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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Why not tax each mode of transportation proportionately to their true cost, and let the market decide?

Because there is no "true cost" and it's all subjective.

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.

or transportation of goods like food become more expensive so people rely on their local farmers instead of getting avacados shipped in from the moon

If you do anything to a low level of the economy (e.g. fuel or energy prices) to the point where consumption at the upper levels is reduced then you're also screwing the poors hard enough that you are either going to get voted out of office or shot in short order (depending on how your system of government handles power transitions).

I agree, but none of this is remotely just or fair without a minimum wage that is a living wage. And what that is needs to be reassessed if policies change the cost of living.

that's life - frank sinatra

Good thing it's something totally within our power to change. - Probably Also Frank Sinatra

>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

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.

Small trucks may cut enough emissions by reducing road-wear. If everyone switched from large trucks to an even larger amount of small trucks it's possible the problem is made worse.

Why the focus on small trucks as if they're a panacea?

>If everyone switched from large trucks to an even larger amount of small trucks it's possible the problem is made worse.

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.

>it's all subjective.

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...

> then you'll have a world where everything is delivered in small trucks and there will be problems with that

So then tax those problems until taxes represent the true societal cost of things

Rail networks have massive network effects. Might be best to let the market not have that one. What with the huge risk of regulatory capture and all.

Looking at e.g. the UK, having some mixed public-private rail system doesn't seem to work that well.

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..

I sort of wonder if private train companies in the US would achieve the sort of interconnection we have in Tokyo. The train station nearest to my house is owned by one company, but after going East two stops the stations and rails are all owned by another company. The station that's part of both of these companies' lines is also a major transfer station to a major line owned by a third company.

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.

This was sort of figured out during the massive railroad booms in the US throughout the 1800s. You can let the market have parts of it but you need guardrails so you don't have some asshole that owns a bridge holding everything up for a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Avenue_Bridge#Histo...

Motor carriers operate with tight margins and require a heavy regulatory hand. There are multiple overlapping jurisdictions, etc. Law of averages make fuel tax work, but there are holes... if you buy fuel in Delaware, less revenue comes to Pennsylvania, etc.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fuel_Tax_Agreeme...

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.

I'm sure the "flag of convenience" states that operate cut-rate truck registrations are very diligent in auditing compliance. </s>

How do you price in the fact that heavy trucks destroy the road faster, causing them to be replaced more often, causing more pollution?

In other words, how do you price in the pollution? And do you really want to?

Yes, you really do want to. It would be lovely if we could charge proportional to the externalities.

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.

We could get the approximations quite wrong and still get massive economic improvements from where we currently are!

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.

Large pickups aren’t an appreciable part of the problem here - 18 wheelers are.

There are a lot of smaller roads where 18 wheelers never travel, and where a 2x weight increase means 10x the road wear (between the cube and fourth power of weight, according to simple models in this thread).

Charge the asphalt companies a carbon tax, and let municipalities create road taxes based on vehicle weight/usage to pay for the extra costs created for road maintenance

The how is difficult -- studies like this are part. "Do you really want to?" is a clear yes. It's called a Pigovian tax, and it's the most unambiguously "correct" way to tax things: you tax things in accordance to their harm to third-parties (and subsidize things in accordance to their benefits to third-parties).

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.

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