
The True Costs of Driving - JumpCrisscross
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/?single_page=true
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mdorazio
Not one mention in the article about the impact of trucks vs. cars on road
wear and tear. The road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the damage
by 9600 cars [1]. If you want to be serious about recouping the cost of
transportation on road infrastructure, you have to tie the tax to the weight
of the vehicle. But that would increase the cost of goods a fair amount due to
the added transportation costs, so it's not popular.

[1]
[http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf](http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf)

~~~
brianwawok
Is road damage from vehicles the main cause for road maintenance? In the
midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the freeze and
thaw cycles in winter. I suspect deserts have something similar going on with
hot summer days.

There are roads I know of that almost never see a car (say a few a month,
weird dead-end roads).. and they wear down just as fast as main streets.

~~~
justin66
> In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the
> freeze and thaw cycles in winter.

On the other hand, the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks
generally cruise) sure wear out faster. I think it's more that freeze/thaw and
snow plows exacerbate and accelerate ongoing wear and tear.

~~~
pimlottc
> the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks generally cruise)

I'm not sure which lanes you mean by that. Or did you mean to say "passing
lanes"?

~~~
justin66
It's entirely possible I used the wrong terminology, I'm talking about the
"right" lane, the one next to the passing lane on a divided highway. You'll
very often find that if the surface of the road is old at all, that lane
(where the heavy long-haul trucks tend to travel most) is more worn. In the
parts of the midwest that get a lot of snow, it's very noticeable.

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rplst8
I think the article deviously wraps up a whole host of issues and presents
them as "if we didn't have these dang cars around, all these costs would go
away."

First, without cars, keeping commute times reasonable requires that you either
live very close to your job (which I admit is ideal anyway) or that you have a
very, very robust intercity commuter transportation system. Something we're
not even close to having.

Second, we can't move everyone and their brother to city center, or even
within the city limits. A very large fraction of workers live outside city
limits. Moving all these people with in a distance of rail stations that makes
building lots of them cost effective would be very difficult from a city
planning perspective.

Third, our economy has been operating on the notion (for quite sometime) that
home ownership is ideal. Since people have a lot of their personal wealth
wrapped up in their home, asking them to move is not really fair either. This
affects "non-car users" too when that move is going to raise the prices of
housing where the non-car users live.

Fourth, allowing people to move about easily from any city to any city means
that there is liquidity in the job market. This is both for car owners and
not. The fact that you can buy a car and go somewhere a train or bus doesn't
means you can take a new job when the current one doesn't meet your needs.

There are also other costs that are saved (both monetary based and time based
ones) for non-car users. Having fewer people in the city limits means that
your wait times for services is lower than it could be. It's easier to get in
and out of the city on a weekend.

That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of
owning a car if it made people feel better.

~~~
FuNe
Pushing for expansion of remote working would do a world of good with regards
to points 1,2 and 4.

~~~
rplst8
I think it addresses number three too! If I can live anywhere I want, I can
buy anyhouse I want, and sell it to someone who is looking for similar house-
features instead of location, location, location.

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sosuke
> Drivers will make use of roads, especially new ones, but only if the cost of
> construction is subsidized by others.

Doesn't everyone benefit from the transportation system though? I like to get
food and other goods on a regular basis like everyone else. My gut reaction
says there are more drivers than non-drivers. We have 797 cars per 1000
people.

~~~
rayiner
The governments isn't spending billions widening roads out to the exurbs
because that's needed to get food and other goods around. If road construction
was limited to what benefited everyone--instead of subsidizing particular
lifestyle choices--there would be far less of it.

~~~
kazinator
All the single-occupancy drivers out there that are causing jams are in fact
hindering the flow of goods. Trucks stuck in that traffic waste fuel, pollute
more and bring up the cost of goods.

~~~
rplst8
I'd argue that we are way beyond this being a problem. In many cases the
highways were designed with a much lower traffic count in mind. When the
population was half what it is now.

The problem to me it seems is that highway planners did not design for
continued growth. Or when they did, growth outstripped capacity.

Additionally, single car drivers is the absolute worst case - why not design
for that?

Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a
perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't. This causes people to
have to move a great distance everyday just to get to work.

What makes this all really laughable is that many people drive a great
distance just to sit infront of a computer where most of their work is done on
some sort of computer network or over the telephone. I think a nationwide
telecommuting first policy would do more to reduce traffic than any of the
other alternatives available.

