Sounds like we need to expand our rail capacity. Our current rail freight capacity is near 100%.
In other words, how do you price in the pollution? And do you really want to?
As for how... beats me. Best we can do is rough approximation, and accept that we will continually find out we were wrong and have to adjust the cost structure.
However the challenge isn't the approximations, but the political difficulties. Even taxing based on mileage would cause an uproar. And taxing large pickups proportional to their economic toll on infrastructure would probably start a violent revolution.
Markets only work if we internalize the externalities, which can most efficiently be done through taxation. Pollution is one of the standard examples of an externality.
You can ratchet up the tax on heavy trucks because "muh road wear" but then you'll have a world where everything is delivered in small trucks and there will be problems with that. At the end of the day it comes down to a subjective question of which problems get which priority.
Is that really a bad thing? If shipping via big trucks (compared to small trucks) causes $200 more road wear per year, but saves $100/yr in gas (and other expenses), why shouldn't we use small trucks?
> At the end of the day it comes down to a subjective question of which problems get which priority.
You're right, there will be some subjectivity involved, but at least the general goal is trying to be as neutral as possible. It's not unlike cap & trade for dealing with climate change - letting the market decide what's the most cost effective way.
Why the focus on small trucks as if they're a panacea?
Right, but isn't the whole premise that the damage is the truck's weight cubed (or ^4)? Splitting large trucks to small trucks only increase wear linearly.
>Why the focus on small trucks as if they're a panacea?
I'm not. It's a hypothetical.
Let's dream for a moment where the tort system worked perfectly. All environmental externalities would be perfectly priced by class actions. Cause $100,000 of lung damage, pay $100,000 to the survivors. If only such efficient courts existed...
So then tax those problems until taxes represent the true societal cost of things
The most efficient freight railways in the world are probably in the USA, and passengers in Japan. Both private vertically integrated things, with the one company owning both rails and trains. But yeah, massive potential for problems as well.
I don't really have a good solution. I'd guess the best industry structure is just "it depends", nothing that is superior to other ways of doing it in all circumstances..
As a user of transit I mostly don't have to care about this, but I ended up calling three companies when I lost something on the way home.
Shitty operators will do anything to save a buck -- trucks with no brakes operating overweight will travel at night to avoid enforcement based on knowledge of enforcement. Others will find holes in enforcement to avoid penalties -- shady trucks operating in Manhattan will be registered in places where unpaid New York tickets won't impact their registration, for example.
If you have a commercial vehicle you are supposed to be tracking how many miles you travel in each jurisdiction and how much fuel you buy in each jurisdiction.
And as a sibling comment points out, where the US does have good rivers/lakes, notably the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio network and the Great Lakes, they are used extensively for transport. The only one I can think of that is disused is the Hudson and canals that connect to the Great Lakes.
But the same is true for Europe: larger rivers allow larger, more efficient ships and are still used for transport, and the canal system is too narrow and so mostly recreational now.
In calendar year 2019, the alameda corridor [1] processed about 4.8 million twenty foot equivilent units (TEU) [2] and the ports of los angeles and long beach processed about 9.3 million [3]. So around about half of the container trips to or from the port are by rail rather than truck. Some of the containers may just get put on trucks at the rail yards at the other end of the corridor to avoid trucking congestion in the port, but I don't think there's a lot of that. (I could be wrong)
For passengers? It's pretty iffy outside of commuter rail, Amtrak operates on freight lines, and is deprioritized, and there's a lot of freight volume, so there's a lot of delays for passengers.
I don't know the right keywords to find data for the ports of Oakland and Stockton. They probably have a decent rail volume too, but they have more challenging geography to get east than in southern california.
[1] the rails between the port of la/long beach and major rail yards exiting los angeles
[2] http://www.acta.org/pdf/Monthly_TEUREV_History.pdf
[3] https://kentico.portoflosangeles.org/getmedia/a43d3038-7713-...