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by dahfizz 1257 days ago
Yeah, that's my point. A single garbage truck is going to do more wear on the roads than thousands of passenger vehicles. Anything besides industrial vehicles is negligible.
1 comments

A garbage truck has many tires to distribute the load. Also they accelerate/decelerate differently.
The rear tandems of a semi or heavier straight truck (garbage truck, dump truck, etc) occupy roughly the same road area as your car and may be carrying the weight of ~10x your car. The contact pressure is also much higher (100+psi tires vs your 20-40 or so).
Per OP's report, what matters is axle load.

A typical garbage truck has 2 or 3 axles. Let's assume 3 to be conservative. A fully loaded garbage truck weighs around 50,000 pounds. That's 16.6k pounds per axle, vs a Tesla Y's 2.2k pounds per axle.

Doing the math, a single garbage truck does as much road wear as ~3,300 teslas.