True, but there is still a large shortfall in road damage vs tax collected.
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adiggs
Well-Known Member
True. And incomplete. I went hunting and found this admittedly older article from the Oregon DMV, 1999, talking about Oregon's weight-mile tax. I don't know if it's still in force and really anything else about it (the Oregon weight-mile tax).
Page 1, covering the background of this topic, is what I found most directly meaningful to my admittedly brief earlier comment and what I had in mind when I made it:
https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Programs/ResearchDocuments/EffectWeightMileTax.pdf
One particular topic they address, that I hadn't previously thought about (at least along this dimension), is why fuel tax is an inefficient mechanism for addressing road taxes - it tends to favor heavier trucks with fewer axles (better fuel efficiency, as fuel consumption doesn't scale linearly with weight, and consumption goes up with more axles) without capturing the corresponding disproportionately large road damage that the heavier trucks do to the road (damage being done in proportion to the 4th power of weight by axle - the article talks about this in more nuanced fashion, and with. more understanding of the topic than I have).
The short version being that fuel tax encourages 80k trucks which minimizes fuel expense by encouraging fuel efficiency (good), while harming the roads out of proportion to a truck carrying a half load. With the overall road dmg / maintenance deficit being made up as a societal general function, or externalized cost of trucking, rather than an internalized of trucking.
Yes, trucks pay much higher fuel taxes than personal autos or trucks. The road use is still subsidized by society.
DanCar
Active Member
If I remember reading correctly, heavy vehicles are responsible for 90% of road damage. Do they pay 90% of the tax?
adiggs
Well-Known Member
Something I would spend hours reading in depth, would be some detailed analysis of actual contributions to road damage / maintenance needs by various weight / usage categories, matched up with associated taxes paid sort of data. This is a topic I'd like to become educated on, but the 5 minutes of searching I did earlier wasn't quickly yielding this kind and detail of information.
Maybe you've got a link/pointer or three that would help us all.
The problem here is I've learned a deep and abiding respect for the idea that there are numbers much, much smaller than 1%. I think in orders of magnitude (as best as I can anyway). If trucking has quality / detailed data that says they're paying 50% of the road taxes and doing 80% of the road damage, I'm actually pretty ok with that. Getting these very big numbers perfectly aligned and matched is excruciatingly difficult. For me - that's the same order of magnitude and life is all peachy.
If it's 1% of the taxes, and 2% of the damage, again - all peachy.
(And mostly I'm admittedly using a US centric view of the world, cuz this is where I live. But similar data for Europe would also work for my initial purposes - I'm just trying to get educated on the data and state of affairs that actually exists; not the talking points).
What I'm worried about is a mismatch that's more like 5% of taxes, and 80% of road damage. This kind of mismatch is how we get an electric and autonomous / semi-autonomous truck in the market, and suddenly find that trucks can be competitive on a ton-mile basis with trains.
I did find this chart to help people start to inform their intuition. Unfortunately, it carefully stops short of the commercial truck range.
Chart of the Day: Vehicle Weight vs Road Damage Levels
I think this exists really to address the "but bicyclists don't pay road taxes" argument. And in this context, they get there. One part of the conclusion being:
Great. But I'm not looking to study the impact of bicycles on our roads - I'm looking to study relative impacts starting with personal autos, and scaling up into personal pickup trucks, and on up through the various classes of commercial trucks and axle counts.
It depends on what the road is designed to carry. Roads are designed to carry a certain weight of vehicle. If the vehicle weighs significantly less than the design load (e.g. 6000 vs 80000), it's going to be about the same as a bicycle (not counting oil spills--the drip, drip, kind on asphalt roads). If the max load is overloaded, the damage goes way up. So for highways and truck routes, car damage approaches zero. For residential streets there is some. Unpaved roads are a different matter, but they have less traffic as well. This is from the geometric design courses I took a long time ago.Great. But I'm not looking to study the impact of bicycles on our roads - I'm looking to study relative impacts starting with personal autos, and scaling up into personal pickup trucks, and on up through the various classes of commercial trucks and axle counts.
I'll pull studies later, I've probably got plenty saved in my old computer when I was working on a logistics degree. The big issue is two pronged; Federal fuel tax hasn't risen since 1993 and passenger vehicle fuel efficiency has increased more dramatically compared to commercial fuel efficiency, essentially meaning passenger traffic is now paying for less per capita miles then bigger vehicles.
