http://magazine.volvotrucks.com/en-gb/Articles/International/2009/1_09/Customer_Story/Customer_Story_video/TV_Extreme_driving_in_Norway/

Trucks do pay for the damages they cause but they are charged a cost-recovery fee for damage not a user charge. They do not pay for the damages they cause on a specific road and face no incentives (other than via outright bans) to avoid certain roads.

The Productivity Commission report found no evidence of cross subsidies on trucks with respect to rail. Like me however they wanted the fees made into user charges.

Rail is not doing too badly but yep, it does not deliver point-to-point.

The meter you write about is close to being deliverable – it needs also to show location and distance travelled by the truck. You are right – apart from weight it is like the devices installed in taxis.

2. The reason why heavy vehicles do not meet anywhere near the cost of the damage they incur has notrhing to do with feasibility or fancy footwork by economists but is due to lobbying of politicians by powerful vested interests – farmers, oil companies, coal producers, meat producers, Woolworths, Lindsay Fox, and the like. The arguments that are always trotted out are that we will all pay more for everyday things because transport component is factored into goods we buy. This is a valid argument but not the whole story.

3. We pay for road building and repair one way or another. But it would be fairer through a user-pays principle if we didn’t subsidise it via general revenue and from other state taxes (where a motorist driving a Honda City helps to subsidise a 22-ton B-Double Mack, and hence line the pockets of Lindsay Fox et al.

Devil’s advocate: But Lindsay Fox et al are all open to the same competitive pressures and have to charge competitively. Their operational costs are pretty much fixed and if the latter are the same for everyone then everything remains equal.

Response: Rail. Currently rail is not competitive because it is not door-to-door, is woefully organised, poorly resourced and undercapitalised and therefore technologically behind the times by 30-50 years. Moreover, importantly, rail is also competitively disadvantaged because of the subsidy going to road transport. But rail is far better suited for carrying heavy loads because of the ability of the ballast under the rail (the bluemetal gravelly heaps) and timber or concrete sleepers. There is a direct relationship between the standardised vehicle width and wheels and the permanent way. A road surface has to be universal to allow myriad of wheel sizes and is therefore overengineered for each individual vehicle, with attendant cost penalties. The roads are also a cost-compromise and are not truly engineered for the weight of the massive freight carrying trucks, hence the damage. There is also the cost of accidents that trucks cause magnified by the disparity between a huge truck and a car that we have not factored in. Rail requires a fraction of the input costs for maintenance per ton of freight carried. In all, rail is indisputably a superior and more logical means of carrying freight.

Conclusion: If the true cost of roadmaking and repair were to be borne by the road carriers as per tonnage carried, the trucks would not be able to compete with rail and the distribution methodology would return to railhead to railhead with smaller road trucking to the door as it was once.

Epilog: As railways are owned by governments, they do not do a good job of lobbying themselves nor do they give themselves wise council. Unfortunately, nowadays we live in a stupid and corrupt country.