High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
thedrive.com182 points by speckx 3 days ago
182 points by speckx 3 days ago
Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
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).
Tyres are also a massive source of micro plastics in the environment, as another example of one of the "uncounted externalities".
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...
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
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.
Third world countries politicians are 100% corrupt, very focused on rapid wealth extraction and nothing else matters (same as current administration).
When they see the flow of money, the politicians first thought would be how do I capture the money? All of it? Or some percentage of it?
The countries that thought about it a little bit (China) understand this and are rapidly electricifying.
Noise is also a form of pollution we never seem to price in. You can hear trucks on the highway from several miles away in many cases, and I was regularly woken up by very loud construction vehicles going by my house in Austin around 5am.
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.)
It does need to be paired with investment in train infrastructure, usually led by governments.
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
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.
Stuff like this makes me laugh when someone says cyclists should pay their fair share for road maintenance.
> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.
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...
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.
> Roads are entirely subsidized by people.
I think this isn't strictly true, and heavy vehicles in the US have to pay a "Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax." Whether that's commensurate to the damage they do, I don't know.
Depends on the road:
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 is insightful. Explains why roads in third world countries are pothole ridden. Even new roads have potholes as soon as they are laid. Of course, this is exceptionally good money for the politicians and their contractor buddies. Always broken, always spending, significant amount is pocketed away. Roads are a terrific business for every politician, no one is opposed to them.
Significantly: externalities from co2 emissions. Which is not just money, but lives.
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.
Not the tire dust. Electric trucks are heavier, so they'll chew through more tires per freight-kilometer.
Electric cars are heavier but 2 tons of batteries barely matters on a 50 ton tractor trailer combination. It'll just carry ~3-10% less load.
In other words: to carry the same amount of freight you need to do 3%-10% more trips, which means 3%-10% more tire wear, which means 3%-10% more tire dust.
I haven't done the math but i feel like a 10% increase in tire wear is probably offset by a 90% reduction in brake dust and not burning 10 000+ liters of diesel per year.
How much actual braking does a semi truck do? It's usually cruising down the highway, and they tend to use gears and jake brakes down long grades.
That is one where you need to do the math. the source of the power for these trucks is an unknown proportion of fossil fuels and there is transmission loss for electric power.
Also, assuming a 10% increase of tire wear rate seems unreasonable: I’d assume it’s proportional to the weight of the vehicle.
People have done the math for electric cars, and the elimination of micro-particulates from the exhaust and the massive reduction from brake dust significantly outweighs the increase from tires.
Also, tire micro-particulates are mostly deposited on the road rather than in the air where they are far more dangerous.
It'd be nice to see similar analysis for large trucks. I suspect the answer is the same, but it'd be nice to confirm.
Batteries keep getting more energy-dense, so likely one of these days electric trucks won't weight any more.
"Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable"
Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
>Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem! Externalized costs are still costs, someone (or everyone) must still pay them. But when they're externalities instead of internalized, then they're hidden (which leads to gross inefficiency) and they're imposed on people who get no benefit and no choice (which is theft). Mass pollution is literally stealing money and life from a population and inefficiently funneling some of that back to the thief/thieves. It's as if transport companies were stealing 50% of the fuel they used to fill their trucks, and people came along saying "you need to pay for all the fuel you use", and then you argued against that saying "well who do we think those costs will be passed on to...."
When the costs are built into the price, then the direct participants pay, that filters out, and everyone can see exactly what they are and are appropriately incentivized to search for solutions to reduce them, same as every other cost that goes into a good or service. The Free Market is essentially a massively distributed constraint solver, and the "invisible hand of the market" is the cumulative billions of independent actions taken by participants in response to the system constraints and what they know. To function sustainably and efficiently, there has to be a high degree of information symmetry and cost internalization, or else decisions will obviously be distorted.
If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need [0]. That is both very low administrative overhead, and still leaves them in a position to make the most efficient decisions for their own personal situation and fully reward producers who do a better job and reducing costs/improving quality.
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0: Or arguably even better, a universal flat payment to the whole population, but the politics of that are harder.
