The price of the goods being shipped. Perhaps, subsidized trucking reduces incentives for rail infrastructure which is cheaper transportation in the long run.

Discussion about this I heard 50 years ago is the alternative to trucks tends to be rail. The real unfairness is railroads have to pay to maintain their infrastructure while trucks do not pay anything close to the costs for theirs.

If you forced trucks to pay for the damage they do to roads rail freight would be far more competitive.

With trucking CO2 is the least of your problems. The fumes are carcinogenic. Brake and tire dust doesn't help either. Electric trucks would be a huge improvement on all fronts.

> And that's an understatement

Indeed!

Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.

1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!

2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.

3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.

4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)

5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen

5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust

6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.

7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.

8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.

9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.

10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.

11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.

A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.

I don't think this is quite accurate.

If trucks were forced to bear their share of the burden we might see a significant shift in how we transported goods, including more rail.

(Yes, I know rail doesn't work for last mile.)

The Santa Clara HWY 85 extension because it was built without federal funds was able to totally ban trucks over 4 tons and 30 years later is in decent condition. It was also built lighter and thus cheaper to build.

That would be great, but the railroads have torn up most of their own lines and refuse to move anything that might be needed inside of a month from ship date because PSR means they only run one mega train periodically. They also routinely refuse profitable runs because they're not as profitable as their other runs and they calculate success only in terms of profitability rate.

US railroads think the ideal railroad is one that owns no track and carries no freight.

Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then? And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances. Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us, or even everyone via UBI. Why settle on diesel trucks as the thing to subsidize above others?

Wrong on many levels, already refuted by many commentors.

If food needs to be subsidized, subsidize it directly. Already done with food stamps, etc. You can apply here: https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps

If food gets costlier, people will eat less and it will reduce obesity, metabolic syndrome and save trillions of dollars in healthcare costs every year. The poor, who you seem to be so concerned about, can't afford the costliest healthcare on the planet.

Or we can have a highly functional train system and not use freight trucks for long haul transportation. Small and medium sized trucks for last mile delivery is significantly less problematic.

>>Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves.

This doesn't make any sense. If total subsidy is X and you remove it then prices should at most raise by X (in aggregate). It is at best an even trade. In reality it's worse because it creates perverse incentives.

If you want to help people then you can spend the same money by subsidizing groceries directly. You can also lower taxes for workers or 101 different things that help lower income people without promoting one way of doing transport.

No, you should fight for free roads. How many ways do you want to subsidize the super rich? Why are you fighting for their interests?

Or mileage * weight^4 based fees. It would have the added benefit of reducing the amount of gender-affirming trucks on the road.

Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.

Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.

Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.

If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.

The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit".

The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.

Move more of it to rail.

It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.

Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".

Buses? Where? In the US they are as rare as unicorns. It depends on location. In third world countries metros, it is best to run electric buses for free and tax cars. It will reduce traffic and avoid hundreds of billions of road expansions if everyone is driving a car.

Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the weight of the thing that passes over them.

I hope you were just making a snarky joke as there is effectively no road damage done by pedestrians and cyclists.

Pressure on the road, and profits, are not similar to those induced by pedestrians and cyclists.

> I don't expect "trucking" to fail

Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.

Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....

That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.

It would lead 195 per year if it stays at that trend; only 1.3x the high end of "normal".

Yes and by a lot

https://www.skool.com/the-logistics-war-room-1319/trucking-b...

We have freight trains in the US. (I hear a freight train right now as I write this.)

There are a lot of trucking companies in the US and if my experience in the PNW is any indication, a lot of them are run by idiots.

Trucking is a low-margin, high capex business.

There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.

But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.

Hear me out, what if we could carry fresh strawberries from California to New York by Starship?

I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.

They could justify a human in the cab to satisfy existing reflective triangle regulations. Provides cheap publicity to nourish their lobbyists.