Two further points

1 Petrol prices in this country are over ten dollars a gallon. No-ones happy about it....but we're starting to think about alternatives.

2. The "true" cost on road transport is not accurately repoerted and never has been....

I remember reading years ago......... ( And dammit!..... Tom is going to insist I go dig this out and I'm not sure I can... this was something rported before the "Web" came into it's own and was suppressed anyway by a conservative government).........in a mainstream UK paper that the governments own research laborotory on roads and traffic had run a year long experiment involving taking several trucks and running them around a route designed to duplicate the typical enviroment a heavy goods vehicle would face in this country.

Now this is Britain... a smaller, more crowded nation then the US so you would have to extrapolate useing your own local knowledge of conditions out there... but what they found was that big trucks caused more then a million pounds sterling damage to the infrastructure............( NOTE questions of "Pollution" were ignored)........ they smashed water pipes and drains under the road... clipped signs, walls etc. negotiatiing tight corners... and so on... at a cost of a million sterling or so which local citizens funded through increased water bills etc to replace damaged pipes, cracked sidewalks etc.

And "Trucks" paid nothing like that in taxes... not even close... they were being subsidised in a hidden fashion by the citizens of this nation.

I would suspect the same to be true in the US.