• conditional_soup
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Like YIMBY said, the short answer is yes. The long answer is that there’s a complicated network of subsidies, write-offs, and car-related maintenance, bureaucracy, and clean-up that is supported by the taxpayer and doesn’t pay for itself. It’s not just repaving roads, which has to happen more and more often as vehicles get heavier and faster (road damage increases quadratically as vehicle weight increases), it’s also paying for highway patrol to enforce road safety, paying for first responders to clean up accidents, paying for other maintenance to prevent wildfires and clean up roadside litter (even if you use prison crews, it doesn’t cost nothing), paying to maintain other road-related infrastructure like signs and guardrails, as well as the multitude of oil and gasoline subsidies that become more and more important as we become more and more reliant on tractor-trailers to haul goods.

    The ten dollars spent by taxpayers for every one dollar of operational cost actually applies to driving cars, I suspect that the cost to taxpayers for long haul trucking is quite larger.