this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Seeing as one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars on the roads, personal vehicles should not be paying the lion's share of road money.
So it shouldn't matter the type of tire.
Those tires are much larger so you could just tax them more. Plus a pneumatic tire can only hold so much weight which is why they are 18 of them on a huge truck. Not to mention more load causes more wear on the tire so they go through them quicker. I mean it’s not perfect, lots of things affect tire wear like road surface, road smoothness, alignment, etc. Maybe you keep the diesel fuel taxes and just tax tires on passenger cars. Maybe give a tax break to small diesel cars to offset the double tax. Just brainstorming…
I think it's a good idea. It's more Progressive than what we have right now. The feds will never do it, some states could be forced to however. That is where the majority of these gas taxes come in at anyway.
Generally the wear on tires is proportional to the wear on roads, since both are effectively grinding against each other with grit as the grinding medium in between. It would be harder to find a more accurate way to measure an individual vehicle’s contribution to road wear, given that weight is such a large factor.
If you used mass surveillance to record exactly how many miles everyone drove and record exactly which vehicle model they were driving for each mile (to know the vehicle weight), you’d still miss out on the cargo factor. For transport trucks that’s the biggest factor, since an empty trailer weighs far less than a full one (and different types of goods have radically different densities).
Of course we already know how much transport trucks weigh and how many miles they drive, since transport trucks are required to go through weigh stations and drivers have to keep detailed logs of how many miles they drive (and hours they drive consecutively). The issue then comes down to consumers and other business vehicles (pickup trucks etc).
None of this is accurate:
Surface wear on roads from tire contact is not a concern, the damage is done due to a combination of compression cycles (the 4th power law) and weather. The 4th power law being that road wear is equal to the 4th power of the axel load.
Your tire wear rate is based on so many unique factors, with vehicle weight being a relatively minor one. Force of accel/decell/turning, suspension tuning, tread, rubber compound, road material, etc.
Your tire rubber is not grinding away the road surface. It's wild that I even have to say that.