~~~
pif
> Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a
> perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't.

This! No city loves car entering their perimeter. But no city chooses to push
enterprises/services/commerces out of their perimeter.

Talk about having your cake and eating it - or, as we say in Italy, having
your wife drunk and the barrel full :-)

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oliwarner
What a silly article. Is the only taxable value of somebody getting to work
the money they spent on tolls and fuel? No, of course not, it's made up and
beyond through gross product.

Direct taxes (at least here in the UK) are more of an influencing factor to
try to push people towards other infrastructure.

Does this mean that non-drivers are paying for roads? Sure, but they're also
getting value and indirect revenue from the system too.

~~~
nickparker
I don't think your first line entirely invalidates the article. Yes, the
transportation sector has all sorts of knock-on benefits to productivity, but
they aren't free.

In the current system the direct tax revenue from transport doesn't cover its
costs, so we're shuffling money around from other sectors. A lot of those
other sectors probably benefit from the knock-on effects mentioned, so why not
shift all the costs of transport into direct taxation?

Such a change would create a 1-1 mapping between the usage cost an
individual/organization pays and the usage cost our entire economic system
pays. Lining up selfish and collective interest usually improves efficiency.

Now, the price we pay for that efficiency coming from our current system is
that the distribution of those costs changes. However, the cost is the same
either way so now we're really just arguing redistributive policy.

I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a
vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense), but
I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that harm.

~~~
ceras
> I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a
> vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense),
> but I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that
> harm.

Since this often comes up as a criticism of policies that eliminate subsidies,
I want to emphasize your point that there are simple ways to counterbalance
such a harm.

The easiest is you shave off some tax revenue from the wealthiest
users/residents and redistribute exactly the amount back to the poor they
would need to purchase the good as no-strings-attached cash. This makes poor
people who choose to use the previously-subsidized good no worse off than
before, but frees up those who never wanted to use it to find a different use
of that money (e.g. public transit, or moving closer and paying higher rent
but paying less in transportation).

~~~
oliwarner
So you'd remove an indirect tax, implement a new direct tax and then implement
a welfare system to help people pay the new direct tax? Car stamps?

Just pulling on my reply to same, varying your tax on a person's earnings is a
much better way of means testing life than by separately means testing every
tax.

~~~
ceras
Not car stamps: the important distinction is that the welfare should not be
earmarked for a specific use. This allows the market to behave naturally and
no longer force non-users to pay the indirect tax while letting poor people
who want to pay it not suffer material consequences vs. the indirect tax.

~~~
oliwarner
The welfare side of this is already handled quite effectively through income
tax banding, though as you say, that does indirectly tax everybody for
infrastructure.

But what's wrong with that? We all pay for national defence. We all pay for
nationally funded arts and schooling and science. Even people without children
or cancer or an interest in weird concept dance. We pay for this stuff because
it makes our countries better, as a whole. Infrastructure is no different.

Even ignoring that, how do you issue this welfare to people who are paying
this/these road use tax? Tax them less at the pump or the tolls? Who
implements this?

And that still isn't fair. They're not paying for the roads they use. This
money goes nationwide. Or does Tincanville (pop 30) have to shoulder the cost
of their entire road network now?

Unless you're willing to take this to the absolute bureaucratic extreme, and
make some people pay tons for low-use roads (which age naturally, regardless
of use) an indirect tax of some description is the only way to keep the entire
road network viable.

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dangjc
This is a great example of why taxes are so high in America. Instead of having
one party be for lowering taxes and one for raising taxes, why not have both
parties admit that we all want to make government more efficient with the
money it does have?

Roads are surprisingly expensive to build and maintain, but sprawl requires
more roads and it reduces the tax efficiency of the land. Here's a great
article explaining how a classic main-street style road generates more
property tax dollars than an equivalent sprawl street.

[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/traditional-
deve...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/traditional-development-
is-a-municipal-gold-mine/)

Rail is expensive to build and maintain too, but maybe combined with ride
hailing for the last mile, rail could be focused on just highly trafficked
corridors that are also the most efficient people and dollar wise.

------
brudgers
In the US, and perhaps other places, the highway infrastructure is provided
not just for personal use, but also for military logistics and civil response.
There's are reasons I-185 runs to the front gate of Fort Benning beyond
commuter convenience and civilian commerce.

------
syshum
Taking only Gas Taxation as the only "user tax" is dubious at best

"User" Based taxation figures should include

1\. Gas Taxes

2\. Sales Taxes on vehicles

3\. Registrations and Inspection Fees

4\. Yearly Excise Taxation

5\. Environmental Fees

an several other kinds of taxes that directly apply to operation of motor
vehicles,

Further this study (that I saw) did not seem to address the MASSIVE subsidy
given to commercial operations on the Interstate system, the Gas taxes paid by
Commercial Trucking companies is fraction of that charged to operators of non-
commercial vehicles.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
There's also the positive externalities of infrastructure, and that winds up
as land values. Like, my dad grew up in a house in what was, at the time, a
rural area near Seattle. When we were driving down I-405, he'd point out a
major commercial building that went up there after the freeway went up. The
difference in property value between the two is almost entirely due to I-405
being there.

Basically, my point is that drivable places tend to be more valuable than non-
drivable, so property taxes are an indirect way of capturing the value
provided by infrastructure (particularly land-value taxes).

------
pif
> Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use.

Why should they? Roads are not there only for those actually using them: they
are meant to be always available for everyone. Imagine a road that is used
only from time to time, just by emergency vehicles: don't you agree that would
be a reasonable way to spend tax money?

