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Everyone uses roads, regardless of their personal existence on them. The entire economy is dependent on roads from the smallest momnpop shop to the largest global conglomerate. Shipping is its life’s blood
This is a big deal that we should pay more attention to. It’s holding back adoption of transit, bike lanes, and EVs
Too many people believe their gas taxes pay for road maintenance. That it’s targeted toward roads and that it covers roads. Too often they react in outrage at concepts like
- EVs aren’t paying their fair share
- it’s not supposed to pay for transit
- let bicyclists pay for their own roads
The reality is that gas taxes are not usually targeted, it’s already not fair with the variety of weight and efficiency of vehicles, and in the US it typically covers more like half of road maintenance so it’s still highly dependent on other funding sources
Maybe it’s time to rethink this tax, to something without the emotional baggage, that’s fair for everyone, and that adequately funds all transportation needs
And? Public transit (that often also uses those roads) is not wholly funded by fairs collected but paid for by everyone if they use it or not as well(a normal thing). I just don’t get why tax funding infrastructure is now seen as bad, is this some weird pcyop to have rich people pay less tax again?
As it should be. Same as you pay for schools if you have no kids.
Even if you don’t drive, you still eat because of roads. No food delivery to supermarkets without roads. Same for all other goods and services.
I think what this is pushing back against is the idea that roads are built for motorists because motorists “pay” for the roads. Entitled people in cars getting pissed at pedestrians and cyclists because they “don’t pay” for “their roads”. As someone who rides their bike most places I’ve experienced this first hand as well as online discourse.
Those people are extra stupid
Aother interesting thing about roads is that they’re build to withstand the wear and tear from heavy vehicles.
This doesn’t seem interesting, until you also find out that the wear from all other vehicles is completely and utterly negligible. Doesn’t matter if you ride a bike, a motorcycle, car, electric car, pickup or SUV. None of the personal vehicles make a dent on the roads of any meaningful size, even if they make up a majority of the traffic.
Obviously we still need the roads for small vehicles, but the cost of constant maintenance all comes from cargo and busses.
If you see it this way, then almost all road construction is a hidden subsidy for the cargo industry who uses trucks instead rails or boats.
It would make a lot of economic sense for the society as a whole to demand fewer cargo trucks and more cargo rails.
I don’t think most of the wear and tear on roads actually comes from the weight of vehicles driving on it, though.
In most places where I’ve lived, the cracks and potholes are caused by the shifting of the ground underneath, freeze/thaw cycles of water/precipitation, and things like that. Most roads would still require maintenance to keep them driveable, even without vehicles driving over them.
It becomes obvious with dedicated bike trails or protected bike lanes, where motor vehicles simply do not have access to those stretches of pavement, where potholes can still form over time.
Huge heavy SUVs and large trucks absolutely do cause wear and tear, and EVs are especially heavy. The surface layers of roads are damaged over time by vehicles if the foundation of the road mostly remains unimpacted.
The weight of a heavy electric Hummer is 4.5 metric tonnes.
The maximum allowed weight of a fully loaded cargo truck is 44 metric tonnes.
According to the fourth power law, this would make the impact of the truck more than 500 000 that of the Hummer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Sure, the Hummer itself is already 16 times worse than a regular 1 ton car, but in the scale of things, the difference between any personal vehicle and a truck is about the same as whatever the truck is.
The fourth power law applies to weight per axle, assuming identical axles/tires. In reality, the typical tandem axle arrangement on big trucks (18 wheels across 5 axles, the four back axles paired together as tandems) spreads the load over a much larger road surface area than a typical 4-wheel passenger vehicle.
Also, the models themselves aren’t that robust. It’s from a single comprehensive study of loaded trucks, from 1958-1960, that has been very influential, but the tests itself never went down to passenger car weight.
Civil engineers have models and formulas for that, and there is indeed much more road deformation from the heavy trucks, but it’s probably closer to thousands of times the load for an 18-wheel tractor trailer than for a passenger vehicle, not 500,000. Note in that analysis, it talks about which power to use (not always 4) for different types of road wear or damage, and many of them are less sensitive or more sensitive to vehicle load.
It’s all interesting stuff, but I worry that people on the internet have put way too much value on the fourth power law here, stretching it beyond the original scope or overstating its applicability to practical road design issues.
While big cars do more damage than small cars or a bike. It’s seriously negligable compared to any sort of goods transport vehicle
Infrastructures are expensive. Startegic ones must be owend and maintained by all the people for the people, regardless individual usage, since being strategic have impact in every individual.
Yeah like trains
Nah, I’m good on not paying for wars of aggression
Holy straw man
This very much depends on the country.
Maybe properly taxes go in part to fund local roads (mine do) and maybe some people paying these don’t have a car. But even people who don’t have cars do have garbage trucks that pick up their trash, mail delivery vans delivering their mail and packages, emergency vehicles that might need to come to the residence, delivery trucks that bring the food to the local supermart, and public transport buses that need to access parts of the community.
People indirectly use roads even if they don’t have a car.
Nope. Roads are public services and always cost more than the measly taxes. Same with trains and train tickets.
As bad as the roads out here are, it always irks me that they charge a road & bridge fee on my taxes but my roads still suck
Well, things that suck also cost money
I know. Thats why I call those fees my assessor’s escalade fund
YSK that this varies significantly from country to country and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so stating this without identifying the specific area to which it pertains is misleading.
Does it? In which countries do drivers pay for the roads exclusively?
Toll roads?
Which country has strictly toll roads?
In McDonaldistan you can only live the suburb if your McRoad subscription is up to date
Principality of Sealand?
Well okay, because it’s also a myth that only people who drive get value from roads.
Yeah i just love exhaust gaz, constant noise and lung cancer.
How about groceries? Medicine? Emergency response services?
Those things are fine, but why does every single person need to drive their own car everywhere, including the places where public transit is the far more effective and healthy choice.
Name 3.
The downtown of any major city.
Why do you think almost every major city has a subway? The number of people who need to move around in the city far exceeds the available road space, without public transit, the entire city would be clogged with traffic.
Even in a more meta sense, cities can and should be healthy places that are built on a human scale. Necessitating cars for everybody pollutes more than just the air. Tires and brakes wear down, leaving microplastics and heavy metals to be washed into rivers when it rains. Noise pollution from cars makes cities unpleasant and the air quality creates worse health outcomes for the people living there.
Human societies have existed without cars for thousands of years, and we already have a way to traverse cities effectively that predates widespread adoption of personal vehicles, mass public transit.
That’s such a bad faith argument. Those are what? 1% of the traffic? if those were the only ones permitted on the road they would be everlasting and we wouldn’t need to rebuild them every 5 years.
Not to mention the ambulances wouldn’t have to wake me up in the middle of the night and make me deaf when they go pass me
The bulk of the traffic is some fatzo sitting alone in his pollution machine and we both know it, coz you’re one of them.
It is not a bad faith argument. Literally every single thing you eat is delivered by trick.
Obviously you have an overwhelming association between cars and roads in your brain but you could absolutely not survive without roads.
The trucks and vehicles that make your deliveries, pick up your trash, and stock your stores do about 15000 times more damage to the road than a passenger car. Even at a 1/100 ratio, that’s 150 times the damage of all the other vehicles, or if my shitty math is correct, approximately 99.34% of the road damage. All of the passenger vehicles on the road every day are a rounding error compared to Semis, Garbage trucks, fire engines, and construction equipment.
So I’d say it’s not a bad faith argument to point out that the people who don’t drive aren’t benefiting from road infrastructure.
For another comparison, it would be like saying that I shouldn’t have my taxes go to dam maintenance in my state since I don’t live in the flood zone.
yeah now do exhaust gaz and noise pollution. Car drivers are selfish people who shouldn’t be in public space. Go drive on a racetrack or something
And you will get the car to the racetrack with a boat or magic I assume?
yeah now do exhaust gaz and noise pollution.
Nah, let’s see your solution for them instead.
Garbage trucks
Construction equipment to fix the bike lanes that go to Trader Joe’s.
Delivery trucks/vans for everything you buy off the internet.
Food does get trucked in somehow!
I never heard it was drivers who pay for the roads. I’ve always heard it’s taxes.
Maybe because some states use the gas tax to fund their DoT?
Yeah, I really think this is a common misconception…
I guess that’s what gas taxes in some place are supposed to go to? Idk, I have done Municipal accounting before and I know that you can almost always shift expenses around to make money used for anything.
On the one hand most people in America have to drive, so they do to a certain extent, on the other hand people who own property work or purchase things such as food benefit from the road system even if they don’t drive as grocery stores in their communities get deliveries on roads and the such. Not a fan that our society requires cars for almost everything but knowing how tax dollars are collected and spend are only part of the story, it’s like saying that because you personally don’t want social security or single payer healthcare or public schools you wouldn’t benefit from its implementation; social security means that older people don’t become complete burdens on society dying in the street and the such, single payer healthcare would reduce costs for all medication and increase the number of doctors available to treat people because (one would hope) there would be less paperwork a doctor needed to do between patients at the very least, and public schools having an educated population eans cheaper services that require things like reading comprehension, be it entertainment, engineered goods, medical treatments, etc. You might not use any one or all of those yourself doesn’t mean you don’t benefit from them.
Because they throw their little tantys and go “fuck your bikes me and my car pay for that road!!!”
