Streets.mn

A Hyundai Kona electric is 15% heavier than the Hyundai Kona ICE version. I was under the impression that damage to the roads due to weight followed a power law. I think I’m right in my assessment. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Road damage follows a power-log rule based on vehicle mass/volume. The vast majority of road damage is caused by the largest of vehicles. A Nissan Leaf driven daily as a commuter car and an occasionally-driven F-150 both cause relatively little wear-and-tear on the road. But, the few times the F-150 is driven, its mass is substantially more likely to cause road damage than the Leaf. [1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

This is admirable, but doing the math I don't think it's worth the energy. $6 is what they get for 25 liters of pee. $6 buys you 120 calories at 5 cents per calorie (1). It takes 24 calories to lift one kg one meter (2) 25 liters of pee is 25 kg, so it takes 600 calories to lift 25kg of pee 1 meter. So in order to earn enough money to cover the needed food intake to move the pee you could only lift each batch of pee 0.2 meters. Put another way, if one moves each batch of pee more than 0.2 vertical meters total during the transport process (or equivalent energy consumption) then there is a net loss, they would have eaten more food energy than is saved. This is assuming that the $6 you get for a batch of pee is within an order if magnitude or so from its true value. I.e a batch of pee is worth to the world between 6 and 60 dollars given the market price they're paying. 1 - https://streets.mn/2018/09/05/what-is-the-cost-value-of-a-calorie/ 2 - https://answers-to-all.com/language/how-many-calories-does-it-take-to-…

The damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Take a look at this chart: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… and this article https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-road-damage/ From the article: "Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)" Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.

2 things. First, pretty sure it’s been discussed here previously(edit: and is down thread), but I believe the wear on the road is like the 4th power of the weight.[1] here’s a chart describing it. with that considered, I don’t think it makes sense to even really charge passenger vehicles in the US, when we have huge fleets of 80k pound big rigs on the road(and the limit is uncapped with overweight permits)—charge them. Second, the problem with tires is that depending on what and where you drive you’ll use them considerably faster. I live a few miles down a very windy chip-sealed[2] road, that I have to drive down any time I go anywhere. As a result(best I can tell) my tires tend to go bald 10k-20k miles early. Chip seal is used because it is cheap, seems regressive that I’d be taxed at a higher rate for a poorer road. [1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipseal

Those abolishments are way less intense than you're thinking. There's still a ton of restrictions that make building even the triplexes that they technically legalized actually get built. Things like floor/area ratios and setbacks, which make building dwellings that people want difficult. https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-duplexes-and-triplex…

Yes - both are building like crazy but Minneapolis is the gold-standard: https://streets.mn/2023/11/13/chart-of-the-day-supply-and-demand-in-ac… Rents have fallen in nominal terms.

Building for pedestrians helps everyone. https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-walking-we-need-to…

I agree, it seems like we’re headed to the everybody suffers equally instead of everybody is benefited equally Perfect example from a link from yesterday: The removed a crosswalk because it was cheaper to be in compliance by removing it than fixing it [1] Said another way, nobody…from the traffic engineer to the city counsel…cared enough about the people impacted, that they lobbied or changed the system in such a way that would help the impacted person. Their inputs were ignored or overruled. [1] https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-walking-we-need-to…

This article was originally published at https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-walking-we-need-to…

Other countries saw the same uptick in smartphones without the same huge uptick in pedestrian deaths, though. In charts: https://streets.mn/2020/10/14/chart-of-the-day-pedestrian-fatalities-p… https://cityobservatory.org/why-are-us-drivers-killing-so-many-pedestr…

> Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!). This [0] is useful context. Bikes are rounding errors compared to everything else. [0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Slightly related is road wear. According to "Pedal Fort Collins", a 8,600 pound vehicle does over 20x the damage of a 4,000 pound one[0]. More pieces throughout the past few decades have also covered this [1-2] 0: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… (source is dead, so a blog reference is all I have) 1: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-… 2: https://www.gao.gov/products/109954

