Oh, gosh yes! Even in this "declining" economy, the big rigs still rule the road, and woe to anyone that gets in their way.

Freight needs to be moved by rail / ship / barge...and truck traffic needs to be curtailed as much as possible...the roads belong to cars, not trucks, IMO. That's why I loved traveling on Florida's Turnpike back in the days I used to scoot up and down that peninsula...very, very few trucks due to the high tolls they were charged.

I'd fully support a tolling of our Interstates if it accomplished two things: Getting rid of the majority of long-distance truck traffic, and provide drastically increased funding for rail and other mass transit options.

You guys also drive less and have great public transit, which our representatives have ignored our need for. Maybe this will be a wake up call that we need to get on the path to a model like yours. Discourage driving while providing closer, cheaper options.

The trucking industry has a very strong lobby. There is no logic in laws that allow 90,000 trucks to be registered and run on highways no matter how high the registration fees, tolls or fuel taxes. Our boughtenpaidfor politicans have been subsidising the industry with low fees for decades and we get to make up the difference with our auto taxes and fees.
The one that burns me the most is upping the allowable load by just sticking another axle under a dump truck. 14 wheels vs. 10. spreads the load over more pavement but the bridge still has to take the whole load inside the same bumper to bumper distance. I've seen trucks in the mid west that look like a centipede.

Well in the short term the Federal Gov is just going to tell the states "You're on your own champ." As peak oil occurs I imagine the more important state government will be. Also states that are next to one another will work together more and will create regional funds. it will be interesting.

The whole purpose of the interstate system is to move around the goods efficiently in a "just in time" fashion. You take the big rigs off the roads, there REALLY is no purpose in having such costly high maintenance roads all over the place. Just so you can tool over to the coast at 90MPH in your BMW?

Obviously by subsidizing the road system for so many years we subsidized the trucking industry at the expense of the railroads, but of course regardless of this as Peak Oil takes hold, the trucking industry is in its Death Throes. You can't directly charge the trucking companies for their use of the roads, they already are operating on a thin margin and are going bankrupt ANYHOW.

If you actually took into account the real costs of moving goods this way with all the maintenance of the roads necessary, freight charges would double, probably triple. You end up paying mostly for transport costs, not a whole lot for the actual goods themselves.

Anyhow, this is a done deal, the economies have to go more local at least until at some distant time in the future we reorganize the transport system again around the new realities.

The Interstate while it lasted however was one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. I drove every mile of it in my Freightliner. A Public works Project that really dwarfs even the Great Wall of China. Like that Wall though, it is now Obsolete.

Reverse Engineer

You can bet that the interstate system wasn't sold to the American public but for the chance at coasting 90 MPH between oceans. The trucking industry was practically nascent at the time, and certainly didn't resemble anything like we have today.

Weren't gross weights limited to something like 50,000 lbs at one point?

The government transportation system kills 40,000 per year.

Dwight Eisenhower sold the Interstate as necessary for National Security. As a lieutenenant int he Army in the 1920s, he took a convoy across the "Lincoln Highway", basically a lot of poorly maintained rutted up local roads across the country.

In reality of course, the interstate was built as the Oil Era gathered up to full steam here in the US, and the Automobile that Henry Ford envisioned as being in every garage came to pass. The cars needed the highways, the highways need the cars.

A subsidized road system made the railroads non-competitive, they after all have to maintain their own track. So in the wake of the interstate came the trucking industry, which only exists because it was subsidized in the building of its "track" by the individual Amerikan who also wants this road to drive at 90 MPH to swim at a FL Beach. Meanwhile, said Amerikan became addicted to all the products delivered "Just in Time" over the interstate system by the trucks, but of course finds it annoying to have to share the road with the big rigs carrying their toilet paper.

What is the difference between putting a toll Booth on the road and charging a tax on the fuel used to drive on same roads? The only difference I can see is you need toll booths. So go ahead, tax the heck out of the trucking companies for using the roads, you however will have to pay for that in terms of much higher prices on your Toilet Paper. You soon won't be able to afford the Toilet Paper or afford the tolls on the road along the way to get it.