~~~
Cerium
I would be fine with everyone paying for the roads and them being actually
available for everyone. The problem is that many roads are made only for cars
and do not have adequate side walks and protected bike lanes such that
everyone can use them.

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lastbestmatt
The argument in the article is misleading given the data it presents. What it
should have said is that drivers pay for roads both via the gas tax AND by
other forms of tax. The portion paid by the gas tax is itself not enough to
cover road maintenance.

Of course, this means that some non-drivers and non-car-owners also pay taxes
used for road maintenance. It would have been worthwhile for the author to
look up those numbers and tell how much non-drivers pay. Given that most
Americans drive, this argument probably wouldn't have the same impact as the
one presented in the article.

~~~
FussyZeus
Plus the idea that non-car-owners do not benefit from a functioning road
system is laughable on it's face. Busses and Ubers need roads too, and that's
not even including the trucks that bring them their food and Amazon orders or
the police that protect them and the fire fighters that may one day save their
life.

That all being said, it is true that the gas tax (along with most other taxes)
has not kept pace with the growth of our infrastructure or inflation in
general. Going in on increasing the gas tax is the best way to insure you are
not getting re-elected because many Americans apparently believe that they pay
enough taxes (they don't.)

~~~
lastbestmatt
Right, it's obvious that non-drivers benefit from the roads too. You could
still argue for higher gas taxes or other use fees if you wanted, for example
to better align incentives (extra road usage leads to directly higher costs
for the user). But this article certainly doesn't make that case.

~~~
ebalit
I think the article proposition is exactly what you're saying. Raise the gas
taxes to cover the real cost of the infrastructure.

~~~
FussyZeus
Again though it's political suicide. People will bitch all day about having
crummy roads but if you suggest a tax increase that would amount to 2 bucks
extra for every tank you'll be run out of town metaphorically, and possibly
literally.

~~~
ebalit
In France the tax was raised right when oil prices where down. It eases the
pain a little.

------
HillaryBriss
Does this mean, when politicians at the national level say "we need more
fiscal stimulus to rebuild infrastructure," that they're wasting money?

Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars and
trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I mean, one of the messages we hear repeated ad nauseum from economists and
politicians is that this sort of government subsidy is a good thing: it
creates jobs and grows GDP. It's a win-win.

Now, are we supposed to believe it's some kind of perverse incentive and an
unfair subsidy?

Which is it?

~~~
pkulak
> Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars
> and trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I would be better if they did it. But, if they _said_ it they would
immediately lose their office. So...

It's been known for a very long time in economic circles that the taxes we
have are not the best taxes, or even good taxes; they are the taxes that
politicians were able to get people to vote for. So, we have a staggeringly-
low gas tax and make up for it with income, sales and property taxes.