I don't think you can dispute this:
Trains pay for *100%* of the track damage costs on privately-owned railroads --
-- while trucks pay only a fraction of the cost of the road damage they do on publicly-owned roads (which are mostly funded by property tax, plus some sales tax, income tax, and gas tax).
Of course Musk's electric trucks would pay for NONE of the road damage they do, under current tax regimes.
This is a thumb on the scales in the US. :-(
It's quite different in countries like China and Russia which have public ownership and funding of the freight railroad tracks, or in countries in Western Europe where a lot of the roads are toll roads.
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So y'all know, I learned this stuff several years back in another context.
To a first approximation, all road damage is done by trucks; road planners actually ignore cars when figuring on road damage and maintenance, because the "Fourth power of axle load" rule means that truck road damage is nearly all of it.
To a second approximation, for a road planner dealing with road damage and maintenance, you STILL ignore cars, but now you include frost heaves from the freeze-thaw cycle.
If you're doing a *third* approximation, you might include cars, but they never get that precise.
It would make sense to tax trucks by the fourth power of axle load -- or some approximation thereto. Tricky to do.
Trains pay for *100%* of the track damage costs on privately-owned railroads --
-- while trucks pay only a fraction of the cost of the road damage they do on publicly-owned roads (which are mostly funded by property tax, plus some sales tax, income tax, and gas tax).
Of course Musk's electric trucks would pay for NONE of the road damage they do, under current tax regimes.
This is a thumb on the scales in the US. :-(
It's quite different in countries like China and Russia which have public ownership and funding of the freight railroad tracks, or in countries in Western Europe where a lot of the roads are toll roads.
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So y'all know, I learned this stuff several years back in another context.
To a first approximation, all road damage is done by trucks; road planners actually ignore cars when figuring on road damage and maintenance, because the "Fourth power of axle load" rule means that truck road damage is nearly all of it.
To a second approximation, for a road planner dealing with road damage and maintenance, you STILL ignore cars, but now you include frost heaves from the freeze-thaw cycle.
If you're doing a *third* approximation, you might include cars, but they never get that precise.
It would make sense to tax trucks by the fourth power of axle load -- or some approximation thereto. Tricky to do.
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Trucks are over 90% of the damage -- the other 10% is damage from weather. (This is averaging areas where weather does more damage with areas where it does less damage.) Cars don't even figure into it.
As for percentage of taxes, most roads are paid for by local property taxes. I'm not sure how you'd like to do percent of taxes given that. In the US, trucks probably pay half of the *fuel* taxes (though electric trucks would pay nothing), but fuel tax covers well under a quarter of road costs, so it's probably more like 10% of the overall road tax costs (and again, it would be 0% for electric trucks).
As autonomy takes root in trucking, I suspect we will see an evolution in road freight vehicles. It seems to me that much of the design around the semi truck is based on housing a large engine and a human driver. Autonomous EV design will not be so constrained in the future. A kind of rolling platform with battery pack underneath could carry shipping containers with minimal weight and length. Lighter vehicles can platoon and obtain aerodynamic efficiencies.
Semi is designed for 80 tons of gross weight, but this is only about 50 tons of freight. The other 30 tons is the empty weight of the cab and trailer. Is there a way to whack off 5 tons of non-freight weight to carry 50 tons of freight? Can you carry 20 tons of freight in a vehicle of just 30 tons?
Semi is designed for 80 tons of gross weight, but this is only about 50 tons of freight. The other 30 tons is the empty weight of the cab and trailer. Is there a way to whack off 5 tons of non-freight weight to carry 50 tons of freight? Can you carry 20 tons of freight in a vehicle of just 30 tons?
adiggs
Well-Known Member
This sounds like useful sounding context - do you have links to studies, books, classes, research that the rest of us can read? Or even a good idea of what works well in a Google search to yield studies, books, etc..
Sometimes the challenge of a good search, is the verbiage you use to initiate the search.
Some of those sentences make no sense, but what I think you mean is 55 tons of freight with 25 tons of vehicle. There are several approaches. Smaller engine size, single tires replacing duals with axles designed for single tires, different materials for the body and trailer.
Of course there are drawbacks to some of them such as smaller engines are going to be slower up hills, and many shipments are containers which are not going to change, or trailers that aren't owned. Exotic materials add cost and manufacturing complexity, so there would have to be a positive cost benefit ratio.
