Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff.
As far as pollution externalities go, you may be right, but actual level-headed analysis of the dollar cost of global warming are tough to describe as “civilization-changing”. Certainly I think the externalities of my own vehicle usage are worth it, and I would be happy to pay those costs if they were internalized correctly (but good luck not turning that into a pork-barrel monstrosity).
> Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles.
Yes, but we need substantially wider roads and more roads when cars are a primary commuting method. It's often the case that trucking is simultaneously the largest source of wear and not the largest contributor to road budgets.
> it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff.
How are rural areas any different?
Those peaches from the Walmart in northern WI were probably grown in the exact same Georgian fields as the peaches from the corner store in Chicago. For manufactured goods made in $asian_country, trucking stuff out to Montana from the coast is going to cause a lot more road damage than hauling it from a barge to some store in the bay area.
The amount of road wear&tear probably correlates more with your distance from the major ports than urban/rural. That can go either way.
Unless you live in Iowa and your diet consists mainly of corn and ethanol and you furnish your home with Amish furniture^1, you're benefiting from trucking routes at least as much as anyone in "the city".
There are very few "self-sufficient" communities in the USA. The closest you get .
> If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff.
As opposed to all the rural subsistance farmers who build all their own stuff? I'm sure there's a handful such people out there, but everybody else has their food and stuff trucked in just as much, with a 30 minute car ride added on top to haul things back to the ranch.
Apparently, road damage is approximately proportional to single axle load to the fourth power. So, a SUV causes approximately 16 times the damage of a compact car with half the mass. And, yes, freight vehicles can cause thousands times more.
> Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff.
This is just whataboutism.
Externalities from all vehicular use should be internalized. I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise.
As far as pollution externalities go, you may be right, but actual level-headed analysis of the dollar cost of global warming are tough to describe as “civilization-changing”. Certainly I think the externalities of my own vehicle usage are worth it, and I would be happy to pay those costs if they were internalized correctly (but good luck not turning that into a pork-barrel monstrosity).