And the correct activity to tax is the delivery itself, or some close proxy for it. Ideally taxed to the business doing the delivery so they have a harder time faking lower prices or otherwise making it seem like the higher costs are for any reason other than the way they're doing business.
While we're at it we could make trucking companies pay for the actual amount of wear they put on the roads and the costs to build truck-supporting infrastructure. And I'd like a pony.
The pitfall is that gas taxes are apparently not strongly correlated to road wear. A gallon of gas in a passenger vehicle does dramatically less road damage than a gallon of gas in a delivery truck.
We need to fix our urban housing problem, or provide further positive incentives for non-ICE vehicles so we aren’t creating a regressive tax. Newsflash: most people don’t like driving a lot, they do it because they feel like they must.
Hmmm. Last mile deliveries are generally a mixture of passenger cars and small vans, whereas deliveries to stores are done using large trucks with disproportionately more road wear. Maybe store deliveries should be taxed higher than home deliveries?
The ideal would be something like, per vehicle, measure mileage and multiply that by a road-wear lookup table indexed with gross vehicle weight rating & number of axles. Cost would be passed down to the consumer and then the market would sort it all out.
Heavy vehicles put exponentially more wear. Especially if the road was not built for having that weight on it. Let's say you build a drive way for a car. You could park a 2 ton car every day for decades with no damage. Yet a massive truck parked once may fuck it up due to it's sheer weight.
that would make sense if roads are built for 5 trips of a car than 1 trip of truck. ( Because car is travelling longer with that one gallon of gallon.)
Is that true though that X cars travelling a mile of road would do less damage than 1 truck traveling on that same road?
Also, gas taxes don't account for different vehicle damage rates to roads. Gas taxes impose effectively a constant per pound-hour tax on road use, which is fine, but roads are damaged based on what is called the 4th power law, so 1000kg axel weight does 16x more damage than 500kg axel weight.
You're right in that the, say, 20 min saved per person is going to go to some other activity.
And certainly some of those activities can involve driving, like going to visit friends. But many other activities will just be spending more time at home -- e.g. coming home straight from work instead of running errands, or staying home Saturday afternoon to read or play video games.
To your point: in areas where traffic congestion is already extreme, it may not make a difference because there's so much pent-up demand for car trips. But in most of the rest of the country (suburbs, rural, etc.) that doesn't suffer from congestion, I think package delivery would have to result in reducing traffic to some measurable degree.
Well, public transportation buses typically weigh even far more than that, at 25-35K pounds, yet society seems to agree they're better overall than the 20 or 40 cars they replace, despite their greater overall road wear.
I don't think anyone considers road wear to be a major deciding factor here. Congestion and pollution are.
Public Transit bus weighs 44k fully loaded. Assuming only seated passengers, it holds 44 people so 1000lb per person. A car is 4000lbs on average. Fully loaded (with standing) holds 92 people. 478lb/person.
So if you’re curious, you’ll enjoy knowing road wear isn’t linear with weight — it’s exponentially proportional. Almost all road wear comes from large trucks and buses. So linear division doesn’t actually have relevance here. Buses are far, far worse than the equivalent number of cars in terms of road wear... but again, it's a non-issue because road wear isn't a main consideration.
the first comment about the sprinter vans shows that its exponential for road wear. Youre arguing roadwear doesnt matter but arguing against busses.
I just wanted to see what weight per person was. Doesnt matter as much for road wear, but as you were saying, pollution etc matters too, and weight per person matters for the other factors. Not weight per axle like road wear
While we're at it we could make trucking companies pay for the actual amount of wear they put on the roads and the costs to build truck-supporting infrastructure. And I'd like a pony.