The point is that truck construction methods are very optimized now, removing the driver and the cab will not save that much over the current Tesla Semi design. The biggest benefit I can see is platooning to reduce the energy cost of long distance freight hauling. Also long distance freight hauling covers a wide spectrum of use cases, so there could eventually be some specialty trucks to handle each.
Sorry I was mixing up 80k pounds with tons.
The current sizes and configuration is optimized around a diesel engine. The point about 80k pounds gross weight is that is a regulatory limit for the class of vehicle. Naturally, if you are paying a professional driver, you want to maximize the freight one can drive. So the economic implication of having a human driver is that if you could carve off 5000 pounds, you would try to carry 5000 pounds more freight. I suspect this is why you are confused by my suggestion. But what I am trying to do here is disrupt conventional thinking which is based on optimizing the value of a single driver per load. So I am specifically challenging the economies of scale of vehicles that will haul freight over the road.
Let's take a very different example. Consider the opportunity to replace heavy diesel tractors used in farming with electric robots. Will farm robots be at the same scales as current farm equipment, or might a more profound change happen? It is quite possible that farming robots will be much smaller. A smaller reduces the soil compression allowing land to be more efficient for growing. A smaller scale can reduce the amount of energy to accomplish unit of farm work. Human worker switch from operating large single machines to managing a large fleet of smaller robots. So the productivity of human labor can go up. Charging infrastructure is used more efficiently with a larger fleet. Suppose your equipment needs to charge 2 hours per 24 hours. Thus if you have a fleet of 12 small robots they can share one charger. If this does the work of say 1 really large robot, then that one charging point needs 12 times the power and will sit idle 22 hours out of 24. So it is much cheaper to keep the fleet of 12 small robots charged up. Also while the robots are charging is a good time for the technician to be inspecting the robot, troubleshooting problems and preparing it for the next task. So the work of technicians can be spread out over the 24 hour cycle, just like the work of the charger is. Reliability also goes up with a larger fleet. if a couple of small robots are in more serious need of repair, no problem the rest of the fleet can keep working the fields. So in farming there are lots reasons why autonomy can lead to smaller scale equipment. The economics of the larger scale equipment was about optimizing the productivity human drivers, but in the future a larger fleet of smaller autonomous equipment will be more about optimizing the productivity of fleet technicians.
So moving freight is all about logistics. One human driver per load means to you want to optimize the size of the load. Autonomy shift the bulk of labor from drivers to fleet technicians. There are ways in which smaller loads more frequently dispatched can improve logistics. Suppose you have 50k pounds of freight to get to 5 different destinations. Does it always make more sense to put this all on one vehicle, or could their be situations where is it is more efficient to have a 5 autonomous vehicles deliver 10k pounds to each destination? On the receiving end, suppose you need to receive 100k pound of freight everyday. Does it always make sense to have this arrive is 2 loads of 50k, or might there be advantages to receiving 10 10k loads spread out over the day? I suspect there are lots of opportunities for smaller scale autonomous freight transport to shift the economies of scale and improve logistics.
It might just be the end of the big box store.
One of my great weaknesses is not keeping my citations. This was worsened by my computer failure a couple of months ago.
"road damage calculation" and "pavement damage calculation" are some starting points. ("calculation" needs to be in the search string)
"who pays for roads" is a good starting point on the tax situation, but there's lots of partial information and very few total analyses. (However, one thing is clear: it's mostly property tax paying for local roads and streets.)
adiggs
Well-Known Member
Heh - I'm not great at keeping citations either. I end up "keeping" a lot of them by posting them here, especially in this thread and the Shorting Oil thread, so I at least have a chance at finding them again.
Thanks!
Update - the road damage calculation search got me some pay dirt right away:
http://www2.ku.edu/~iri/publications/HighwayDamageCosts.pdf
I haven't gotten to the conclusion(s) yet - it's nearly 200 pages with the appendices, but it looks like they're evaluating the right stuff (for an admittedly small slice of the trucking world).
Thanks!
Update - the road damage calculation search got me some pay dirt right away:
http://www2.ku.edu/~iri/publications/HighwayDamageCosts.pdf
I haven't gotten to the conclusion(s) yet - it's nearly 200 pages with the appendices, but it looks like they're evaluating the right stuff (for an admittedly small slice of the trucking world).