>> "Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable" Who do we think those costs will be passed on to....
> Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem!
I think, you're confused about "the entire problem" - it's not that "costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone" it's about the alternative approach leading to the same result.
Actually, now the costs are passed mostly to drivers, in the case of making trucking pay more, they will be passed to all consumers, a minor difference.
> If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need.
And the cost of that subsidy will be passed to? ... Again, everyone else of course. No change in actual outcome.
I'm not saying all subsidies are bad and I hate toxic fumes as much as anyone but solving these problems requires an approach much deeper than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
But if the companies actually creating the costs have to bear their burden directly—even if they can pass some portion of that cost on to their customers—that means they have a direct incentive to do something about it.
Prioritize routes that have higher-quality roads, rather than just going the fastest from point A to point B.
Improve emissions.
Reallocate loads where possible and helpful.
Maybe so, but it will also push smaller providers out of business and foster monopolization, the latter is usually more costly and less concerned about environmental impacts. As I said, when the system is chaotic, something is going to get in the way.
This idea gets brought up every time someone suggests adding regulations to prevent some harm large companies are doing—no matter how common-sense, no matter how great the harm, if you're adding regulations, that must hurt the little guy more; that must increase monopolization.
So I gotta ask:
What solution would you actually propose?
Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Do you think we should be removing regulations? Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things is necessarily going to backfire and we're just too stupid and naïve to see it.
> if you're adding regulations, that must hurt the little guy more; that must increase monopolization.
That's the opposite of my position, adding regulations can work both ways, I meant it the other way around.
> Do you genuinely think that the system as it exists today is the best it could ever possibly be?
Again, the opposite of what I said. Improving the system requires systematic approach, fixing here and there without it results in a mess worse than before.
> Sure, that would mean that big companies have even more freedom to ruin our roads and wreck our health, but hey, maybe an extra 3% of small businesses might be able to become profitable!
Removing the income of "extra 3%" which is many thousands people for a rather minuscule, supposed reduction of pollution isn't worth the tradeoffs. If you can't solve the big problem don't mess with an already unstable system - fix the system first.
> Because I'm pretty sick of people pushing the idea that any change we make to improve things
We're where we are because of much emotion and many changes to improve things, to paraphrase, The road to hell is covered with many changes to improve things. This is what happens without a systematic approach to improvement.
The price of the goods being shipped. Perhaps, subsidized trucking reduces incentives for rail infrastructure which is cheaper transportation in the long run.
That is narrow minded, rails can not replace trucks.
And no one is going to build rails to such areas like the 500 people living in Aniak, Alaska, or similar.
Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough."
Rail is not perfect for everything; however, it is a heck of a lot better than 100+ trucks all driving to the same place that a single train could go much more efficiently.
Ships aren't perfect either, but you don't see anyone driving a truck across the pacific do you?
Replace the majority of trucks with rail and use trucks for last mile (from the rail terminal to delivery point), or truly remote deliveries (from the nearest rail yard! even if that is 500 miles away).
Rails cannot replace ALL trucks. But it could replace a lot of them.
Edge cases shouldn’t determine our infrastructure and hybrid models have always been the norm.
I could go outside right now and bang pots together and wake up more people than live in Aniak.
In my town of 700 people there is already a rail line built before trucks were common. It still runs to this day, but almost entirely just to ship sugar beets a few times a year. The majority of 1000 people towns ive been to or lived in in my state have rail either through town or within a 10 minite drive.
If they could put this much rail up 100 years ago, its a cop out to say its too difficult today with equipment able to lift the equivalent of 1000 men.
Is it just a given that subsidizing people to live in Aniak is a good thing?
To be fair, there's a counterargument - namely, that people who live a long ways away from infrastructure have been forced to by the very NIMBYs who made it illegal to build more homes where the infrastructure already exists. Population density near some BART stations is scandalously low.
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.
I don’t know…
The roads are for the people
Companies also use roads and cause more damage than the people
Companies use roads to transport goods to people
People buy goods
People subsidize roads
Making trucking companies pay for road upkeep just means your costs get a little more direct I guess?
