alt Hacker NewsAnd?
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.
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If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.
The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit".
The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.
It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.