Trucks have had a free ride on the tax payers for year’s.¿
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You do not know what you are talking about, it is probably
much higher now but when I was still trucking it was costing
three or four thousand a year just for road tax. thanks
But supposing you were right there are many towns hundreds
Of miles from the rail roads so if you have your goods shipped
to the nearest rail road town don’t expect to get it when you want it.
And you better expect a lot of damage and some rotten produce,
you might also figure paying about twice the cost as the
taxpayers will have to subsidize the rail roads.
D
If the trains could haul it better and cheaper they would be hauling it all now.
I might also add that the main purpose for building roads was
to get freight from one place to another in many cases built by truckers.
“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.