this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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There was a discussion a couple of years ago around gasoline taxes and how they are supposed to pay for roadway maintenance. The question came up about EVs. There were discussions about how to include EVs in the taxation system so they would pay for their fair share of the road. One of the options was to impose a tax attached to your vehicle registration based upon the weight of the vehicle. The greater the weight, the more wear and tear it produces on the road surface. This might be one solution to the barrier problem, namely moving the extra cost to the reason for the extra cost.
The "problem" with that tax is that if it's applied fairly, it gets very big very fast. The damage to the road goes up with weight, but not linearly. Not a square factor, either. Not even cube. It's to the fourth power.
Start applying that to long haul trucks and the whole industry will be bankrupt in a month. The implication being that we are all subsidizing that industry with taxes on roads. Including that one trucker with a "who is John Galt?" sticker on the back.
That said, this is also a very good argument for improving cargo trains to the point where most long haul trucking goes away.
Trucks already pay a lot more in tax and regulatory expenses. In my state, annual car registration is $30-ish. Annual registration for a full-sized 18-wheeler is $1350 for the truck and $30-300 for each trailer. They also have to pay annual fees at the federal level which can be $600+/year, and an additional fuel tax on top of the existing state sales tax on diesel which I don't know the rate of right now. All of that applies to every single power unit and trailer in a fleet.
Trucks should be taxed much higher than cars, but too many people don't know or just don't care that this is already the case, and it has been this way since the 1940s.
They are taxed a lot. Are they taxed to the fourth power of axel weight? Not even close.
Based on your math, you'd be charging almost $2 million per year per truck. With that much money, you'd be building an entire nations worth of brand new infrastructure several times over each year.