There are other good reasons for public-private partnerships and toll-financing. A little known but crucial fact is that wear and tear of roads tends to increase to the fourth power when axle loads go up:
The relative damaging effect of an axle is considered to be approximately proportional to the fourth power of the load [1, 30]. However, this has been found to be an under-estimate for flexible pavements on weak subgrades such as peat [3, 23], where damage has been found to be proportional to the sixth power and higher.
In other words, a 40 ton truck can easily cause as much damage to a typical road as 60,000 1 ton cars. The fourth power rule isn’t carved in stone, of course, but it happens to describe damage to roads most accurately. Factors that influence the concrete amount of damage a road suffers are besides subgrades the tires and the paving materials and their specific (di-)stress modes (Link to a 114 kb PDF-File). Distress modes of road pavement include damages such as surface cracking, surface roughness and rutting.
Well, this is a big whoops! I am working the problem, but go read the post, it is good. Look what the report predicted in 2007:
As the article at Reason Foundation points out, freight transportation is increasing even more rapidly than passenger transportation, with a severe capacity crunch not to far in the future. It may therefore be worthwhile to separate cars from trucks along major roadways and trucking firms should be happy to pay for them.
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