• TrustingZebra@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Road shipping isn’t really cheaper, they just get to put $10 of operational cost on the taxpayer for every $1 they spend. You’re basically subsidizing artificially cheap shipping.

    Could you explain this? Is it because taxes pay for roads?

    • yimby@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      In a word, yes. Subsides to the tune of 100s of billions of dollars a year across the USA.

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Like YIMBY said, the short answer is yes. The long answer is that there’s a complicated network of subsidies, write-offs, and car-related maintenance, bureaucracy, and clean-up that is supported by the taxpayer and doesn’t pay for itself. It’s not just repaving roads, which has to happen more and more often as vehicles get heavier and faster (road damage increases quadratically as vehicle weight increases), it’s also paying for highway patrol to enforce road safety, paying for first responders to clean up accidents, paying for other maintenance to prevent wildfires and clean up roadside litter (even if you use prison crews, it doesn’t cost nothing), paying to maintain other road-related infrastructure like signs and guardrails, as well as the multitude of oil and gasoline subsidies that become more and more important as we become more and more reliant on tractor-trailers to haul goods.

      The ten dollars spent by taxpayers for every one dollar of operational cost actually applies to driving cars, I suspect that the cost to taxpayers for long haul trucking is quite larger.

    • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Heavy vehicles are the only thing that can put any meaningful wear on roads and streets, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law that says that the wear on the road is a function of the fourth power of the mass of the vehicle over the number of axles. A car puts 160,000 times as much wear on a road as a bike does, and the step up to heavy transportation vehicles involves a similarly massive jump. Every time a heavy truck moves a shipment over our roads, there is a real cost that we have to pay in maintenance that has no equivalent for personal vehicles.