Comment Re:This reminds me of the Cold War... (Score 1) 1040
Let's recap, fuckface.
Okay. I believe it went
- I pointed out about six fallacies in a parent post.
- You called me a fuckface and threw in some new numbers on 1 of the 6 items.
- I took your numbers and recalculated.
- Then you called me a fuckface again and dug up some more numbers.
Does that bring everyone up to speed? Good. Let's continue.
If you look at the left side of the graph, your case falls further apart. [Note: right side, but okay.] Urban to urban, your case nearly collapses as the factors vary from 2.5 to 7 (e.g., 9.08 for auto/urban and 65.15 for 80k truck/urban).
The right side with the 9.08 and 65.15 is an attempt to introduce some fuzzy math about "social costs" ("Includes pavement, congestion, crash and noise. Excludes pollution." [Emphasis mine]) I reject this column since it's nearly impossible to accurately determine how they arrived at these numbers. Instead we'll focus on actual pavement costs. In which case the cost ratios are somewhere between 21 (small trucks vs cars) and 819 (big trucks vs cars); Given that these only go to 1 decimal place, it's possible that car costs are in the range [0.05,0.14] and still round to 0.1 cents per mile.
A hypothetical auto owner driving 20,000 miles per year at 25 mpg, and paying $100 in registration fees, ends up paying about $397 per year. So on average, looking at federal and state taxes, a tractor-trailer combination trucks pay about 35 times what a typical auto would pay based on national averages.
Given that the average driver in the US drives about 13,000 miles their costs are around $300/year and not $400. (Note that I'm making my own case worse). So the average truck pays 13900 / 300 ~= 47 times what a car does.
Lastly, your wiki link is unclear. You have gone from "road wear" to "bridge damage".
I was citing the diagram for weight distribution between the axles of a semi, and nothing else. I'm sorry you got confused by that.
So IN CONCLUSION, what you've shown is that if we look at only "urban interstate" traffic, ignore "rural interstate" traffic, and assume that an average semi weighs no more than about 25 tons (as opposed to the 40-ton maximum that shipping companies aim for) then and only then do cars and trucks break even. In all other cases, trucks pay less (proportionally) than cars do. Unless you want to venture from the confines of actual road costs and try to include fuzzy concepts like "societal costs". But I'm sure a guy of such rigorous devotion to hard data wouldn't want to do that.
So now that you've dug up all this data to help me prove my point, what's next?