This is just not true. This is why I have so much trouble with liberal/leftist thought. It’s no more scientifically sound than conservative fantasies. “Believe science” is a religious cry, and not based on any reality. Check it.

Cars are a rounding error in load-based road wear. Large trucks cause almost all road wear, and it’s not even close.

You see, road damage scales with roughly the fourth power of axle load. Double the weight on an axle and you get ~16x the damage, not 2x.

A passenger car puts maybe ~1 ton on an axle while a fully-loaded semi puts ~8 tons. That ratio to the fourth power is in the thousands. The commonly cited illustration (from the old GAO-style estimate) is that one fully loaded 18-wheeler does the pavement damage of roughly 9,600 cars. In fact, road planners often don’t even account for car wear when building a road — only that of large trucks. So this doof gets their central premise exactly backwards. Cars are not “very destructive to roads.” In load terms they’re nearly irrelevant.

And hilariously it is invoking road-damage savings to justify free public transit. But buses are very heavy vehicles. A loaded city bus does hundreds to thousands of cars’ worth of pavement damage on its own. Thus, the road-wear case for transit only really holds for rail as buses are road-eaters.

In other words, banning every car on the road would not noticeably reduce road wear. But getting rid of all large trucks and all buses would. And those are the facts, not whatever weird degrowther clownery that nonsense is. And facts are all I fucking care about.