Cars damage infrastructure in proportion to the fourth power of axle load. Not only are people in big cars killing people in little cars, they're also HEAVILY subsidized by the people they kill.
It doesn’t help that much. Each tire of a fully loaded 18 wheeler carries 4.4x the weight of a typical car tire. 4.4 ^ 4 = 378x the damage per tire but there are also 4.5x the tires so your at 1,700x the damage.
That’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s 99.9% or 95% of the damage ware is still absolutely dominated by heavy vehicles.
And how many more SUVs go through that road? If there's a few hundred SUVs for every 18 wheeler, it's no longer negligible: it's 10 or 30% of the damage.
And it could be a lot more negligible, if that mostly drive alone, drove a car with half the weight.
I used 4,000lb for the car, a 2024 Chevrolet Suburban which is huge only clocks in at a 5,824 lbs. Load another 1,000lb for passengers etc and (6,824/4000) ^ 4 = 8.5x a car or 0.5% what I calculated for a full 18 wheeler.
Sure there’s more cars than 18 wheelers but 7,000lb is a rather extreme outlier in terms of SUV weight.
Well, my 7 seater has a kerb weight of 2780 lbs (and it's a hybrid, the petrol is lighter); fully loaded it's under 4400 lbs.
And it's probably heavier than most cars around here, because most cars are not 7 seaters, but 4/5 seat hatches.
US SUVs and pickup trucks wouldn't fit most parking lots around here (to tall, to wide to even get in), but somehow the problem is never the size/weight of cars people got used to drive.
Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks
They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries.
It's not like they're the sum of all evil, they have a small impact on the size of these things, but bringing the sizes down will help on the pathway to lowering the size of everything.
> Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks
The fuel trucks aren't going to change in size, they're going to come more often. Also, oil is typically distributed in pipelines or on ships rather than trucks until the last mile. Meanwhile a fuel tanker holds some 10,000 gallons of fuel, i.e. enough for "large" 20 MPG SUVs to go 200,000 miles. Meanwhile the tanker is generally transporting the fuel less than 100 miles, so this is diluted by a factor of 2000. Because of the 4th power law, this still causes nearly as much damage as the SUVs themselves, but they're both still negligible compared to all of the other commercial trucks transporting everything else.
Obviously this doesn't even apply to electric vehicles.
> They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries.
Yeah, it's not a crazy influence, it's just to point out that the economy is a pyramid and if you make the stone on top smaller, there are thousands of other little places where you can shave weight. Cars account for a small but significant amount of our bulk material usage, think mining equipment -> iron ore -> sheet steel -> stamped parts -> car. If you can reduce the number of F350s we sell, we can reduce the amount of iron ore we're consuming, the size of the ships carrying it, the trucks that haul the mining equipment etc.
The US sells on the order of 4M domestically produced pickups and SUVs per year and produces 1.8MT of steel. If we, conservatively, reduced the weight of all of those cars by half or 1T ea (they're often 3x the weight of a sanely sized vehicle) we quickly eclipse US steel production, even if we exclude some parts as non-steel. That multiplies by 1.6x when you think in terms of iron ore (though most is recycled from scrap).
> If you can reduce the number of F350s we sell, we can reduce the amount of iron ore we're consuming, the size of the ships carrying it, the trucks that haul the mining equipment etc.
But you want to optimize the thing where you get the most bang for your buck.
The heavy side of the most popular SUVs aren't based on the F-350, they generally weigh around 4500 pounds vs. 3500 pounds for the lighter end, the latter being around the same as the average mid-sized sedan. Cutting 30% off of a one-time cost for something that will have a 20-year lifespan is generally not going to be the best place to optimize.
Compare this to, say, introducing mixed-use zoning so people can live closer to their jobs and drive fewer miles. This not only reduces fuel consumption on an ongoing basis, it makes cars last longer because they have fewer miles on them and then you don't need to manufacture as many, and it has direct human benefits because people spend less time stuck in traffic and drive fewer miles with risk of traffic fatalities.
There are very very few paved roads where the largest vehicles on them are large SUVs. I live on a mountain near a road where commercial vehicles are banned and we still get a few large commercial vehicles per day.
One of the roads up the mountain has switchbacks near the top that are so tight that nothing longer than 18 feet is allowed up, but at least 2x a week a box truck gets stuck.
Heavy cars have many negative impacts but road maintenance isn’t one worth worrying about.
There are vehicles that do more damage to roads than large pickup trucks. It's still the case that large pickup trucks do more damage to the road than small cars. Owners of pickup trucks are being subsidized by pedestrians and small car owners. They do not pay enough for the privilege of driving their vehicles in relation to the damage they cause.
