$3.99 at my local Costco. Other places in NJ are charging anywhere from $3.92 to $4.13.
On a related note, I see that Gas Buddy is again listing Costco stations when you type in a zip code. However, if you do a search by “brand”, Gas Buddy doesn’t include Costco as one of the brands from which you can choose.
Traverse City, Michigan:$4.09 - $4.29 unleaded regular.
Unless one has to decide between groceries or gas to get to work.
How do you figure this?? If one driver puts 20,000 miles a year on their car they use twice as much fuel as on that drives 10,000 miles a year and pays twice the fuel taxes at the point of purchase. That is the point of a gasoline tax.
Absolutely agree with this!
Again, trucks USE more fuel for each mile driven so they PAY more fuel taxes than automobile users. Not nearly enough, I agree with that. The damage done by 1000 semis is far greater than 100,000 automobiles. The solution is to reduce maximum axle loads nationally and in each state. The tax on diesel is already higher than gasoline but not by much. Should be more.
How do you come to this conclusion? The DOT posts this on their website…
“Unlike roadways, U.S. freight railroads are owned by private organizations who are responsible for their own maintenance and improvement projects. Compared with other major modes of transportation, railroad owners invest one of the highest percentages of revenues (19 percent) to maintain and add capacity to their system, spending nearly $25 billion annually.”
So rail lines are being maintained privately. Seems to work quite well.
The only issue I can see with that (there’s always an issue, right?) - you’ll effectively burn more fuel to move the same amount of freight. That will increase freight costs (and ultimately the price of everything) and produce more carbon (if you’re looking at it from that perspective).
Another issue - you’ll need more loads = more drivers, and we don’t have enough already.
I agree with both of those points. I would counter the cost argument that the savings in tax dollars for road repair and delays caused by contruction would offset the additional deliver costs. The CO2 argument would be less stop and go wasted fuel sitting in stopped highway traffic would offset the increase in truck traffic. Europe has been running lighter semis for years and they are nuts for carbon reduction.
The driver shortage, well, I can only point to the autonomous trucks running Texas to Arizona and the coming recession that should address the driver shortage.
Eh, maybe. But I doubt it would offset. Would have to know how much you’d actually save on construction with the lighter loads (an empty truck and trailer alone is still over 30k lbs), how many more trucks it would take to move the same amount of material, how long trucks are actually idling for the construction and all those variables. As for Europe, are those trucks covering the same distance as US trucks?
Yeah, Europe is nuts for carbon reduction, but they’re also more dependent on Russia than anyone for oil, from what I gather. They protest fracking in their own countries but get oil imported from Mother Russia. Whatever floats their boat, I guess. All of that info gathered from news articles. I freely admit I’m no export on all things European. Nor do I really want to be 
I was mistaken when said that both pay the same amount of taxes because I forgot about the fuel tax. So the 20k mile driver does pay more taxes in the form of fuel tax but not anywhere near double what the 10k mile driver pays. The problem is that all registration taxes, fuel taxes, tolls, and whatever else there is that drivers have to pay to the government only amounts to about half of the cost of maintaining roads. So someone who drives 100 miles per year is still paying for over half of the cost of maintaining roads.
Right they pay more since they drive more but my point is it is still like a losing business. Have you heard the joke “We lose 5 cents on every one that we sell, but we’ll make it up in volume”? The diesel fuel tax only covers a small percentage of the road use expenses that a semi truck creates. The more a semi truck drives the more money the government has to spend to maintain the roads. This is paid for by things like sales tax and property tax, since the tax revenue from transportation related things is already entirely spent for road maintenance.
You missed the point. The railroads are maintained by the railroad companies. People who send freight over the railroad have to pay for the train expenses and the cost of maintaining the railroad. People who send freight over the highway on a semi truck only have to pay for the semi truck. The road is provided by the government for free, except for the small on highway fuel tax. This effectively subsidizes the cost of sending freight on on highway semi trucks making railroads less used than they should be.
Despite the government subsidy on highway transportation, the railroads are still able to stay in business! That shows how efficient rail transportation is.
Lots of data on that subject… Given that roads cost from $1.25 to $3M a mile just to re-pave and heavier trucks require repair MUCH faster than lighter ones AND Canada already has much lower weight limits (comparable to Europe… and way more miles!) plus EU trucks have more axles to carry less load to do just that, it seems to be a rather large savings. This link expresses the huge effect weight has on road damage…
The increase number of trucks depends on how many semis gross out rather than cube out on any given shipment. I could not find that data anywhere. I am sure the big shippers know the answer to that.
Not true. See the attached article. Many state divert road taxes to pay for other things. The money is adequate…the states just won’t spend it ON the roads!
You can’t be serious? Every truck out there pays thousand’s of dollars in licensing beyond fuel taxes and the cost of the equipment. That’s why some operators license their trucks in other states where the fees are more reasonable.
Me thinks the Snowman posts here because none of his relatives will listen to him anymore .
[quote="VOLVO-V70, post:175,
Me thinks the Snowman posts here because none of his relatives will listen to him anymore .
Or friends if he has any.
You’re over complicating it. If they get a million dollars from transportation taxes and spend 2 million on road repairs, they have to get the other million from somewhere else, like property tax or federal funding. If they spend half of the 1 million from transportation taxes on schools, then they have to bring in 1.5 million from other sources to pay for the roads. The US average 53.4%, meaning that much of the road expenses are covered by transportation related taxes like fuel taxes, registrations and tolls. It doesn’t matter how many times the money is shifted around, it still comes out to 53%. Are you saying that the information that I linked to is wrong? That transportation taxes exceed the amount required to maintain roads?
They do pay a lot, but they pay the same regardless of how much they drive, and what they pay is vastly smaller portion compared to cars, and is a tiny portion of what would be sufficient to cover the cost of semi trucks using the roads. As Mustangman pointed out, semi trucks cause vastly greater wear to roads than cars. A wheel that is twice as heavy than a car causes 16 times as much wear on an asphalt road. And they have 18 wheels instead of 4. That’s over 50 times as much wear on a road from a semi truck driving by compared to a car. They should be paying $5000 a year for registration compared to $100 for a car, and that doesn’t even consider that the semi truck is driven many times more miles per year than a car.
Realize any additional taxes, fees, etc added to semi trucks is most likely just going to get passed on as freight costs and increase the price of goods. So, effectively, you’re going to wind up paying their taxes and fees anyway.
That pretty much completely disregards the point of promoting efficiency. Such as transporting things shorter distances by finding more local suppliers, using railroads instead of on highway trucks, and so forth.
Joe who doesn’t drive and has all of his needs met locally shouldn’t have his taxes used to pay part of the transportation cost of your patio furniture that you bought that was trucked half way across the country to get to your house.
Maybe so, but it is what it is. You want freight moved, you contact carriers. They’ll give you a rate. You pick the cheapest rate. So, if one carrier can do it more efficiently than the other for whatever reason, they get the job. If all of the carriers incur additional costs due to increased taxes, fees, or even higher fuel costs, they all raise their rates.
Are you unaware that your property taxes and sales tax is being spent to maintain roads that are used by semi trucks?
I can’t (maybe others can) correlate the savings in road construction costs vs transport costs in going to lighter weight limits. If we go to a 70k gross weight limit vs an 80k gross weight limit (for example), I don’t know how much less damage that will really do. Would be easy to determine how much freight costs might go up, though, as a percentage of old max vs new.
That is true. In scrap metal, you max out all of them if it’ll fit in the trailer! I imagine that’s not the case with a lot of products, though.