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Yes, a whole lot more analysis is needed. There is a whole lot of complexity with all this, but the complexity of logistics actually creates opportunities for a wide menu of vehicle choices.
Here is a little toy example. Suppose you have 25 tons at a hub that you deliver to 5 destinations, 5 tons for each destination. The average distance from hub to destination is 40 miles. So you've got 1000 ton-miles of work. Suppose the shortest circuit visiting each destination and returning to the hub is 240 miles with each destination spaced about 40 miles apart.
Option 1. Put 25 tons on a 15 ton rig (40 ton gross) can travel the circuit. This is 240 vehicle-miles, but how many gross ton-miles is. The first 40-mile leg has a gross weight of 40 tons, 1600 ton-miles. The second 40-mile leg is 35 tons, 1400 ton-mile. And so on to the last 40-mile leg where the rig returns empty at 15 tons, 600 ton-miles. Altogether, this option requires 6600 gross ton-miles of work needed to accomplish just 1000 freight ton-miles.
Option 2. Suppose you have a fleet of smaller 3 ton rigs capable of moving 5 tons of freight, 8 ton gross. So you need five trips from hub to destination and back. This is 400 vehicle miles. That is 5 trips of 40 miles out at 8 tons gross and 40 miles back empty at 3 tons gross. In sum, that is 2200 gross ton-mile to get 1000 freight ton-miles.
So which option is better. If you had to pay for a driver, you might prefer option 1 with just 240 vehicle-miles over option 2 with 400 vehicles-miles. If you care about energy use, you might prefer option 2 with 2200 ton-miles over option 1 6600 ton-miles, three times the work. Also if you car about road damage, you might prefer option 2. If you care about being able to get the 5 load to their destination quickly, option 2 gives you the potential to send out 5 vehicles at once, say less than 60 minutes (40 miles) to deliver all, while option 1 will take 5 times as long to deliver the final load. Or suppose you car about the staging out assembly of each load. Option 1 requires your hub to prep all 5 loads at once before the big rig can depart, while option 2 allows you to prep 5 loads separately, potentially at different times or differ places in the distribution center. Or finally, if you care about reliability, you might prefer option 2 because with a large fleet size you can more easily tolerate having a few vehicles that are not in service.
So for all these reasons, it is clear why trucks used for final delivery tend to be smaller than the trucks used for over-road hauling. But autonomy eliminates the key advantage of option 1, that of minimizing driver miles. BEVs will also have to integrate charging, which I suspect favors larger fleets of smaller vehicles. Is it cheaper to buy 5 of these 8 ton rigs than 1 40 ton rig? Don't know, that would depend on how strip down the vehicles can be built in the AEV world. If battery is the primary driver, than the energy efficiency is on a gross ton-mile per kWh basis and ratio of gross ton-mile to freight ton-mile, which in this case is 3 times higher for option 1. So smaller vehicle can be more expensive on a life time gross ton-mile basis than larger ones and still be more economical on a freight ton-mile basis.
I'm I saying that AEVs will eliminate class 8 semis? No, not at all. But as the economics of smaller AEVs improve and logistics outfits get more sophisticated in leveraging those advantages, I suspect that smaller scale options to take up more market share. Likewise, AEV semis will not eliminate trains; however, as the economic improve, trains could see some loss of market share.
I'd also point out that we've seen the small triumph over the large in other areas. For example, in computing, large main frame computers were disrupted by smaller, less powerful microcomputers, which in turn were disrupted by PC, laptops, and even smart phones. Large database servers have also been largely disrupted by distributed schemes like Hadoop. Or in transportation, Uber found that it lost 10% of it ride volume in SF when the city had approved electric scooters like Bird, not that scooters are full replacement of ride hailing cars, but it can erode significant market share. So smaller scale alternatives can often lead to greater efficiencies.
So what does the Cybertruck unveiling suggest about how Tesla is approaching the Semi?
Is Tesla slowing plans for Semi so that it can bump up Cybertruck?
What new Cybertruck technologies might crossover to the Semi?
Will there be a CyberSemi?
What else?
Is Tesla slowing plans for Semi so that it can bump up Cybertruck?
What new Cybertruck technologies might crossover to the Semi?
Will there be a CyberSemi?
What else?
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