Road user charges should be uniform. X dollars per kilogram no matter what the class of the vehicle. Commercial or not should not make any difference, the road doesn’t know. The only modification I would make to this policy is X is divided per passengers but that’s really hard to measure and enforce. If it could be done then it should. For example taxi companies and busses etc can measure and log the number of passengers on any given kilometer traveled.
The problem with that is that the road damage is exponential, so it doesn’t scale up in a linear way.
But then if they spread the load over more axles, it becomes additive, so if your aim is to make it fairer then you’ll need more complex calculations (that are perfectly possible to do with information we already collect, but it’s more confusing for the ones buying the road user charges).
Meh. Trucks get weighed so the additional axel of a trailer isn’t going to make that much of a difference. The cab has multiple axels but it could be traveling empty without a trailer.
Axle weight is the single most important factor in road damage, if you are aiming for fair share, you can’t ignore it. This is much more important than the overall weight of a vehicle, and in fact a lot of regulation is around axle weight and the weight of groups of axles as well as the overall weight.
Road user charges should be uniform. X dollars per kilogram no matter what the class of the vehicle. Commercial or not should not make any difference, the road doesn’t know. The only modification I would make to this policy is X is divided per passengers but that’s really hard to measure and enforce. If it could be done then it should. For example taxi companies and busses etc can measure and log the number of passengers on any given kilometer traveled.
The problem with that is that the road damage is exponential, so it doesn’t scale up in a linear way.
But then if they spread the load over more axles, it becomes additive, so if your aim is to make it fairer then you’ll need more complex calculations (that are perfectly possible to do with information we already collect, but it’s more confusing for the ones buying the road user charges).
Meh. Trucks get weighed so the additional axel of a trailer isn’t going to make that much of a difference. The cab has multiple axels but it could be traveling empty without a trailer.
Axle weight is the single most important factor in road damage, if you are aiming for fair share, you can’t ignore it. This is much more important than the overall weight of a vehicle, and in fact a lot of regulation is around axle weight and the weight of groups of axles as well as the overall weight.