Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
That was my initial thought, but then my liberty filter kicked in and then my wondering about unforeseen unintended consequences.
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My liberty filter asks why jackasses with heavy vehicles should damage my roads with impunity, especially when they are transporting the same number of passengers on their commute and the same number of weekly grocery bags as my Fit. A work truck doing actual work is reasonable, but a work truck doing the job of a Civic or Corolla is not. A work truck built to do the job of a Civic or Corolla is even less reasonable, so I say F@¢<'em. If your ego is so big that you need to buy a tank to schlep your ass to work and back, you can afford to pay more than me in my little blue roller skate that does a fraction of the damage. Said roller skate can carry just as many passengers as an SUV (and with my utility trailer, it has a 5x8 bed), just saying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
The difference in damage done by a my VW vs my Astro is trivial.
1. The VW weighs 3330 lbs and the Astro weighs 4300 lbs
2. Passenger cars in general do very little damage to modern roads. The vast majority of damage is done by heavy trucks.
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Yes, the damage done by heavy trucks is much greater- that's just math. Like I said above, a work truck doing work is reasonable- and higher fuel taxes will be reflected in the cost of transported goods. But I've had many road trips on interstates where the right lane was turned to gravel because of the trucks that were then running in the left lane (slowly turning it also into gravel) and unable to pass them because I couldn't go faster in their damaged, graveled right lane than they could in the still decent left lane. I'm not blaming the truckers, I'm blaming the system. But I'm still pissed about the gravel that they made that they wouldn't subject themselves to (and why should they damage their trucks when the system they worked under wouldn't fix the roads?). My compact car shouldn't have had to fight through that gravel while the damage-causing trucks cruised on the smooth lane, eventually killing it. Higher fuel taxation would have at least spread the pain, if not leveling the playing field.
Luckily, I spent many years in the Field Artillery, where big dumb guys without any sleep still manage to do math, and forces and the damages they produce get thoroughly studied (ENIAC was actually built to calculate FA ballistics). One of my many jobs as a howitzer chief was to fill out every night the DA Form 2408-4, the record of fire. Every tube and breech has a rated life, counted by full charges. On the 155 I had, a Charge 8 was one full charge. From Charge 3 up to Charge 8 the shell's range would be proportional to the charge, but the force applied to the breech and the tube was exponential (think person-miles travelled versus damage to the road, if you will). The tube's life was rated at 1,750 rounds. In a war, shooting only Charge 8s, you could wear out a tube in little more than a day. In the Guard, in peacetime, you could shoot 35,000 rounds at up to a Charge 6 before reaching the tube's rated life. Since the cannon on hand would be the ones we deployed with, the remaining life in the tubes was critical data.
See
Field Artillery Cannon Weapons Systems And Ammunition Handbook, page 1-7 (I was on an M-198 Howitzer, mounting an M-199 tube (the same tube as on an M-109 SP)).
Tube life (equivalent full charge) M-199 tube, 1,750 rounds
Charge 8s = 1.00
Charge 8 = 0.33
Charge 7 = 0.10
Charge 6-3= 0.05
Charge 5-3= 0.05
The lesson from the military is that the more force you apply to something, the more damage you get. And as the force increases, the damage increases even more greatly. My Fit's curb weight is 2,496#, less than half a 2013 Suburban's weight, and is rated 27/33mpg, while a 2013 Suburban is rated 15/21mpg. So I'm pounding the pavement with less than half the weight (0.05 EFC) while getting 1.5 to 2 times the gas mileage (even before hypermiling; try doing that in a Suburban). Using Field Artillery math, the federal gas tax should be multiplied by 20 to bring equiblibrium to the damage being caused to the roads by Murrincans in SUVs. Wave the flag all you want, b!+¢#3$, Army math (you know, those troops you pretend to support?) says your SUV is killing this country's infrastructure. I drive on roads that have never seen an 18 wheeler that are going to pot. Murricans apparently hate Murrica.
If your liberty requires you to not wear a mask in the grocery store, if your liberty requires you to piss in the municipal swimming pool, if your liberty requires you to haul your ass to work in an SUV, you apparently use your liberty to hate this country. That's not a political position, that's just the math I had to do as an NCO in the army. If you disagree, give me math to support your position.