Most people don't even really grasp how much they really pay for driving when all personal costs are included. Well, the story gets much worse when you consi...
The big costs, e.g. for road maintenance, are due to trucks by a wide margin
The big costs are due to weathering. The freeze-thaw cycle in particular does a huge amount of damage to roads.
The costs of fixing freeze-thaw damage to roads is proportional to the total paved lane miles you have. If you’ve got a total of 5 lanes on your stroad, that’s 2.5x more damage to repair than if you’ve just got 2 lanes on your street.
And car lanes don’t move many people per hour per foot of road width. Bike lanes, sidewalks, and bus lanes support much higher numbers of people per hour per foot of lane width.
Having people drive everywhere encourages suburban sprawl with a very large number of lane miles per capita. That has a very expensive fixed cost to repair from normal freeze-thaw cycles, even if the marginal cost of each mile actually driven in a car isn’t so bad.
The big costs are due to weathering. The freeze-thaw cycle in particular does a huge amount of damage to roads.
The costs of fixing freeze-thaw damage to roads is proportional to the total paved lane miles you have. If you’ve got a total of 5 lanes on your stroad, that’s 2.5x more damage to repair than if you’ve just got 2 lanes on your street.
And car lanes don’t move many people per hour per foot of road width. Bike lanes, sidewalks, and bus lanes support much higher numbers of people per hour per foot of lane width.
Having people drive everywhere encourages suburban sprawl with a very large number of lane miles per capita. That has a very expensive fixed cost to repair from normal freeze-thaw cycles, even if the marginal cost of each mile actually driven in a car isn’t so bad.