Not if they're under 55k lbs. A 54,000 truck will cause thousands of times more damage than a Hummer EV. Does the tax you refer to reflect four orders of magnitude of damage differential?
If that's the going rate for weight-based road damage, then scaled down to a residential vehicle, no one without a CDL would ever pay more than pennies.
Since gas taxes and vehicle registration fees are needed to fund road construction, I have to conclude that residential vehicles are subsidizing road damage caused by trucks.
Which, again, is fine. But let's be honest about it.
This is correct. Almost all road repair costs are caused by commercial heavy trucks. They should not just pay more, they should be paying substantially all road work costs.
If we charge directly based on road damage, this is true. But I'm okay with residential road users subsidizing the use of commercial trucks; they're very useful to have around and charging appropriately would increase the cost of services not-insignificantly.
Mileage taxes are interesting; then the people who use the roads the most, and have the most interest in keeping them in good shape, pay the most to do so.
I'm also okay with charging heavy vehicles more based on them being a larger threat to life. But saying that tax is "because heavy residential vehicles do more road damage" is disingenuous.