So transportation costs go up by about the same amount, and then, what, the government voluntarily lowers taxes?
I guess it would have the benefit of making other forms of transit like rail more economical
Do they not build bypass roads in the US?
It seems like trucks just drive through the middle of every town even if they aren't going there.
I sure wonder what the US would look like if they started levying these costs on trucking.
The coasts would be fine, but getting stuff in and out of interior states would instantly hyperinflate.
And?
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.
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.
> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.
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.
You understand that all business activity in an economy is driven by consumers. Everything is downstream of consumer demand.
Then, subsidize everything for all businesses?
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
I would rather that we subsidize the consumers.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)
Consumer demand can still be distorted.
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".
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.
It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice.
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?
The annual revenue of the trucking industry is roughly $900 billion. That puts their net profit margin at about 3-5%.
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
That number is laughably low compared to value of cargo they move. Really they should get to tech company model. Take 20-30% of value what they transport. Say you got 100 billion of AI servers. 30% of that goes to trucking company when they move it point to point.
$30-$40 billion sounds like scrapping by to me. For an entire industry, one of the most important in the country.
Move more of it to rail.
As much of it as possible is done by rail, it’s the last mile problem.
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
Yes trucks are only there for the last mile, they do tiny journeys, they certainly don't make up a significant portion of interstate highway traffic and drive for hours at a time
What rail? The railroads are at capacity
They are? Is there a chart or a map or a study or something that supports this?
Try to book something to shop by freight; expect a long wait
Take a trip on Amtrak and enjoy sitting still for 2 hours as freight trains go past you due to congestion / priority
The East Palestine disaster put an end to some tricks the railroads had been doing to squeeze out a little more capacity. The railroads are trying to expand switchyards and acquire old unused tracks like mad. My buddy who is in the union is pretty happy since this all means he’s moved up a few notches, gets day shifts now, and doesn’t need to travel as much.
I don't have any idea how to begin booking anything to ship by rail freight but there was no time in my life when I would have expected it to be a thing that could be scheduled with any agility. They closed the the Amtrak station and took the town off of the route decades ago, and I have been lead to understand that it has been a slow way to get from A to B in this country for my entire lifetime. I have not noticed a change in the number of freight trains that I hear in the past ~6 years, except during the beginning of covid when things got very quiet; but this is an anecdotal observation and does not represent the result of a study with any kind of formality. I have not witnessed an expansion in rail lines; the disused paths that I'm personally aware of remain disused, although I am aware of a new apartment complex that is presently being built atop of one of them near me. I do not know your buddy, or his union; I wish to presume that they're a very nice person, and that their union is very good for them and their fellow members, as I also wish to to presume that you are a fine person as as well, but this kind of presumptive character assessment is unrelated to the question. I am uninterested in conducting research to prove or disprove anybody else's stated assertion and I presently perceive no compulsion to become interested in doing that.
Kindest regards from Ohio.
I’m in the same state you are, so you can probably guess which railroad he works for. My town used to have its own tiny railroad complete with a local sales office that got busy signing up every business with a siding to try out shipping by rail. (It’s owned by a small multiple system operator now.)
I happen to have a few acquaintances who ship by rail and things are consistently at capacity. They’d rather move by rail than truck considering how much cheaper rail is, but timeliness is an issue. Most people simply aren’t aware that MOST freight is moved by ship and rail. Trucks are for the last few miles, in terms of total tonnage.
To change this would require buying trillions of right of way to build more tracks.
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".
Sounds like a great way to end up with tolls on all the roads. Or no access to the roads at all.
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?
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
Would be nice if it actually worked that way. Here in my state we've paid for the tollway 50 times over but we'll never get to stop paying a premium over and above the repairs.
Or mileage * weight^4 based fees. It would have the added benefit of reducing the amount of gender-affirming trucks on the road.
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
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.
Anecdotally on my own US highway commute, the ratio of public-buses to large trucks is very small, in the range of 1:50 to 1:100.
