The USA already moves a higher percentage of freight by rail than almost any other country. But rail could never work for time-sensitive loads or last mile delivery.
Perhaps they could make the rail lines and machinery smaller. One might even consider such rail to be "light", in comparison.
I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many cities already have rail lines going down roads in city centers. They probably just built the city around a historical freight line, and haven't bothered to remove it.
the freight has more axles, and you could set the baseline weight by vehicle class
but maybe this would just incentivise the sort of person that buys an F150 to drive to the shops to simply to upgrade to a big rig (for the tax saving?!)
Massive increase in the cost of public transport as buses pass their tax costs onto users.
Massive increase in the cost of freight shipping, which would be passed on to consumers, i.e. everybody, since virtually every part of the economy depends indirectly on freight transport.
It would amount to everybody paying, and thus being more or less equivalent to public funding of roads.
Freight -- Ideally this causes more investment into freight rail and more freight to be moved by rail/boat. This might cause short term price increases to expand the infrastructure, but long term it's much cheaper/greener/efficient to move this stuff on rail. Last mile (maybe last 100 miles) will always be by truck, but we have way too much long haul stuff.
Public Transport -- If tax payers are currently paying for the external costs of public transportation (via taxes to repair roads) then it won't cost anymore public money if taxpayers continue to cover that cost. For private busses this is a case of tax payers unfairly subsiding their external costs.
> The unintended consequences of this would be: ... public transport ... freight
You could obviously tweak legislation to treat such vehicles differently if you wanted. I was just getting the core idea across, not suggesting my comment should be copy-pasted verbatim into the next bill Congress is passing.
It's worth noting that unless the roads are degrading and not being repaired, those costs are already being paid. It's just a question of who is paying it.
It removes the implicit subsidy for buses, but we want to encourage people to use buses over cars and SUVs. Also, the damage from cars/SUVs is so small that the cost of collecting the fee would exceed the amount of the fee.