Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
It seems like trucks just drive through the middle of every town even if they aren't going there.
A 9th-power law is most predictive when the road is barely able to withstand the 6T load; and the per-crossing damage is roughly linear to axle-weight when the pavement is able to withstand much higher loads than 6T per axle.
This suggests it may be the source for over a quarter of all environmental micro plastics [0]
Some reports suggest it could be even higher, this article [1] references a pew report suggesting tyres could be the source for over three quarters of the micro plastics found in the ocean.
Though it's not as if they're just driving around for fun (most of the time), but not costing these sort of externalities means the market doesn't realistically consider alternatives even if they "should" be more efficient, so "cheaper" when all the /real/ costs are added up.
[0] https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/protectin...
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/02/toxic-tyre-dust-this-sou...
Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
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.
Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?
I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.
Properly taxing trucks will be mostly passed onto the consumer, not reducing their compensation much, and it would significantly reduce the number of trucks on the road (a good thing). Out of equilibrium, it would cause many of them to go under and compensation would crater... so of course it would be wildly unpopular.
That’s puzzles me a loot - there are many countries which hardly have any money for social safety net yet they keep fuel and electricity prices very low as a matter of government (social) policy and poor people benefit the least because they don’t drive and use little electricity.
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.)
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
Why not use trains for heavy transport?
I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.
The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of each individual vehicle, the additional delays, having to pay multiple drivers and risk of accidents per vehicle?
Even if they want to keep a fleet of vehicles, shuttle trains aka "rolling highways" where trucks could roll on to the train via ramps, shut off their engines, let the trains take them to wherever, then continue into the destination cities, would be better than running the fleets on the roads. That would be good even for private cars.
The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, anything but build rail...
US railroads think the ideal railroad is one that owns no track and carries no freight.
Then you'd have the State giving money directly to the likes of Unilever (think tooth-paste) and big agro-business (think bread). Subsidising transport instead is the lesser of many evils.
> And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances.
Market doesn't work when it comes to most of us.
> Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us,
This is just praying to bringing in servitude amongst us, it will go like this: "we will stop subsidising your daily bread if you stop voting for us". The same goes for the idea of UBI more generally speaking.
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.
Wrong. As food gets costlier, people shift eating habits from healthier but more expensive food to cheaper ultra-processed food. There are similarities elsewhere, like the iron law of prohibition: making opium more difficult to sell shifted the market to heroin, and eventually to fentanyl.
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.
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
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 consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.
It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
I said this in another comment:
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".
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
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".
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
The thing I'd like to highlight is that each category has a very different profile for which roads they use, and how heavily.
I hope you were just making a snarky joke as there is effectively no road damage done by pedestrians and cyclists.
Also, homeowners pay 3% property tax (Texas). This pays for everything local, schools, roads, police, parks and a ton of other things.
Homeowners also pay their HOAs, while not as much as property taxes, this covers a ton of things within their subdivisions.
The super rich are free loading on all of this infrastructure.
They should get a credit each time they use a road.
I am convinced that you are trolling.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
--
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-market-pushes-anot... (Early 2026)
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/bulmaks-files-chapter-11-ba... (Late 2025)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/an-unusually-terrible-frei... (Mid 2023)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-trucking-bloodbath-isn... (Mid 2022)
https://www.truckingdive.com/news/trucking-fleet-bankruptcy-... (Early 2021)
https://www.propertycasualty360.com/fcs/2020/01/13/another-o... (Early 2020)
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
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....
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
We've had wars since then.
edit,
Two recent examples from a long list:
The Persian Gulf War was admitted to be as such in April of 1991. https://www.congress.gov/102/statute/STATUTE-105/STATUTE-105...
The Global War on Terror was funded on that name in 2005. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/1268
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night. :)
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
This is very much normal. I'm not saying it's correct or alright, just that it is normal.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but an intense amount of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
While that won't help most current truckers, the shift to electrical trucks is going to create some opportunities for the companies that buy them to undercut diesel trucks on price. Electrical trucks are still scarce and expensive and infrastructure is also lacking (in the US at least, EU/China is a different story). But of course with diesel prices spiking this high, it only exaggerates the benefits. And it looks like price uncertainty in general is could be here to stay with e.g. Russia probably needing many years to rebuild their oil infrastructure and the middle east also needing a lot of time if/when some sense of normality is restored there.
There are likely to be a lot more EV trucks on the market over the next years. China is already heading for 40+% of trucks sold (of all types, including heavy trucks) to be electric. They are way past the testing and experimenting phase there.
Transitioning the whole truck fleet in the US will take many years of course. But with Tesla bringing their factory online, other truck companies are likely to also increase production. This could quickly go from thousands of trucks sold per year in the US to tens of thousands. Tesla alone has the ambition to do 50K semis per year. We'll see if they manage. But it's going to disrupt truckers that are highly dependent on diesel prices when whole fleets start becoming immune to diesel price uncertainty.
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
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.
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Correct, it's a good opportunity.
Optics change when an 80000 lbs rig inevitably crashes into stopped cars creating multi car inferno ball of death.
Have they? https://robotaxireport.com/data/waymo-vs-tesla-safety-record...
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
They're saying that human accidents happen at a much higher rate while self driving cars nearly never have accidents, yet people fixate on the relatively few examples when self driving cars do have accidents.
If human drivers were held to anywhere near the standard that robots were then nobody could drive.