“If the trains could haul it better and cheaper they would be hauling it all now.”
I am not making a case for trains, and as a matter of fact, trucks haul stuff cheaper for a number of reasons including the fact that they don’t pay enough to support the damage they do to the nation’s roads. That’s a fact whether you like it or not. It has nothing to do with the quality of the transportation they provide. So from what you wrote I have a choice: Paying for rotten produce brought to me by a train, or paying for you to ruin the roads that I have to use too! Not much of a choice is it. All I am saying is that trucking should pay in proportion to the costs of the infrastructure ( roads ) it uses. If the cost of the goods hauled goes up, so be it, because that way the people who are paying trucks to move their goods are actually paying the true costs associated with that transportation. It isn’t just your fuel, vehicle cost, maintenance of same and you being paid to drive, the roads you you are also a real cost to your business. But right now, you aren’t paying the actual costs there, and somehow you seem to think it’s o.k. to pass those costs directly onto the backs of the taxpayers. Here in California, our state just passed a huge fuel tax and vehicle license fee increase supposedly to fix our roads. My point is that if trucks didn’t use our highways, we probably wouldn’t have needed the increase.
I was in Colorado a few years ago driving from Denver to Sydney, Nebraska. The highway was a 4-lane divided concrete roadway. The right lane was so badly battered that they had posted signs that it was o.k. for trucks to us the fast lane. I guess they had let the trucks beat up the curb lane and didn’t have the money to fix it, so they were going to let the trucks finish off the entire highway by letting them break up the fast lane.
The reason Colorado does not have the money to fix the roads with is because they put almost half of the highway tax they
collect in what they call a general fund, only about half of
the taxes they collect go for the high ways.
And you are wrong about trucks not paying their share as they pay more than their share.
It is not the fault of the truck that the whores who work for the state spends the money wrong.
for the size of the vehicle small cars pays less than their
share as 35 miles per gallon does not amount to much tax.