This all was made possible by Oil which flowed freely out of the ground down in Texas in 1950. Its GONE now there, and rapidly its being GONE from fields all around the world, and even if its not GONE, other people want it also and so it COSTS a LOT more. The whole model doesn't WORK anymore, and no tolls are going to keep the Interstate system free of potholes.

Reverse Engineer

Well the stated purpose of the interstate system was to allow the movement of troops on something less vulnerable then rail lines.
The main real purpose was to allow autos and trucks to move along at a constant speed and not come to a stop at each cross road with its waste of fuel and chance of collision. Just look at the differance between fuel rateings city to highway. Imagine if there was no highways so every mile was a city mile. And think of how many stop lights and signs there are between New York and San Francisco.
The old Keystone cops silent films show you what city traffic had become with just model Ts and As. Imagine if they had done nothing to get rid of the stop signs. The fact that it allowed the truckers to break the monopoly of the rail roads was just a side benifit.

A large truck loaded with toilet paper weighs only a few tons more than it would empty, and shouldn't have a particularly high road use tax. The truck might weigh about the same as a bus carrying fifty passengers.

A large truck carrying 50,000 pounds of canned goods would still be mostly empty. If you leave out a few tons of canned goods, you could carry a large volume of toilet paper relatively cheaply without exceeding the weight limit.

In theory, trucks already pay a toll. It's collected at every weigh station when they cross state lines. I don't have any information on whether they pay their fair share at this time, but there's certainly already the mechanism in place to assess the fee without converting the highways to toll roads.

IFTA replaced most of that. Non-permitted overweight loads probably still have to pay at weigh stations, but those are called fines.

Tolling, via RFIDs and e-checkpoints mounted at each interchange, could accurately measure the distance covered by each truck, and allow truckers to pay for their commensurate use of it. GPS would probably work as well.

I don't think tolls or taxes are the answer.

In the worst case, tolls require a mega-bureaucracy such as the NYS Thruway Authority to handle the nine digit annual budget and line the pockets of the those same bureaucrats sitting behind desks - not out on the highway in an orange vest.

As for taxes, this highway fund has been raided for earmarks and every disaster relief situation since it was created. The bridge in Minnesota that collapsed cost $200 Million+ I'm not sure if it all came from this fund, but I seem to recall very quick action by lawmaker to come up with these funds. Don't know where else they would have come from.

There will never come a day when a tax is actually used for it's intended purpose - not when there are so many crooks in Congress with the power to spend at will on whatever they please. Don't get me wrong. I think the bridge in Minnesota probably needed to be replaced, but at what cost to ALL taxpayers the majority of whom will never step wheel in that state. Alaska's bridge to nowhere is another case in point - thankfully it was squashed - but how long did it go on fully funded?

Now with PO you have steel and asphalt likely to go through the roof and no tax will be enough to pay for maintenance of the "system."

I think the answer is a massive scaling back of unnecessary projects like 8 lane highways and such along with increased light rail. People will just have to accept fewer maintained lanes and I think there will be fewer drivers on the road anyway.

Well you have to have one or the other. Your house without a road to it would be worthless and I do mean Worthless, zip ,zero, nada. Same with your work place. If you cant get people and goods to and from a site it has no value. It is wilderness.
I find tolls a waste of fuel time and labor. the same amount of money can be raised at the pump with a gas and diesel tax and you had to stop to fuel up anyway. That and registration fees set based on the weight of the loaded vehicle hence the damage it dose to the road and you can generate plenty of funds to maintain the system. big problem of course is keeping the politicans from stealing it all or stealing half of it and wasting the other half. The interstate system was the best deal the taxpayers ever got with the REA being the only other contender. It is criminal the billions that have been wasted by neglecting to maintain it at a rate equal to the rate of wear and tear.