Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.
If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.
It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.
The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.
It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice.
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
That number is laughably low compared to value of cargo they move. Really they should get to tech company model. Take 20-30% of value what they transport. Say you got 100 billion of AI servers. 30% of that goes to trucking company when they move it point to point.
If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.
It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit".
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
Buses? Where? In the US they are as rare as unicorns. It depends on location. In third world countries metros, it is best to run electric buses for free and tax cars. It will reduce traffic and avoid hundreds of billions of road expansions if everyone is driving a car.
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
> 8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?
I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.
And pedestrians, cyclist and such pay nothing. We should easily gate all sidewalks and make them pay fair share of cost needed to build that infra. Just have payment terminals before and after each crosswalk allowing them to pay their fair share of use of roads.
They are still free loading on infra they have not paid for. I see no reason not to make them share the cost too especially for the space they need to be dedicated to them.
The local communities paid for that infra. With zoning laws and during the development of subdivision. The cost of land for their lot reflects the additional land cost and and infra developed. They also pay utility connection fee so the city can build plumbing/sewage infra.
Also, homeowners pay 3% property tax (Texas). This pays for everything local, schools, roads, police, parks and a ton of other things.
Homeowners also pay their HOAs, while not as much as property taxes, this covers a ton of things within their subdivisions.
The super rich are free loading on all of this infrastructure.
With trucking CO2 is the least of your problems. The fumes are carcinogenic. Brake and tire dust doesn't help either.
Electric trucks would be a huge improvement on all fronts.
Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.
Wrong on many levels, already refuted by many commentors.
If food needs to be subsidized, subsidize it directly. Already done with food stamps, etc. You can apply here: https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps
If food gets costlier, people will eat less and it will reduce obesity, metabolic syndrome and save trillions of dollars in healthcare costs every year. The poor, who you seem to be so concerned about, can't afford the costliest healthcare on the planet.
Wrong. As food gets costlier, people shift eating habits from healthier but more expensive food to cheaper ultra-processed food. There are similarities elsewhere, like the iron law of prohibition: making opium more difficult to sell shifted the market to heroin, and eventually to fentanyl.
Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then? And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances. Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us, or even everyone via UBI. Why settle on diesel trucks as the thing to subsidize above others?
Or we can have a highly functional train system and not use freight trucks for long haul transportation. Small and medium sized trucks for last mile delivery is significantly less problematic.
> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.
Yeah this feels like what I call the "scientific method for journalists". Step 1: create a hypothesis Step 2: google for evidence supporting that hypothesis Step 3: write an article about how it's definitely happening
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number isn't especially remarkable.
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night. :)
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
I'm sure there's something to this but unless I missed it this story is missing the one piece of data you really want in order to contextualize: how many trucking companies ordinarily go under any given month?
Truckers aren't just rolling around out there for their own enjoyment they're transporting the goods we all use every day, on pretty thin margins at that. I guess if you're trying to indirectly tax the users of trucking then OK.
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
In the the Space Exploration overhaul mod I once played for Factorio, at one stage the game progressed to the point that many/most resources could be converted into matter.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but an intense amount of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
...to move in and sell innovative new products in a healthy, vibrant and mature marketplace? In direct competition with Mack, Freightliner, Kenworth and Peterbilt? Selling products which only get sold if people choose to buy them?
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
And?
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
Move more of it to rail.
As much of it as possible is done by rail, it’s the last mile problem.
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
Let those consumers pay for it then!
What rail? The railroads are at capacity
They are? Is there a chart or a map or a study or something that supports this?
Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
You understand that all business activity in an economy is driven by consumers. Everything is downstream of consumer demand.
Then, subsidize everything for all businesses?
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
I would rather that we subsidize the consumers.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)
Consumer demand can still be distorted.
I said this in another comment:
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.
If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.
It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.
The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.
$30-$40 billion sounds like scrapping by to me. For an entire industry, one of the most important in the country.
The annual revenue of the trucking industry is roughly $900 billion. That puts their net profit margin at about 3-5%.
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice.
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
That number is laughably low compared to value of cargo they move. Really they should get to tech company model. Take 20-30% of value what they transport. Say you got 100 billion of AI servers. 30% of that goes to trucking company when they move it point to point.
If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.
It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit".
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
Buses? Where? In the US they are as rare as unicorns. It depends on location. In third world countries metros, it is best to run electric buses for free and tax cars. It will reduce traffic and avoid hundreds of billions of road expansions if everyone is driving a car.
Anecdotally on my own highway commute, the ratio of public-buses to large trucks is very small, in the range of 1:50 to 1:100.
The point I'd like to highlight is that each category has a very different profile for which roads they use, how often, and at what speeds.
Sounds like a great way to end up with tolls on all the roads. Or no access to the roads at all.
No, you should fight for free roads. How many ways do you want to subsidize the super rich? Why are you fighting for their interests?
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
Or mileage * weight^4 based fees. It would have the added benefit of reducing the amount of gender-affirming trucks on the road.
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
> And that's an understatement
Indeed!
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
> 8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?
I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.
There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.
I don't think this is quite accurate.
If trucks were forced to bear their share of the burden we might see a significant shift in how we transported goods, including more rail.
(Yes, I know rail doesn't work for last mile.)
It does need to be paired with investment in train infrastructure, usually led by governments.
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
And pedestrians, cyclist and such pay nothing. We should easily gate all sidewalks and make them pay fair share of cost needed to build that infra. Just have payment terminals before and after each crosswalk allowing them to pay their fair share of use of roads.
Pressure on the road, and profits, are not similar to those induced by pedestrians and cyclists.
Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the weight of the thing that passes over them.
