For anybody looking for numbers on how much of the road budget fuel taxes pay. Numbers are for Minnesota in 2010.

https://www.streets.mn/2014/01/03/roa...t-ii-who-pays/

I look forward to the third installment where he estimates the additional costs/subsidies associated with building/maintaining/surviving our car-first road network.

Good work, and if I may add his numbers for MN state are in line with the proportions I've seen compiled in general.

On thing caught my eye, not really a road cost but rather a transportation cost: in addition to the 34,000 people killed in traffic, there were 55,000 deaths on 2005 where traffic emissions were a contributing factor. That seems like a lot, and we don't know how much the emissions contributed or how many of those would not have died that year except for that contribution, but what if you could put a dollar value on those lives lost? That sounds cold, but it is estimated for various purposes. The US government for example pays out a standard amount to a soldier's family. The EPA came to a $74 million figure for insurance purposes. There are a lot of ways to approach it, and it can be argued endlessly. But some Standford economists arrived at $129,000 for one year. Let's go with that, the value of human life is $129K per year.

The 55,000 people lost an average of 12 years, from actuarial projections. So multiplying it all out, I get $82 Billion as the cost of just the emissions, for just one year, considering only the truncated lifespans. Not even counting medical costs, just the amount lost in life represents 82 billion dollars *. Somehow, that needs to be added in to the true cost of roads, and who is paying that cost - and the other external costs - needs to be included in how the roads are paid for.

Anyway, that's not to detract from the information provided in the original post. I'd just never seen the 55,000 number before and the implications were thought provoking.


*(lessened by whatever proportion that the emissions contributed to the early deaths, but we don't know that part. Even if it's just a fraction of $82 billion, it's still staggering).

If you want to see somebody going about building/maintaining the road/street network check out https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/