| ▲ | SoftTalker 4 hours ago |
| And? Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly. |
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| ▲ | thelastgallon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these. Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives. Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form. |
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| ▲ | SideQuark 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks. It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property. | |
| ▲ | anomaly_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You understand that all business activity in an economy is driven by consumers. Everything is downstream of consumer demand. | | |
| ▲ | thelastgallon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Then, subsidize everything for all businesses? Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would rather that we subsidize the consumers. (The super rich will still be super rich.) |
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| ▲ | igor47 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems) | |
| ▲ | kjshsh123 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Consumer demand can still be distorted. I said this in another comment: Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good". |
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| ▲ | igor47 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less. |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit". |
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| ▲ | Fezzik 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads. |
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| ▲ | thelastgallon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice. This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich? | |
| ▲ | jcranmer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The annual revenue of the trucking industry is roughly $900 billion. That puts their net profit margin at about 3-5%. I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that. | |
| ▲ | Ekaros an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That number is laughably low compared to value of cargo they move. Really they should get to tech company model. Take 20-30% of value what they transport. Say you got 100 billion of AI servers. 30% of that goes to trucking company when they move it point to point. | |
| ▲ | bitmasher9 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | $30-$40 billion sounds like scrapping by to me. For an entire industry, one of the most important in the country. |
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| ▲ | epolanski 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Move more of it to rail. |
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| ▲ | rekttrader 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As much of it as possible is done by rail, it’s the last mile problem. Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff | | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What rail? The railroads are at capacity | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | They are? Is there a chart or a map or a study or something that supports this? |
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| ▲ | kjshsh123 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do. Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good". |
