The Pankian Metaphor 3076

an issue in the whole series of articles is that heavy truck traffic (even within maximum legal load limits) still results in significant road damage. overloaded vehicles can result in significant additional infrastructure degradation ... and so you have all those weigh stations all over the country (presumably attempting to catch relatively prevalant practice of overloading, aka if overloading wasn't prevalent ... then you probably wouldn't need all the weigh stations).

so the claim is that the infrastructure damage costs as a result of (legal) heavy truck traffic is significantly larger than what is being recovered both thru fuel taxes and-or registration fees based on GVW.

all the road design documents state that the damage is proportional to number of heavy truck adjusted axle-loads (heavy truck traffic adjusted for axle load-weight characteristics).

the most recent reference implies that it is widely recognized through out the highway industry that there needs to be additional fees to correctly apportion true highway infrastructure damage costs related to heavy truck traffic and that several states are already collecting such fees (i.e. the aggregate damage cost is proportional to some mile-axle-load measure ... the specific axle-load damage times the number of miles of road that has been travelled and therefor damaged).

misc. past posts referring to heavy truck axle-loads

reference to study of accurately accounting for highway infrastructure use costs and various fees and mitigation strategies:

part of the study discusses municipal buses (as examples of heavy trucks) that have routes through residential streets, that otherwise prohibit commercial heavy truck traffic and were never built for the number of buttociated heavy truck axle-loads (that are the result from the municipal bus traffic).

one item discussed was having specially reinforced pavement, at least at bus stops (where the damage can be especially extensive). a counter argument for specially reinforced pavement, just at designated bus stops, was that a major purpose of bus service was to allow the freedom to dynamicly adjust routes (that you get from having vehicles that can travel roads ... which could be severely restricted with limited number of pavement re-inforced bus stop areas).

another suggesting was to drastically restrict bus pbuttenger loads on residential street routes (as partial road damage mitigation effort).

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