Weight, speed, and distance traveled all contribute to wear. I suppose speed doesn't matter much to city engineers, because city roads are usually low-speed.

FWIW, charging per mile is supposed to make sure trucks pay more than they do; supporters of the mileage tax argue that trucks aren't paying in proportion to the damage they cause.

I spent a half hour with Google (i.e. not an exhaustive search) and found speed to have an effect on bridges and the rate with which speed bumps wear out, but it was not noted as being a factor for wear & tear for general streets and highways. Some interesting information in the new "double wide" heavy truck tires (which reduce truck fuel consumption by 1% to 2% vs. dual tractor trailer tires).

Any links ?

Civil Engineering is not my field,

Alan

One section of the Garden State Parkway in NJ used to ban trucks and buses. That section carried an enormous volume of commuter traffic, and IIRC, the reason for banning large vehicles was that "all car" traffic flowed much more smoothly. A side-effect was that the roadway required much less maintenance than sections where trucks were allowed.

As Alan correctly notes elsewhere, damage goes up as the fourth power of the weight increase on an axle (ie, double the weight on the axle, damage goes up by a factor of 16). To the best of my knowledge, no state imposes taxes or fees on large vehicles in proportion to the damage they do to the roads. The usual arguments made by the trucking industry in opposition to proportional taxes/fees is that (a) the costs will simply be passed on to consumers, so general tax revenue should be used instead, or (b) in the case of increased fees, trucking companies will relocate so they can register their vehicles in states with lower fees, costing lots of jobs.

PS: I am aware that acceleration & braking affect wear on a street (in New Orleans bus stops are poured in concrete while the rest of the road is asphalt), but I am not aware that speed per se increased wear. Cars traveling at 25 mph should create as much wear & tear as those going 50 mph or 80 mph AFAIK. Weight is the primary determinant.

Maybe on a smooth surface, I live about 500 meters from a bumpy parkway and I can tell if something is moving fast when it hits a bump -- I can feel it, lots of kinetic energy being transferred up to those bumps. If something fast and heavy hits a bump I hear creaks and pops in my house.

The M6 Toll road round the North end of Birmingham in the UK gives a pointer to the real financial relative cost of HGVs (heavy trucks) as opposed to lighter vehicles, in terms of road wear.

The M6 Toll is the UK's first privately constructed, maintained and operated motorway. Up to its construction all motorways in the UK were constructed, maintained and operated by the government using tax revenues, and did not attract tolls except in the case of some tunnels and bridges.

When the M6 Toll was opened in c.2003 the price charged for an HGV was set slightly too high to make it economic for HGVs to use it. This is believed to have been a deliberate policy on behalf of the operators of the M6 toll. One can assume that they did their sums and decided that it was more profitable to discourage HGVs from using their shiny new road than collecting their tolls.

The original reason for constructing the M6 toll was to relieve the older M6 through Birmingham, which was grossly overloaded with both cars and HGVs. The older M6 nowadays still has a large number of HGVs using it. They can clearly be seen from the train below! They can't all be moving around within Birmingham itself, so one can only assume that they are still avoiding the M6 toll.

Interestingly, the M6 toll operators appear to want to discourage motorcyclists as well, charging them a fee when most other toll operators in the UK don't.

http://www.m6toll.co.uk/default.asp?mainmenuid=1
http://www.abd.org.uk/local/m6_toll.htm

sf

Ah, yes...the 40 cent tolls in Illinois. Conveniently located every three miles. I have fond memories of desperately searching my car for exactly One quarter, One nickel and One dime, every five minutes as angry commuters honked behind me.