FUEGO
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2007
- Messages
- 7,746
One of the problems that people seem to forget is that cars traveling on a road will 'wear' it out... (the trucks are MUCH worse)...
SO, if you only tax the gas (which pays for the roads) and I drive a gas hog, then I am paying more for that road then the guy in the Prius... yet the 'damage' to the road is the same if we have the same weight car and tires....
Lighter cars (which are typically more fuel efficient) cause proportionately less road damage per unit of fuel tax they pay in general. Road damage increases roughly exponentially to the fourth power as vehicle weight (per axle) increases. So a suburban with roughly double the axle weight of a passenger car actually does 16 times more damage to the road versus the passenger car, while only paying approximately twice the fuel tax (based on the suburban's mpgs about 2x the passenger car's).
In any event, pavement wear by passenger vehicles is almost rounding error when it comes to pavement design for high class roadway facilities since heavy trucks account for virtually all of the pavement wear due to loading.
My understanding of the clunker cash law is that they want to help the environment (get clunkers off the road and replace them with high mpg vehicles) and stimulate the economy (get people to buy more new cars).