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by aejnsn 1759 days ago
> fuel price and road damage is not reflected in a gas price even if trucks are less fuel efficient

It’s almost like you’re saying a fuel tax shouldn’t incentivize fuel efficiency. I am saying it should. Broadly, heavier vehicles do definitely burn more fuel, hence why diesels are more prevalent with heavier workloads.

1 comments

well it depends on what the gas tax is for. If the gas tax is to pay for road maintenance, then ideally the gas tax for a given vehicle should be commensurate with the amount of road damage that we then have to pay for through maintenance. the correlation however is not nearly strong enough between the tax and road damage, so the tax for heavier vehicles should be hiked significantly.

if you want to charge a carbon tax to dissuade burning fossil fuels that's another thing entirely, but the gas tax has never really been designed to do that, it's always been for road maintenance. Electric vehicles don't just become weightless on roads.