy transport?

I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.

The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of paying each individual driver and risk of accidents per vehicle?

The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, but still no rail...

> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.

And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.

In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.

Cars don't even register.

Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.

Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.

Sounds like a great way to end up with tolls on all the roads. Or no access to the roads at all.

And?

Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.

So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.

And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.

And pedestrians, cyclist and such pay nothing. We should easily gate all sidewalks and make them pay fair share of cost needed to build that infra. Just have payment terminals before and after each crosswalk allowing them to pay their fair share of use of roads.