Ah, the perils of tacking up a post, without putting down the research – things you know to be true, but simply don’t have the time to find the links for.
I did know that the subsidisation of truck transport was bad, but didn’t realise quite how much so.
[It was] empirically determined that the effective damage done to the road is roughly proportional to the 4th power of axle weight .[37] A typical tractor-trailer weighing 80,000 pounds (36.287 t) with 8,000 pounds (3.6287 t) on the steer axle and 36,000 pounds (16.329 t) on both of the tandem axle groups is expected to do 7,800 times more damage than a passenger vehicle with 2,000 pounds (0.907 t) on each axle.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. A 36 t truck does “7,800 times more damage [to the road] than a passenger vehicle” of 1.8t.
While the RUC does increase at greater than a linear rate per axle and takes into account the number of wheels per axle (which relates to road footprint) , it certainly isn’t an exponential function (PDF). If this was the case, I suspect heavy trucks wouldn’t be economic. And they’d be marching on Parliament with guns, rather than just driving slowly. The Road Transport Forum, who organised this protest, have for years been trying to get the weight limit for trucks moved up from 40 tonnes to 60 tonnes. That increase would have dramatically more impact (although I don’t have the exact figures)
Now, we might have reasons to subsidise truck transport over other forms, but lets be clear and realistic here. We’re subsidising trucks by a huge amount. Roads are built by central and local Government, and paid for out of taxes and rates, and the RUC. The income collected from the RUC falls well short of the cost to society by truck caused road damage alone.
And all of this is before we include the externalities, which are quite substantial. If we lookat; road safety, health (vehicle fumes contain a cocktail of toxic chemicals, and living near a road harms the growth and development of children, and traffic polution kills around 400 per year in Auckland alone (pdf)), climate change, noise, stress, and simply the physchological effects that large numbers of large vehicles cause on pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users, then it is quite clear that trucks are not an unmitigated good. The obvious alternatives, rail and coastal shipping stack up far better on almost all measures.
Idiot/Savant summed things up very simply,
- Heavy trucks are responsible for a third of the damage done to our roads. They don’t pay a third of the costs of maintaining them.
- A 2005 Ministry of Transport study into surface transport costs and charges showed that truck drivers receive enormous subsidies, paying only 56% of the social cost of their activities, compared with 64% for cars, and 82% for trains.
- The increase for an average truck is around $500 a year.
As Russel Brown said, why can’t the ninth floor put out an argument as well and as simply as this? Perhaps if they actually fought their enemies properly they wouldn’t be on such a losing streak.
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Idiot/Savant some things up very badly.
According to the STCC heavy vehicles are responsible for a third of the damage done to our roads and they pay a third of the costs of maintaining them.
The STCC assumed the road users don’t pay GST and the roads must earn a return on capital. Remove these two assumes and the subsidies disappear.
Maybe the last point is correct, but I note she is now using the correct figure of 10% increase rather than the 7% stated in her earlier press release.
You have made a small but critical error with your comparison of road damage and RUCs. Those that have nothing to do with weight are distributed according to km travelled. As Idiot/Savant quite rightly pointed out, only one/third of maintenance spending is due to wear-and-tear from trucks. Only one-twentieth is caused by cars and van. Leaving three-fifths not caused by traffic but simply caused by time. Cars outnumber trucks ten to one so when you divvy up that time damage it is the same amount per 1000 km for trucks and cars. The MoT’s cost allocation model, if it is actually being used, takes the urban/rural mix of construction funding and vehicle travel into account so there should have been a bigger increase in RUCs for light vehicles in the last ten years. So using the RUC rates order that was in place 1989 we get an old age/construction cost of approx $18-$20 per 1,000 km. Subtract that from the charge rates and you do find that weight component of the RUCs is close to 3rd power. Bear in mind that pavement strength increases with the square of pavement thickness which offsets part of the 4th power increase in dynamic axle loads. (OECD DIVINE study). The OECD study also found that air suspension slashes road damage. That has never been taken into account with RUCs as far as having two schedules of fees but it has been taken into account to the ectant that maintenance cost increases have been absorbed by truckies and bus operators switching to airbag suspension. Essentially a subsidy taken from the modern to subsidise the old fashioned.
Incidently, try comparing the RUCs of an 8-axle truck with a four axle railway wagon. It’s no wonder Toll wasn’t prepared to pay Ontrack for track maintaince.
I agree that air suspension reduces peak axle loads, so should be considered when setting these charges.
However, I can’t follow your maths – perhaps you could re-explain how you got a 3rd power increase in charges by weight. Looking at the figures I can’t see that at all.
Indeed Idiot Savant got even more wrong. STCC was predicated on 2001/2002 figures which:
1. Had rail freight totally unsubsidised, which is far from the case now.
2. Had most air pollution from trucks arising from PM10, which is largely a function of the sulphur proportion in the diesel. Since 2002 it has dropped from 1500ppm to 50ppm, which should cut the air pollution externality by over 75%.