No, I'm not misunderstanding. I talk with traffic engineers on a regular basis on how the MUTCD is a large barrier towards safer streets. Pavement markings, including lane widths, bike lanes, counter flow bike lanes, HAWK signals, transit lanes and crosswalks affect the street design. My largest personal pet peeves with the MTUCD is the requirement for far side signal heads. Far side signal heads cause crosswalk encroachment. If signals were near side only like in EU, crosswalk encroachment would be impossible because you lose sight of the signal head. https://streets.mn/2021/04/30/thinking-outside-the-pedestrian-box/ If you check out my second link in my first comment from NACTO, near the bottom there is a table of various cities and their specific issues with the MUTCD. Mine (Madison, WI) is here: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FHWA-2020-0001-0258

Keep in mind cyclists don't really damage roads: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Indeed, and god forbid separate bike paths / infrastructure. The main complaint is that bikes don't pay tax / registration, but usually after I get them to agree that vehicles should pay in proportion to the damage (and commensurate repair costs) they inflict on the infrastructure and then show them this chart [0], they usually end up just resorting to insulting my "libtard values" or something. Cubic functions are not something I think they remember from school... [0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

We're fatter than our peers [0], we drive more (and therefore crash more often) [1], we're more violent [2], and we abuse drugs at much higher rates [3]. Those are our "special disadvantages." [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpNdUMeXUAAEHA4.jpg:large [1] https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/annual-VMT-driving-chart… [2] https://i.insider.com/55831cda69bedde87600549e?width=700&format=jp… [3] https://www.issup.net/knowledge-share/publications/2016-09/usa-and-eur…

Neighbourhood roads don't see 18-wheelers. Additionally a 2x increase in weight results in a ~20x increase in damage [0]. That's certainly not negligible and will eventually have to be factored into car taxes. The same is true for heavy trucks though: subsidies on road damage/maintenance disincentivises more efficient modes like rail. [0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Here is a table of vehicle damage levels by size. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Do remember that damage to the road from tires scales exponentially with weight (per tire). So those trucks are doing huge damage to the roads (and not paying for it directly). Here's an article with a nice graph about it: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Meanwhile the backwards state of Wisconsin has a special extra tax for hybrid vehicles, and then an even larger extra tax for electric vehicles [1]. The justification was that hybrids don't pay their "fair share" of fuel taxes - but it's not like I see the state government putting a huge tax on diesel fuel to tax the heavy trucks that actually are causing road wear. [2] [1] https://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/dmv/vehicles/title-plates/fuelfee.aspx [2] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

Road wear is like cubic? With vehicle weight. Would take 10000 Tesla’s to wear the road the same as one truck. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… If you want to EV tax me for road wear fine. Please tax trucks at least 1000x, and please tax all gas burning cars for the lung cancer and other negative externalities they cause.

I get your point, and don't disagree with it, but the analogy you used is still off. In the case of fuel taxes, they're mostly used to fund road maintenance. Since the amount of road damage (and therefore maintenance cost) increases exponentially/geometrically with axle weight[1], it doesn't make sense to tax cyclists because the amount of cost they incur is negligible. On the other hand, it does make sense to charge electric vehicles extra $$$, because they incur road wear but don't pay for it via fuel taxes. [1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

I thought it was roughly to the 4th power of the vehicle? At least that's what this chart [1] suggests and I've heard in a few engineering podcasts [1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

You might be interested to learn about the Gehl Door Average, a metric that Jan Gehl came up with (based on his book Cities for People). It measures the number of doors per 100 meters of street frontage, and is a contributing factor to walkability: https://streets.mn/2014/11/06/front-doors-and-walkable-cities/ Parking lots have a 0 GDA, and so feel weirdly empty when walking. (So do parks, but one easily-calculable metric can't capture everything.)

For the curious, "Road damage ... is estimated to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight". [0] A chart shows it nicely: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating#Importance

Not offset enough. a hummer does 21x the wear/tear that an average car does. a 9ton big-rig does 410x the damage https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

It’s my understanding that the vast majority of road wear is caused by very large vehicles. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… It would seem that it may make more sense to make up the difference in other consumption taxes as transport of goods is probably a good chunk of the road wear. Increasing the cost of EVs at a time of climate crisis seems pretty short sighted.

While this may be true, big rigs and other ultra-heavy vehicles cause a disproportionate amount of wear as well. [0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-…

To clarify the last point, damage to roads increases exponentially as weight increases. A big-rig will do hundreds of times more damage to a road than a, say, Prius. https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-… http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf