You could just as well have the government just pay the freight railroads to provide a good quality passenger service rather than give them a tax break.
It’s always been my impression that it’s easier for government to forgo revenue, than it is for them to assemble funding. When you are putting together a funding package, everyone wants to stir the pot, whereas with the alternative the majority will leave well enough alone so long as their own sacred cows are not impacted.
I know what you mean, but times are changing. I have just recently learned that every tax that does not exist amounts to government spending.
How many highways were constructed with porous concrete that allowed road salt and water to corrode the rebar in the paving. Also what happens with Asphalt roads?
You really can’t blame trucks for road damage. Trucks are essential to the economies of the world. Travel to other countries and see for yourself how they do things. In Germany trucks are heavier and have a greater axle load then here in the good old US. The difference is in the road themselves. Compacted soil over many hundreds of years makes a better roadbed then just freshly graded. Bridges are built years in advance before the road meets them to give the concrete proper time in reaching its maximum hardness. Asphalt and concrete roads are much thicker and have greater reinforcing. Greater costs up front but longer lasting. Here we build cheap and fast. Low bid and shoddy work is the norm. The roads in most newer developments around my house are 3 to 4 inches thick laid on nothing but graded stone on top of sand. Any mid sized car will make pot holes in it. Don’t blame the trucks. If we designed trucks like our roads then it would take several trips to the corner store for 2 bags of groceries. Imagine carrying 1 quart of milk 4 times because the road can not support 1 gallon at once. How is that the gallon containers fault?
A few comments with the caveat that I am not a civil nor a structural engineer.
Your analysis of required road strength does not look like you are taking dynamic loading into account. My guess is that truck spring rates are much higher in relation to car spring rates than the ratios of axle loading. Think comments about nose suspended traction motors versus truck or body mounted traction motors.
Damage is likely to be a highly nonlinear function of axle loading (much as it is for railroading). I suspect that damage to roads would be somewhat like fatigue in metals - which is still not very well understood as Boeing recently found out with the SWA 737 a couple of weeks back.
I think you are probably in the ball park about building a highway to handle trucks may cost 3 times as much as on built solely for cars. Assuming this is true, this implies that the truckers should be paying for 2/3rds of the highway construction costs.
Thanks much for those links. [tup] I just skimmed the Kansas one, which is very interesting being based on data and a study completed only a couple years ago - mainly for the meat and related industries - and including recommendations for more rail and intermodal usage, so greyhounds should be interested in it as well. It deserves a more devoted review, but in the meantime here’s the essential conclusion, last paragraph at the bottom of page 122 (Page 130 of 180 of the ‘PDF’ format version, approx. 2.83 MB in size):
“. . .the total highway damage cost associated with processed meat related industries was estimated as $71,019 per year, or $1,727 per mile.The damage cost per truck per mile was approximately $0.02.”
My ‘gut reaction’ is that’s not believable. In railroad terms, that’s 2 cents for about 20 to 25 payload ton-miles or 40 gross ton-miles = 0.05 cent per gross ton-mile or $50,000 per Million Gross Ton-Miles per Mile - although, that’s not far off from what a typical mile of track costs to maintain per year for - say, about 10 times as much traffic (10 MGT or so). But that 2 cents per mile would be only about $7.20 in road damage costs to cross the entire state of Pennsylvania, some 360 miles. Locally, to travel 15 miles on the PA Turnpike costs $1.10 for 15 miles from Lehigh Valley to Quakertown or about 7.3 cents per mile for my standard-size 4-wheel cars - more than 3 times as much. Stated another way, that $1,727 per mile for a generous 30 year service life for a roadway would amount to about $52,000, or around $10 per foot. 'Seat-of-the-pants", rebuilding a mile of road would cost at least 10 times that much. But let me look at the methodology in some more detail. &
Well now, Greyhounds are an ancient breed. In the thousands of years they’ve been around I don’t think even one of them has ever expressed disinterest in bloody raw beef.
Kansas has done a couple studies on the transportation situation in the south west part of the state. They’ve got a big industrial concentration there (which they like) of very large beef plants and feed lots. Since the inbound and outbound shipments for these industries primarily move by truck, the state of Kansas is on the hook for providing the necessary transportation infrastructure.
They look at the underutilized rail lines in that area and sigh.
I’m convinced the reason that the vast majority of this business, with the exception of inbound cattle feed, moves by truck has nothing to do with rail being an inferior transport mode for the beef. Intermodal development was stunted by Joseph B. Eastman. Eastman can best be described as a “Hard Working Idiot.” He became chairman of the ICC in 1926 and was made “Emergency Transportation Co-ordinator” or something like that by FDR in the early 30’s. Effectively, he was FDR’s transportation czar.
Where the fault lies on the condition of the US Highway system it is Not the Trucks cars or any of the Users. It lies with teh GOVERMENT and them alone. Why is that you say name the people that come up with the standards that the Engineers have to design the Bridges and roads to meet the Goverment. Name the people that refuse to make the Concrators have a Warrenty peroid for any problems in the Roads the Goverment. In Europe if there is a problem with the road the Concrator that did the last repavement job has to warrenty the ROAD for 30 years. Here as soon as they are done they are off the hook. Also here in the States it is the Cheapest bid that meet or does not meet the Specs gets the contract. Europe they require the contract to go to the Longest Warrenty issued on the Contract. Not who bids the lowest.
Here in the US we might use 5% asphalt in blacktop. Europe IIRC from other Forums it is 15% hpolds up a hell of alot better. Also we have a 6 inch thick layer of roadbead. There it is 30 inches which one will last longer. Remember the FHWSA writes the construction standards.
You must live in the South. When I moved south that was one of the things that struck me as odd. Interstates do have a good foundation in NY. I was amazed to see the construction of I-485 here, where they basicaly scraped the ground flat, rolled it, and put the pavement right on the dirt.
But then, I was also amazed to see that my water meter is outdoors. LOL
I think that is an important point. The government owns the roads, so why would they be motivated to make them last? Bad roads are cash cows for revenue. Every pothole and every traffic jam has hundreds of taxpayers fuming in their cars, and this culminates in besieging the government to take action now.
I am skeptical of all analyses purporting to quantify road deterioration inflicted by vehicle types. This is because I cannot imagine who would develop such an analysis without having an agenda that benefited from the outcome of the analysis. If a private business owned the roads, I could see them having an interest in knowing the truth about the wear and tear caused by their vehicles. Knowing the facts would be part of their business. But otherwise, there would be inherent motivation to exaggerate the results, downplay them, or shift the blame from one vehicle user to another.
The problem with any analysis of road damage by vehicle type is so complex that anyone can convincingly challenge it and come up with a different result. On one hand, engineering facts and numbers don’t lie, but on the other hand, they can be made into an effective smokescreen.
Certainly roads wear out with use and weather. And they wear out faster as vehicle weig
I was strickly an observer of a repaving and widening project on I-85 south of Atlanta.
First almost all bridges over the interstate were raised an average of 24 - 28 ".
The right lane and middle lane (where it was 3 lanes) were really torn up and cracked concrete. Lewt lane was smooth as trucks not allowed in left of 3 lanes or more.
All holes in concrete previously were patched repeately but cracks quickly came back.
3. Second Various lanes were patched and any under pavement repair completed.
4. For repair of the concrete a 10 inch layer of asphalt was added over the concrete and patches. I suspect this was done to use the super cooled physical properties of asphalt that I have note are done in current airport pavement projects.
5. Then new re bar (#8?) was added long ways and cross wise.
6. Finally a 10" layer of concrete (5000# ?) was poured to form a new pavement.
7. Note: all but one bridge was re built as well.
Project took 2-1/2 years to complete. Appeaars that this was an attempt to build roads to avoid truck damage.
Who would be paying for the difference between the current road construction standards and the improved standards? While the “government” does build and own most of the roads in the US (government meaning local, state and federal), they collect the money to do so from a combination of taxes and fees. How these taxes and fees are allocated has been a source of a lot of discussion.
One of the chief complaints by the freight RR’s is that the competition has not been paying their fair share of costs.
So now we are reduced to dismissing a variety of engineering studies that consistently show very heavy damage to our highways (our highways, not the trucking industry’s private network) by trucks? Are we to believe they are all wrong because they “don’t pass the sniff test” or biased because of some convoluted reasoning about the government?
Then again we need the trucks because we as a society keep buying and throwing away crap. The trucking industry isn’t just running trucks for the heck of it…
I don’t think there is any question that heavy trucks cause more wear and tear to highways than lighter vehicles. Theoretically, they are charged accordingly. I don’t know if their charges match the wear and tear they cause or not. But a lot of people believe they don’t. If the studies are accurate, what would be the reason for trucks not being charged their fair share by the taxing authority?
Do all the studies that show vehicle wear and tear to highways come to the same conclusion? What is your conclusion about whether or not trucks pay their fair share? I don’t have one. I would have to do my own study before I could reach a conclusion. But when you consider the amount of engineering analysis that would be needed, plus the cost
I am merely saying that the studies I linked seem to accept the notion that the damage from trucks is exponentially greater than autos. I noticed that a Wisconsin study found severe deterioration on roads even with the segments linked by the recommended REBAR dowels to reduce flex. Look at what blue streak 1 observed south of Atlanta on I 85 rebuilding.
“The right lane and middle lane (where it was 3 lanes) were really torn up and cracked concrete. Left lane was smooth as trucks [were] not allowed in left of 3 lanes or more.”
Pretty clearly, though trucks are necessary for commerce, lighter loads and/or the payment of much higher fees to allow for the damage they cause to our highways need to be considered. You, Bucyrus, often complain about the government providing services not covered by user fees. It does appear, however, that all of us who drive cars and pay taxes are heavily subsidizing the trucking industry.
I agree that studies show trucks do more damage to roads than cars or other lighter vehicles, and I have no problem believing that. And the damage might go up exponentially with the weight of the vehicle as you say.
But where is the evidence that trucks are not paying for all of the damage they do, but instead are having part of that damage being paid for by a subsidy from car drivers?
I do not know precisely how much truckers actually pay into the highways funds per truck. Even if the exponential damage factor were only 500X that of a car (less than 10& of the commonly mentioned amount) don’t you think it seems unlikely that one truck would pay 500X what you or I do [if we actually knew how much we pay, that is]? I suppose that figure, or the method of calculating it is available somewhere.
I really don’t know what the truth is about that. But it has to be an extraordinarily complex calculation. If it were accurately calculated, one should be able to readily ascertain whether trucks pay for their share of the road wear and tear. But the fact that the question is endlessly debated suggests to me that an accurate calculation has not been made. Or if it has been made, then not everybody believes it is accurate.
But here is something else to consider: Suppose trucks do not pay the full cost of the road damage they cause. Whose fault is that? The taxing authority calls the shots. For that matter, I wonder what the taxing authority would say to the question of whether