Hey this is neat! I'm going to give this a go later.
Dave
joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
I didn't realise the history! That's really important context. I'm a big fan of coastal shipping because it reduces transport emissions, but the resilience factor is helpful too!
Personally i’d go back to the future a bit and look at reverting the 2014 changes to reduce weight and thus damage.
There's a really key point here. Heavier trucks cause more damage, but the exponential increase is based on axle weight. If you spread the load out over more axles (keeping the axle weights the same as a smaller truck), then you no longer get the exponential increase in damage and are now in additive damage. Now obviously these trucks cause more damage than one truck (the same per axle, but more axles), but they also move the freight with a smaller number of trucks since each is carrying more.
There are other factors at play too (like the heavier trucks do need roads (bridges) capable of carrying all that weight), but I don't think allowing the larger freight trucks is generally as big of a cause of massive damage as it gets blamed for. I think it's reduced freight costs (one driver can carry more) which increases demand, and there are also other reasons I suspect freight has increased a lot, causing more road damage.
I also want to add that an under 3,500kg vehicle with two axles pays $76 per 1000km. Two axles up to 6,000kg pays $80, so you can already see something isn't right (shouldn't they be paying almost twice as much at a minimum, but as it's double the weight across the same number of axles then 4 times as much). When you get up to larger vehicles things get super complicated and I'm out of my league 😆
Another thing here is weather. Weather causes a lot of road damage, more in some parts of the country than others. I'd guess it's probably possible to estimate what proportion of road damage is caused by weather, if you had access to the right stats. Is it fair to spread this out across RUC bands by weight (heavier vehicles pay for more of the weather damage) or should it be per vehicle? I'm just rambling now, but my point is it's probably not easy to put an exact number on how much of a subsidy trucks get, since a lot of the spread (like who pays for weather damage) is arbitrary. I think it's probably fair to say heavier vehicles are getting more use of the road and so perhaps it's ok for them to pay a larger share of the weather, etc, costs. Which leads me to your next point.
I would also start providing a similar amount of subsidy to coastal shipping as road freight gets and build the coastal network back up. I’m a huge fan of rail freight, and would like to see it used more as well but most of the existing infrastructure around that is ok for now.
A large amount of freight is between main centres. Imagine if you could throw a rail hub near Auckland and one near Wellington and then use container trucks to get things where they need to go. Easy loading and unloading of trains, no traffic, no dealing with driver rest breaks etc making stuff late because all the trips would be short and easy to schedule a different driver for. If you put some thought into it you could have it working really well. You could work you way to putting heavy electric capability into the line.
Coastal shipping is a great option too, and we already have all the infrastructure for it.
If we can reduce the speed & weight of trucks, plus the amount of them and the distance travelled then in theory (to a pleb) our roads aren’t as expensive to build, and don’t suffer as much pot-hole damage so the maintenance costs are reduced.
I think reducing the amount of freight going by road is the important bit here. It does cost more to build roads that can take the heavier trucks, but I don't think we will stop building such roads even if we reduced the weights allowed.
All in all, this is a long rambly comment to say, other than some nit picky bits, I agree with you and it would be great if you could get this going for us thanks 😋
The road wear and tear problem seems to be solvable through RUC. You'd probably destroy the transport system doing it overnight. Perhaps it would be a good start to calculate accurate costs and set the RUC rates at those actual cost rates, then apply a discount to get close to current rates. This makes it more visible, and over time you can reduce the discount while also working on building alternate infrastructure.
Multiple Firefox windows? I'm not that civilised, I just have 100+ tabs in the one window.
I like to have a 50GB+ swap file. Though Fedora is a bit weird with swap files as by default it's stored in RAM (Yes, extra space for RAM is stored in RAM. I... admit I don't understand the detail).
I use a shit load of RAM on Linux. You guys clearly have amateur numbers when it comes to how many applications you have open at once.
Yeah, I also see in the comments some disapproval at the freight industry not wanting to pay, claiming they get the benefits.
I disagree with that assessment. The freight companies don't get the benefit of shorter routes, what they get is competition forcing prices down on those routes because costs have dropped. The economic benefits aren't to the freight companies, it is a wider economic benefit of cheaper freight and more efficient transfer of freight that is spread across many companies and individuals. Hence why it doesn't make sense for freight companies to pay for, but does make sense for a government to invest in.
When I was using it Searx was a whole pile of tinkering 😆. I think it probably runs just fine without the tinkering, but then you want to stop with all the pinterest results so you try to work out how to filter them out. Then you learn about plugins and so on.
IIRC though, if you're familiar with docker then it was pretty straightforward to spin up an instance.
I don't have strong opinions, but I have traveled through some Canadian towns up through the Rockies, and I think if there was a big 24/7 McDonald's at the entrance to Banff it would have given the place a completely different feel. So I can understand why 30% of residents may have signed a petition to stop this.
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I'm curious to hear views from others on this. This article claims both that medical users are careful not to drive under the influence, then later claims they may drive under the influence of something else so as to avoid being caught.
Personally 50k a year seems like such a low number it's barely a pilot (there were 3 million breath tests in 2023).