The thing I'd like to highlight is that each category has a very different profile for which roads they use, and how heavily.
And pedestrians, cyclist and such pay nothing. We should easily gate all sidewalks and make them pay fair share of cost needed to build that infra. Just have payment terminals before and after each crosswalk allowing them to pay their fair share of use of roads.
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.
They are still free loading on infra they have not paid for. I see no reason not to make them share the cost too especially for the space they need to be dedicated to them.
The local communities paid for that infra. With zoning laws and during the development of subdivision. The cost of land for their lot reflects the additional land cost and and infra developed. They also pay utility connection fee so the city can build plumbing/sewage infra.
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.
My point is that pedestrians don't directly pay fair share of costs. Just like trucks don't directly pay fair share of costs of roads. Scenario is exactly the same. Or really much much worse with pedestrians. There is no tax they directly pay for the roads. I see no reason why they should be treated different from trucks.
Pedestrians and cyclists save money by reducing healthcare costs, sick days, aged care etc.
They should get a credit each time they use a road.
This could be solved by tracking those activities. Say GPS tracker attached to everyone. Decide certain beneficial point and then going under it or too much over it would result in losing credits.
This has nothing to do with the topic. Cost of maintenance due to usage for pedestrians is effectively zero. Putting more effort into quantizing that maintenance is separate from the infrastructure investment.
This (micromanaging) line of thinking toward maintenance is degenerate social policy.
ie Treating the cost of someone receiving benefits for which they did not pay (or otherwise deserve) is a catastrophic enough to desire more spending and bureaucracy to withold the benefit.
They paid for it, via property taxes, either as owners, or less directly, via rent.
I am convinced that you are trolling.
My state charges a fee for every new bicycle that is purchased in the state to help cover costs.
In many cases the infrastructure is better for cyclists and pedestrians _before_ the government spends money on it. I made a video about this if you're curious - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew - rural Ireland is a much safer place to cycle where the roads are still gravel and dirt.
Pressure on the road, and profits, are not similar to those induced by pedestrians and cyclists.
Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.
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?
> Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then?
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.
What? That doesn't make any sense. A political party can't threaten to take away anything when you stop voting for them. Instead, you simply get the policies of the party you elected in their place. If UBI is popular then there's nothing stopping the opposition from offering it, or even promising to double it. But even if they said "elect us and we'll take away your UBI", then that's just not getting a hamburger because you ordered the pasta.
And what aspect of that arrangement looks like servitude? I don't usually associate servitude with the idea of getting paid a stipend regardless of whether I choose to work. Do you know who has historically enjoyed such a stipend? The Lords and Ladies who had all the servants!
Also, there are plenty of implementations of a grocery subsidy that don't have the state giving money directly to big agro-business. For example where I am, groceries are exempt from sales taxes; this is equivalent to a flat tax plus a specific grocery subsidy applied at point of sale to the consumer. This benefits any food producer, large or small.
> A political party can't threaten to take away anything when you stop voting for them.
We must be living in two different political worlds. "Vote for us or you'll lose your social-related benefits" is already an existing thing when it comes to elections in the Western world.
> And what aspect of that arrangement looks like servitude?
Choosing your (political, in this case) masters on account of said political masters throwing you some crumbles from time to time, this is indeed servitude.
> "Vote for us or you'll lose your social-related benefits" is already an existing thing when it comes to elections in the Western world.
Is this, perhaps, because the party saying it is a (relatively) left-wing party trying to ensure social benefits for all, and their main or sole competitor is a far-right party trying to destroy the very idea of compassion?
'Cause there's a big, big difference between "you'd better vote for us, or we'll destroy the things you like", and "you'd better vote for us, because the other guys will destroy the things you like". And while the latter isn't always true, it's not remotely a threat. It's either an inevitability, or a flat-out lie.
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.
> food gets costlier, people will eat less
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.
> cheaper ultra-processed food
Is because of subsidies to the corn. Remove those.