I hope you were just making a snarky joke as there is effectively no road damage done by pedestrians and cyclists.
They are still free loading on infra they have not paid for. I see no reason not to make them share the cost too especially for the space they need to be dedicated to them.
Pedestrians and cyclists save money by reducing healthcare costs, sick days, aged care etc.
They should get a credit each time they use a road.
My state charges a fee for every new bicycle that is purchased in the state to help cover costs.
The local communities paid for that infra. With zoning laws and during the development of subdivision. The cost of land for their lot reflects the additional land cost and and infra developed. They also pay utility connection fee so the city can build plumbing/sewage infra.
Also, homeowners pay 3% property tax (Texas). This pays for everything local, schools, roads, police, parks and a ton of other things.
Homeowners also pay their HOAs, while not as much as property taxes, this covers a ton of things within their subdivisions.
The super rich are free loading on all of this infrastructure.
Significantly: externalities from co2 emissions. Which is not just money, but lives.
With trucking CO2 is the least of your problems. The fumes are carcinogenic. Brake and tire dust doesn't help either. Electric trucks would be a huge improvement on all fronts.
Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.
Wrong on many levels, already refuted by many commentors.
If food needs to be subsidized, subsidize it directly. Already done with food stamps, etc. You can apply here: https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps
If food gets costlier, people will eat less and it will reduce obesity, metabolic syndrome and save trillions of dollars in healthcare costs every year. The poor, who you seem to be so concerned about, can't afford the costliest healthcare on the planet.
> food gets costlier, people will eat less
Wrong. As food gets costlier, people shift eating habits from healthier but more expensive food to cheaper ultra-processed food. There are similarities elsewhere, like the iron law of prohibition: making opium more difficult to sell shifted the market to heroin, and eventually to fentanyl.
Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then? And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances. Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us, or even everyone via UBI. Why settle on diesel trucks as the thing to subsidize above others?
Or we can have a highly functional train system and not use freight trucks for long haul transportation. Small and medium sized trucks for last mile delivery is significantly less problematic.
> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power. Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable.
Why not use trains for heavy transport?
This is a meaningless stat without comparison. There are nearly 500k trucking companies operating in the US, with ~91% operating 10 trucks or fewer.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
A statistic is propaganda if it is a value without a percentage, or a percentage without a value.
Yeah this feels like what I call the "scientific method for journalists". Step 1: create a hypothesis Step 2: google for evidence supporting that hypothesis Step 3: write an article about how it's definitely happening
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number isn't especially remarkable.
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
--
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-market-pushes-anot... (Early 2026)
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/bulmaks-files-chapter-11-ba... (Late 2025)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/an-unusually-terrible-frei... (Mid 2023)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-trucking-bloodbath-isn... (Mid 2022)
https://www.truckingdive.com/news/trucking-fleet-bankruptcy-... (Early 2021)
https://www.propertycasualty360.com/fcs/2020/01/13/another-o... (Early 2020)
So 16 in 30 days is a rate that, if sustained, trends toward ~3x the high end of your estimate of normal.
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
It would lead 195 per year if it stays at that trend; only 1.3x the high end of "normal".
That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.
> I don't expect "trucking" to fail
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
> Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
The US Congress not declaring a war is the normal thing (for the last many decades).
Congress hasn't issued a declaration of war that was signed by the president since June of 1942.
We've had wars since then.
edit,
Two recent examples from a long list:
The Persian Gulf War was admitted to be as such in April of 1991. https://www.congress.gov/102/statute/STATUTE-105/STATUTE-105...
The Global War on Terror was funded on that name in 2005. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/1268
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night. :)
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
I'm sure there's something to this but unless I missed it this story is missing the one piece of data you really want in order to contextualize: how many trucking companies ordinarily go under any given month?
Truckers aren't just rolling around out there for their own enjoyment they're transporting the goods we all use every day, on pretty thin margins at that. I guess if you're trying to indirectly tax the users of trucking then OK.
Roads are subsided by people - what else would they be subsidised by, aliens?
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
Demand may not be elastic however.
The interstate pneumatic tube network I designed with macaroni in the fifth grade is looking visionary now.
Or trains...
We have freight trains in the US. (I hear a freight train right now as I write this.)
Its not big truck you cant just dump something on it! Its… its a series of….oh my! LOL!!!
In the the Space Exploration overhaul mod I once played for Factorio, at one stage the game progressed to the point that many/most resources could be converted into matter.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but an intense amount of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
Aren't there several orders of magnitude more trucking companies in the US than 16?
Heck, shouldn't that be below the expected bankrupt trucking companies in any given 1-2 month period?
Yes and by a lot
https://www.skool.com/the-logistics-war-room-1319/trucking-b...
I felt this on my last truck shipment. My previous LTL provider suddenly closed and the next cheapest option is more than twice as expensive.
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
Totally unsurprising.
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
MAGA!
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
Good opportunity for oligarchs like Musk to move in.
What?
You win, they win. You lose, they win. It’s a scam.
...to move in and sell innovative new products in a healthy, vibrant and mature marketplace? In direct competition with Mack, Freightliner, Kenworth and Peterbilt? Selling products which only get sold if people choose to buy them?
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Correct, it's a good opportunity.
people really do just say anything to hate on others eh
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
> However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen
Have they? https://robotaxireport.com/data/waymo-vs-tesla-safety-record...
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
They could justify a human in the cab to satisfy existing reflective triangle regulations. Provides cheap publicity to nourish their lobbyists.
I’d see it if:
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
Trucking is a low-margin, high capex business.
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
Yes, to build space based trucking. Because roads are congested, getting permits for new roads is hard.