Based on your math, you’d be charging almost $2 million per year per truck. With that much money, you’d be building an entire nations worth of brand new infrastructure several times over each year.

My point is that long haul is a very small minority of long-distance freight. Anything that can fly, does. Anything else will go on a train if a route exists (this is where rail expansion would help, but there are other problems with that we won’t address). The only freight that travels long-distance is truckloads that can’t fly (hazardous goods that are dangerous to put on a plane, or stuff like certain foods that could be damaged by the pressure changes in flight) AND doesn’t have a good train route to take. My cross-country routes were always stuff like fresh produce or other foods that would be damaged by the pressure. Everything else would travel a few states, but never from one coast to the other.

And you can’t put 3 full pallets on a bike, you’ll always need trucks to some extent.

Even if we put 100% of freight on trains, and expand the existing rail network 10x, the need for trucking infrastructure would not decrease by any significant amount. Trains can’t stop at every single business that needs freight, and trucks are still needed to get that freight from the railport to its destination (this is called “last mile” freight, but it can be up to a few hundred miles depending on where the nearest logistics hub is compared to the destination).

By the way, we already use trains significantly. Look up the intermodal logistics network. The general concept is smaller trucks pick up freight from different businesses, consolidate it in a single warehouse, then the freight gets put on full size trucks to move to the nearest railport and the trailer is loaded on a train which carries it as far as possible, then the reverse happens at the other end. The vast majority of freight movement uses this method.

Trucks already pay a lot more in tax and regulatory expenses. In my state, annual car registration is $30-ish. Annual registration for a full-sized 18-wheeler is $1350 for the truck and $30-300 for each trailer. They also have to pay annual fees at the federal level which can be $600+/year, and an additional fuel tax on top of the existing state sales tax on diesel which I don’t know the rate of right now. All of that applies to every single power unit and trailer in a fleet.

Trucks should be taxed much higher than cars, but too many people don’t know or just don’t care that this is already the case, and it has been this way since the 1940s.

I’m guessing you don’t actually pay attention to the tax law, then. Annual vehicle registration (aka, a vehicle ownership tax) is more expensive as the weight on the vehicle goes up. Vehicles over a certain weight limit require more complex and strict drivers license classes (granted, class B starts at 26,001 lbs which is way higher than even today’s heaviest consumer cars), and any vehicle used for work has higher insurance and regulatory costs, regardless of the size.

Buying an F350 (a truck that really only has a place in very specific situations anyway) requires so much extra work and almost always requires a class B license because of the kind of work being done with it. People who choose to get something like that because of small-dick syndrome are idiots. And that’s coming from a person who used to drive 18-wheelers and still has a compact SUV as my daily driver.