We also have to reexamine existing pricing and demand management mechanisms. A prime example is the weight-distance tax for highway use, referred to as the axle weight tax. Current fuel taxes simply reflect miles driven, not the capital and maintenance needs of highway users, particularly trucks. Highway capital and maintenance costs rise exponentially with the load put on the road segment. Cliff Winston, of the Brookings Institution, has estimated that the rear axle of a 13-ton van causes over 1,000 times as much damage as the average automobile.
Additional axles distribute the weight of a vehicle, making it less damaging to the roadway.
However, current user charges, based primarily on fuel use, provide little incentive for using vehicles that distribute the weight in a less destructive manner. The politics of this issue are controversial, but they reflect people's prevailing sense of fairness. There are the people who invested and who built their lives around the incentives already in the system. Those people feel that if you change the rules, if you change the pricing to their disadvantage, then it is unfair. They counted on it being that way.