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Incredibly janky port of comments from my old WordPress site:

Warren Huska

2022-01-16 at 9:37 pm

Wonderfully done.

The question of bus-equivalence is an interesting one – the road damage on Don Mills in Toronto is notable – raised ‘bus knuckles’.

HOWEVER this does not remove the value of identifying and charging externalities to recoup subsidies.

As I am fond of saying to people who want a ‘road tax’ levied on cyclists, “I can’t wait for my rebate cheque”

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Incredibly janky port of comments from my old WordPress site:

Andrew

2021-03-25 at 11:07 pm

Another great article and captures the bulk of the issue. A few caveats worth mentioning from this traffic engineer:

– This all accelerates an order of magnitude where studded tires are allowed and the tire fees don’t come close to covering it.

-Road damage isn’t the only direct cost. The needed right of way, pavement, signals, etc needed to supply capacity in the form of new lanes (including bike lanes and sidewalks) is another factor. For vehicles, this points to a GPS tax structure that charges more at peak times. Less peak demand = smaller roads needed.

– Fundamental to this all is a transportation funding structure that makes new highways cheap, but does little for those outside a car, safety, etc. and creates unsustainable maintenance obligations at the state and local level.

– To venture into politics, this is one area where the “pay your own way/personal responsibility ” party is willfully blind to the massive suburban SUV subsidy.

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Incredibly janky port of comments from my old WordPress site:

Ray

2021-03-08 at 9:31 am

Using GPS to help calculate a tax based on a miles x vehicle weight formula could be a means to charge for the actual damages that drivers incur on roads, but difficult to legislate. People resist whatever they perceive to be an invasion of privacy. This proposal would make all streets and highways effectively become toll roads. Some of the assumptions from the study might be challenged as well. For example, two vehicles of the same weight could impact road wear differently if they have different types of tires/wheels/suspension, or by their driving speed/style. Other variables affecting road wear include the construction method in preparing road beds, soil integrity, materials used, slope, weather, climate, etc. The research on highway damage upon which you base your argument is nearly 70 years old. Maybe nothing has changed in 70 years, but it seems like there might be additional data. Should stop and go drivers be taxed at the same rate per weight x mile as highway drivers? Should a trucker driving on gravel roads in the arctic be taxed at the same rate of weight x miles as one driving on an interstate highway in the south? Should bicyclists and pedestrians pay a road tax too? A bus carrying thirty people might cause as much road damage as thirty people each driving in separate vehicles, but I suspect that the total environmental impact of the bus would be less than that of 30 separate cars. There will need to be some new mechanism to fund roads that is not based so much on fuel, and preferably tied to actual road use. It might also be possible to regulate and tax tires and wheels more. I recall discussions of this issue from decades ago. The GPS technology enables the old idea of toll roads to work more efficiently and less visibly. It’s worked pretty well for Hot Lanes, although there could be lots of exceptions and variabilities in payment methods, as well as potential for fraud and abuse if made into a funding system that affects everyone who uses a road.

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