Road damage isn’t like hit points. If a road has regular large vehicle traffic, it doesn’t really matter how many smaller passenger vehicles are driving on it—even if they are pickup trucks. Passenger vehicles aren’t going to change how frequently the road needs to be repaved.
At the extreme end, imagine a railroad bridge. We don’t care about how fat the mice that regularly cross it are.
It's not only that. Roads have to be resurfaced periodically because of weather damage regardless of how many vehicles drive on them. For any road that sees predominantly/only car traffic, this will be the dominant effect and the cars are irrelevant.
Delivery trucks certainly do and very regularly at that. A delivery truck can easily cause about 300x the wear of a large SUV or full size pickup.
A full sized school bus will regularly drive on just about any road. Fully loaded they’ll do 1000x as much damage as a large SUV.
Fire trucks, septic tank pump trucks, big furniture delivery trucks, landscaping trucks, motor homes etc… will also drive on pretty much every small local road.
And much bigger commercial trucks drive on very small local roads enough to dwarf the damage of a large SUV. My neighbor just had a foundation for an addition poured. 3 cement trucks came out. 3 fully loaded cement trucks would cause something like 20,000 times as much damage as a large suv.
I’d need to drive on my street once a day for 50 years in an enormous suv cause as much damage.
Given normal weathering and damage caused by frequent or even infrequent large commercial vehicles, larger local passenger vehicles aren’t going to increase maintenance costs.
The USA already moves a higher percentage of freight by rail than almost any other country. But rail could never work for time-sensitive loads or last mile delivery.
Perhaps they could make the rail lines and machinery smaller. One might even consider such rail to be "light", in comparison.
I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many cities already have rail lines going down roads in city centers. They probably just built the city around a historical freight line, and haven't bothered to remove it.
the freight has more axles, and you could set the baseline weight by vehicle class
but maybe this would just incentivise the sort of person that buys an F150 to drive to the shops to simply to upgrade to a big rig (for the tax saving?!)
Massive increase in the cost of public transport as buses pass their tax costs onto users.
Massive increase in the cost of freight shipping, which would be passed on to consumers, i.e. everybody, since virtually every part of the economy depends indirectly on freight transport.
It would amount to everybody paying, and thus being more or less equivalent to public funding of roads.
Freight -- Ideally this causes more investment into freight rail and more freight to be moved by rail/boat. This might cause short term price increases to expand the infrastructure, but long term it's much cheaper/greener/efficient to move this stuff on rail. Last mile (maybe last 100 miles) will always be by truck, but we have way too much long haul stuff.
Public Transport -- If tax payers are currently paying for the external costs of public transportation (via taxes to repair roads) then it won't cost anymore public money if taxpayers continue to cover that cost. For private busses this is a case of tax payers unfairly subsiding their external costs.
> The unintended consequences of this would be: ... public transport ... freight
You could obviously tweak legislation to treat such vehicles differently if you wanted. I was just getting the core idea across, not suggesting my comment should be copy-pasted verbatim into the next bill Congress is passing.
It's worth noting that unless the roads are degrading and not being repaired, those costs are already being paid. It's just a question of who is paying it.
It removes the implicit subsidy for buses, but we want to encourage people to use buses over cars and SUVs. Also, the damage from cars/SUVs is so small that the cost of collecting the fee would exceed the amount of the fee.
We do it different in Europe: pay disproportionate by engine displacement. My father's car has 10x the taxes as my mother's car just because the engine is 1.6 times larger (2.5 liters, nothing outrageous). At the same time my mother pays for that car quite close to what I pay for each of my bikes that are 8-10 times lighter and have way smaller engines (300cc and 600cc).
Which is a much better system. My country (Portugal) still does mostly displacement, and a turbo-charged 1 liter pays a lot less than a naturally aspirated 1.6 hybrid, despite the former consuming 50% more gas.
The notion of charging different fees or taxes by engine displacement is idiotic. It has nothing particularly to do with road wear, emissions, or safety hazards.
If you want a measure that can not be easily manipulated and can serve as an albeit imperfect proxy for wear, emissions, weight and last but not least ability to pay then displacement is an option for taxation.
Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles. Axle weight determines road wear. I agree that using the axle weight would be better but displacement taxes were also a luxury tax.
> Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles.
This isn't even a good approximation because turbochargers (which nearly all heavy, diesel vehicles have) significantly increase power at the same displacement. The 5 liter Mustang weighs less than 4000 pounds. Here's a >10,000 pound bus with a 3.2L diesel engine:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law