It's really not that simple. Starchy carbohydrates like wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes are, dollar-for-dollar, legitimately more calorie dense and more shelf-stable compared to healthier fruits and vegetables. They were staple crops for good reason long before the advent of modern agricultural subsidies. Salt is also very abundant, cheap, and not subsidized.
I do think agricultural subsidies are distorting the market and our food system, but eliminating them isn't going to magically fix everyone's diets overnight.
Many poor people already buy according to calories per dollar, more expensive food just makes people buy more grain starches and sugars, which will not make people healthier.
>>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.
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.
The US has a highly functioning train system. The US has the largest rail network and is third in the world in of volume shipped by rail.
Comparing miles of track to square miles of a country the US ranks 40th, with ~26 miles of track per 1,000 square miles of land. Just under South Africa, Pakistan, and Tunisia. #1 Switzerland has ~208 miles of rail per 1,000 square miles of land.
The US moves up to 25th comparing miles of rail per million people, with 278, but is trounced by #1, Canada, with 782 miles of rail per million people.
Not even 40% of US long distance freight is by train. Just because that is one of the better nations doesn’t mean it’s as good as it can be.
Thank you! I don't know why they keep sticking to their scripts when it doesn't apply in this case.
Yes, let's cause the last lifeline that keeps society afloat to fail.
This is all very nice in theory but you do realize that if US nationwide trucking is no longer able to operate profitably (and they are barely profitable as it is, see TFA for a nice illustration) that you are looking at absolute chaos in short order.
You'll have some nice and undamaged roads to look at though, but I'm not sure if that will make up for the downside.
The point isn't to preserve roads, but to expose the true cost of damage to the industry causing it. It can be phased in over time. Trucking will become more expensive and businesses will respond by optimizing transportation and raising prices. This will be offset by much lower taxes because trucks cause the vast majority of road damage from vehicles.
Yes, this is the perfect time to do so, after all, what could possibly go wrong?
Really, there is a contingent on HN that seems utterly divorced from reality. The trucking industry as a whole profits ~30B annually in the United States. That is an absolutely insane number of miles hauled. Many of these operations are barely hanging on and whether or not 16 trucking companies going bankrupt in a month due to fuel prices is normal or not I couldn't tell you but on the off chance that it is this might not be the time to experiment with what other things you could do to that industry.
For contrast: Amazon profits number in the hundreds of billions (300B+ iirc) and that is just one company vs a whole industry.
Effectively that means that they are making pennies of profit per mile driven and that any kind of destabilization of that industry will instantly translate into either shortages or further price increases.
All of the retailers and businesses were able to do business when new tariffs where introduced, which was complex, messy and changing weekly. The costs were passed on to consumers. Retailers and businesses that use trucking have really nothing to do, they get a bill just like now. Trucking remains as it was.
Then, its upto them to figure out more efficient means of logistics. Companies that can figure this out will survive in the marketplace. Competition weeds out inefficient companies.
None of the things you say happened when tariffs changed. All companies were fine and made more profits. The economy didn't collapse. (Source: See stock market and profits of companies)
So you agree this externality should be internalized? What time in the past would have been better to implement this?
Maybe you're right and putting this off is the right decision. If we get automated trucking and those thousands of trucking companies are replaced with a handful of tech companies it might be easier to implement reforms.
Such a tax would be highly regressive I think.
When a government collects taxes they have to think how to invest that money to maximize gdp growth. Subsidizing road infrastructure is a pretty good use of those funds IMO, though admittedly I’m probably biased as a transportation engineer.
CA uses fuel taxes to fund road infrastructure, which isn’t the worst approach… the heaviest users (‘heavy’ both figuratively and literally) invariably pay the largest share, although EVs are messing up that equation.
> the heaviest users (‘heavy’ both figuratively and literally) invariably pay the largest share
But the point is that the heaviest users(semitrucks) cause almost all of the damage (literally >99%) but don't pay for most of the maintenance. This represents a subsidy of trucking companies. They cause damage that they don't pay for. This is an example of the economic concept of an externality, which is bad and should be eliminated.
How is saying "this business is barely viable" an argument for subsidizing it?
