Road damage scales with axle weight to the fourth power (w^4).
So if a 500lbs motorcycle is the unit of damage, a 4,000 lbs sedan does 4,096 units of damage (4096x as much), a 6,000 lbs SUV/pickup does 20,736x, a 14,000 lbs delivery van does 614,000x, and the 80,000 lbs US federal limit 5 axle semi-trailer does 90,800,000x the damage of the motorcycle.
So probably shipping stuff in trucks doesn't cost enough, and SUVs/pickups should cost 5x for road tax what sedans do.
Nope because the numbers you just posted exemplify what every knows: road cars don't even register on the radar compared to semi-trailers.
The tax for "road damage" should be approximately zero for cars, any cars, and way more expensive for semis.
But people who hate on cars don't want to hear the truth: they're all too happy to take their bicycle to go buy the milk the semis brought to their city.
A tad heavy on the rhetoric, wouldn't you say?
There are fixed or per-vehicle costs:
* signage, lighting, snow removal, etc.
* weather-related wear and tear from freeze/thaw, thermal expansion, etc.
* capacity (more lanes needed, driven by passenger vehicles, not trucks)
So yeah, semi's should probably be paying $100k/year in road tax based on wear, but that doesn't meant that your car's road tax should be $1/year.
There's also a great argument that all the suburbs are not paying enough in property taxes. Those paved roads have high costs to maintain over time, and service just the traffic to/from some large houses. Some have gone so far as to call suburbia a scam, on the basis that it has to perpetually grow to pay for maintenance.
The truth is it's not all about road damage. In fact I couldn't care less about that because I don't really use those roads anyway.
Tax is more about driving behaviour than anything.
If you live in the US, you use roads. Every physical product you buy is transported by road at some point.