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I am willing to pay per mile if the system is reasonable and fair. The problem is a per vehicle mile tax is grossly unfair if it does not account for differences in road damage that different vehicles do. Let me explain.
Fatigue road damage(the spider cracking that preceeds surface failure)is not linear with vehicle weight. A single fully loaded semi truck traveling over a strech of road does the same amount of fatigue damage as 10,000 passenger vehicles. That is not a typo it is an ODOT statistic. To put that in perspective, the fatigue damage of one semi truck is equal to a line of (15 foot long) passenger vehicles 28 miles long! Similarly a typical 7500 pound 4 x 4 pick up truck does way more than three times the damage of a 2500 pound passenger vehicle. The higher fuel consumption and accompanying higher tax of the larger vehicle still does not compensate for the damage that the larger vehicles do to the roads. Further, a per vehicle mile tax would be positively regressive if it does not account for this fact.
Quite frankly, this is the crazy aunt in the closet of the "Automotive arms race" of the last 15 years.

posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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