That you need it to survive.
Airlines are barely viable. They are surviving.
"The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start as a billionaire."
Why do you think trucking industry* in its current configuration is the most optimal configuration that can ever exist and it needs to be frozen for posterity?
*It is never about the trucking industry, but the mega businesses that use trucking. They know how to do logistics, which is how to do multi-modal transportation (ship, train, trucks, last mile delivery). Amazon built new warehouses everywhere in US. When the pricing reflects reality, warehouses + multi-modal transportation will reconfigure.
Its just like saying Layer-1 of networking in 1970s (1Mbps Ethernet? Token ring?) is the perfect way to transport packets, we should freeze it in time and never think of anything better. Layer 1 in the real world is transportation.
Trucking is also one of the largest sources of employment in the country. It's quite literally the backbone not just because they haul so much, but because they are a massive source of income for families.
I'm not saying trucks are bad or that we should get rid of them or that truckers shouldn't be paid or anything like that. If we closed the externality of trucking causing more damage than they pay for then trucking and transportation would get better. The trucking companies would have more information to make decisions about what routes/equipment/etc are worthwhile.
> Yes, let's cause the last lifeline that keeps society afloat to fail.
Perhaps society would be more resilient if important parts of its infrastructure was not subsidized but costed in a sustainable way.
"Cheap" roads — the users of which do not pay the full costs (see also fossil fuel use and climate change externalities) — caused sprawling development, which itself has been called a Ponzi scheme:
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon...
The idea is that people would design and use things differently if they had to pay the (break-even) cost of maintaining them for the amount of damage they cause to them: perhaps things would not be built as far apart if transportation was not subsidized, perhaps there would be more rail, etc.
How many roads and bridges are towards the end of their design life but are not being replaced because there is no money? Some communities gave up on pavement and went to gravel because of costs:
* https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34469490
* https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1109605_americas-infra...
* https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/7/26/the-un-pav...
This is a meaningless stat without comparison. There are nearly 500k trucking companies operating in the US, with ~91% operating 10 trucks or fewer.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
A statistic is propaganda if it is a value without a percentage, or a percentage without a value.
Yeah this feels like what I call the "scientific method for journalists". Step 1: create a hypothesis Step 2: google for evidence supporting that hypothesis Step 3: write an article about how it's definitely happening
Trucking companies for shipping are easy to setup and take down.
I wonder if anyone here has shipped anything by freight directly (like a car) and done the research on USDOT / MC Numbers / VIN for their truck. It's a shady system.
16 companies is nothing.
Most of those "trucking companies" are just self-employed truck drivers...
500k trucking companies = 1 company per 700 people in the US, which would be crazy if they were actual organizations
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number isn't especially remarkable.
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)
So 16 in 30 days is a rate that, if sustained, trends toward ~3x the high end of your estimate of normal.
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
> 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....
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
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.
Congress hasn't issued a declaration of war that was signed by the president since June of 1942.
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.)
I'm almost 40 years old. The US has basically been at war my entire life in some form or another. Not a single war was declared by congress, I don't think.
This is very much normal. I'm not saying it's correct or alright, just that it is normal.
The US Congress not declaring a war is the normal thing (for the last many decades).
We started a war and aren't calling it as such.
We are a democracy. We voted for this, gerrymandering .. Money still in politics .. wealth concentration .. and all.
It's a war. What you call it is immaterial, just like it doesn't matter that Putin refuses to call the invasion of Ukraine a war. The identity of a thing is not dependent on the label, it is inherent in the thing itself.
> Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war.
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.
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".
Aren't there several orders of magnitude more trucking companies in the US than 16?
Heck, shouldn't that be below the expected bankrupt trucking companies in any given 1-2 month period?
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
Only partially and it depends on their contracts. And only when transporting goods. They also have to cover empty miles in between gigs when they are not getting paid. Or when idling. And of course fuel prices differ between states. So, it depends but mostly cost goes up for truckers. Some trucking companies might be very vulnerable to high prices like this.
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.
Sounds like we need more investment in diesel-electric hybrids. Like trains.