3. He totally ignored the marginal cost analysis case studies comparing road to rail freight, which found different results in each case, in one case rail had lower environmental costs than road, in one they are similar, in another road had a lower cost.
The intellectual dishonesty of the left and environmental movement on rail vs trucking is sad. The only substantive subsidy of road freight is on local road costs, but this applies to cars too. It is because the fixed costs of local roads are paid for by property owners through rates. That should end, but it wont change the mix of rail vs road freight.
The MoT’s cost allocation model should now say that trucks following the increase now pay their fair share of state highway costs, in fact 5 years ago they were overpaying by 20%. It is largely urban myth that road freight is heavily subsidised, it is also largely urban myth that much more freight could go by rail instead of road. At the most we are probably talking about 5%.
I’ll respond to those points.
1) Rail has only been owned by the Government for a few weeks. Rail freight may be subsidised in the future, but as yet nothing has happened as far as I know.
2) Sulfur is certainly not the only pollutant in diesel emissions. Counting only those that have health effects, there are; carbon monoxide, complex aromatic compounds, black carbon particulates, and many others that are linked to harmed lung function and cancer.
And then there’s the greenhouse gas emissions, from the above chemicals and CO2, which is unavoidable. Rail burns 1/4 the amount to cover the same distance with diesel electric units, and causes a fraction of the emissions when electrified rail is used. This is a large fraction of the trunk line, and is certain to increase as the price of oil increases over the long term. All the above considered, reducing this externality by 75 seems quite unjustified.
3) Most marginal cost analyses I’ve seen put rail out on top. Including the STCC. It won’t outperform under all circumstances, I’m not suggesting that.
How did you get to that “overpaying by 20%” figure? I can’t see it.
Tables 3.2A and 3.2B of the STCC pretty much cut your arguments to pieces, as does figure 3.1B. Even ignoring environmental externalities (which I think we shouldn’t do – these costs are real) RUCs and truck registration account for much less than the costs imposed. While rail also causes a shortfall, this is much less percentage wise than is the case for trucks.
I’m all for evidence based policy making. But the protests seem to be designed to thwart the Governments ability to do this, and impose a standard that favours truck operators.
Sorry, the above should read “Rail freight may be further subsidised in future”. Rail and road transport both already receive subsidies.
George, Sorry for the slow response. The basis of my argument is that currently most of the money being spent on roads is not related to the weight of the vehicle. Only a very tiny portion of the money spent on land, earthworks and bridges is due to the weight of vehicles. Two-thirds of the money spent on maintenance is due to non-traffic factors and simply is the result of the passing of time, the likes of the corrosion of steel reinforcing and soil being squashed by tonnes of roadway 24/7.
These costs are recovered at a fixed amount per 1,000 kms travelled. Hence when traffic grows faster than the rate of inflation most of the extra money from light vehicles going into the road fund is spent on road improvements rather than on road maintenance. The opposit tends to be true for heavy vehicles. When charges are increased to fund extra spending on road improvements the extra cost is added to the base km rate for RUCs hence light vehicle RUCs increasing from $10 twenty years ago to $36 today.
Now, if you put the RUC rates tables in a spreadsheet and subtract the base km rate of $36 from all of the figures in the columns for powered vehicles you are left with approx 60 cents for road damage for light vehicles. Get the spreadsheet to calculate the 3rd power increase of that 60 cents for all the higher weights and you will find the numbers are very close to those you got by simply subtracting the $36.
The road damage quote you provided was good but I can add the situation in New Zealand is a bit worse because our cars are lighter, although nowhere near as light as they were in the 1970s.
Using that same fourth power rule reveals the following:
Typical large truck in the 1960s would have been 13 tonnes towing 15 tonne trailer, total four axles, typical car weighed one tonne. That truck/trailer did as much damage as 80,000 average cars. Adding tandem axles reduces that to 23,000. A 20 tonne four-axle truck towing a 25 tonne four-axle trailer would only have done as much damage as 65,000 one tonne cars. This is why highway engineers were the strongest advocates of replacing the gross weight mileage tax with 3rd power axle-weight RUCs. It is the reason the huge increase in tonne/km of road freight hadn’t resulted in any real increase in state highway maintenance between 1985 and 2000. The overlap between the phasing out of the railhead restriction and the introduction of RUCs and the time needed to replace the existing fleet of trucks and trailers actually did result in maintenance costs increasing by 75%, although heavy vehicle payments doubled relative to light vehicle payments during that period and in fact that trend continued till 1998.
Running the same calculations comparing these trucks with todays 1.5 tonne average for cars results in 16,000, 4,500, 13,000 respectively.
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