The interstate pneumatic tube network I designed with macaroni in the fifth grade is looking visionary now.
In the the Space Exploration overhaul mod I once played for Factorio, at one stage the game progressed to the point that many/most resources could be converted into matter.
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.)
Or trains...
We have freight trains in the US. (I hear a freight train right now as I write this.)
Its not big truck you cant just dump something on it! Its… its a series of….oh my! LOL!!!
I felt this on my last truck shipment. My previous LTL provider suddenly closed and the next cheapest option is more than twice as expensive.
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
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.
Idiots is a overstatement. This is why trucking brokers exist. These small trucking outfits can barely hold a conversation, much less deal with a end-consumer on anything customer service related.
I'm sure there's something to this but unless I missed it this story is missing the one piece of data you really want in order to contextualize: how many trucking companies ordinarily go under any given month?
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
F peoples health and the environment. We need profits now! No incentive to get off diesel, just lower the price!
Totally unsurprising.
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
Truckers aren't just rolling around out there for their own enjoyment they're transporting the goods we all use every day, on pretty thin margins at that. I guess if you're trying to indirectly tax the users of trucking then OK.
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
"Some were small, single-operator outfits. Others were larger, operating dozens of vehicles."
Arn't there hundreds of thousands of owner-operators? I don't doubt high costs drive some people out of business, but this seems insignificant to report on. An engine failure could bankrupt a poorly run operator too. What are the typical numbers?
How fast does the fuel surcharge money actually come in? Could a small trucker go broke waiting to get paid?
You people who think this is a great thing really need to put more thought into what you propose as the migration to your better future, because what it looks like to everyone else is that you’d really love them not to able to afford heat, rent, and groceries
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
Why is it that we need subsidies? Farmers and truckers "cannot make do" without subsidies! This is a well known "fact". But it seems very lopsided and most likely is why we can't have nice things.
Some farm subsidies are necessary to stabalize food production against yeild variability. It is the only alternative to a mass granery system which has historically failed many cities and nations. Yearly yields can be 30% off your prediction due to normal weather patterns and only even out over decades.
All that said, many crop subsidies are horribly mismanaged and selectively targeted for political reasons.
Good opportunity for oligarchs like Musk to move in.
I’d see it if:
- 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?
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.
Yes, to build space based trucking. Because roads are congested, getting permits for new roads is hard.
Hear me out, what if we could carry fresh strawberries from California to New York by Starship?
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
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.
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
> However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen
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.
You misread them.
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.
And yet disingenuously you avoid the fact that centralizing the act of automating transit by delegating it to the manufacturers of an automated transit system is one of not the lynchpin to fully technologically enforceable tyranny.
You can stop a protest with a geofence with self-driving cars. You cannot stop every state's worth of pissed off people driving to the center of power and raising hell with human driven vehicles, maintaining the possibility of active revocation of consent to be governed at scales that require governments to come back to to the negotiating table.
Canada learned this the hard way with the trucker protests during COVID, and agree with the protestors position or not, you can't argue with the results. The federal government pushed the little red button by sanctioning their own citizens, freezing assets, trying to turn the tables; demonstrating to anyone paying attention we have already reached a point of technical centralization harmful to peaceful resolution of issues, as small groups are making decisions so vast, that the only response to things is to physically show up, and in doing so, scare the ever loving hell out of residents as a feedback mechanism to those causing the problems.
Those that look at self-driving as only a safety metric, and not simultaneously a sovereignty metric, are either crushingly naive, or haven't put anywhere near the thought into downstream effects as they should have.
>crashes and fatalities are something that already happen
Optics change when an 80000 lbs rig inevitably crashes into stopped cars creating multi car inferno ball of death.
They could justify a human in the cab to satisfy existing reflective triangle regulations. Provides cheap publicity to nourish their lobbyists.
...to move in and sell innovative new products in a healthy, vibrant and mature marketplace? In direct competition with Mack, Freightliner, Kenworth and Peterbilt? Selling products which only get sold if people choose to buy them?
...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.