Its the same american goldfish memory that lead us to trump 2.0. People forget how inneffective Obama was at fighting right wing narratives and how inneffective he was at pushing for the policies he campaigned on.
Over time people's memories of Obama have been more nostalgia for the times rather than an honest assessment of his actions. People forget that if he had given half the effort to shutting down guantamano bay that trump has to destroying the department of education we'd be looking at a very different calculus of executive power.
Did I stutter? Obama squandered a huge mandate. I'm not saying he's a bad president like trump or bush, just a mediocre one, who could have done more but never rose to the moment. He also won the dem primary by poisoning the well against clinton which was a component of her 2016 loss.
And look at fucking Carter, spent his post presidency helping people.
Obama spent his whole post president career jacking off and chumming up with a bunch of tv celebrities. He's a mediocre president whose smug charisma presaged trumps smug charisma. Why live in denial?
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.
My preference would be to assign an equivalent single axle load to each vehicle based on make and model or avg trailer load capacity and then scale that linearly with mileage.
The problem is distance driven has a linear effect. The weight has an exponential effect. If you drive a monster truck 10 miles a year and you drive a shitty commuter that weighs 1/5 the amount 3,650 miles a year, the monster truck is gonna damage the road more. If the fee is anything but a 4 power exponent from weight and linear with distance then you're punishing miles driven more than they are contributing to road wear.
In fact the only time distance matters is if its 0 then why even bother licensing a vehicle heavy enough to be worth surcharging? If most people drive their vehicles more than 10 miles a year but less than 10000, you'd want the fees to scale with normal use cases rather than some fringe use cases that encourage people to own vehicles they never use.
Edit:
The way to do it is probably surcharge people for the weight of the vehicle + the weight of the gas the vehicles use in a year.
The fourth power law indicates that a heavier vehicle that is 5x heavier per axle does more damage to the road in one day than one day than a lighter vehicle (1x) would do in a year travelling the same route every day.
So no, its not disproportionate or unfair to fee vehicles by weight. Japanese kei trucks aren't even very big so there's market solutions that exists. Plus there's an argument to be made that if you're only using a truck once a year its more effecient to rent it than buy it.
As for simplicity, you're right no plan is going to easily be both fair and simple. Where I live there's weigh stations along the highway that weigh big trucks and these capture out of state trucks. I'm sure a registration fee can be collected there, too for out of state vehicles, even at a day rate. You can also offer parking fee discounts for registered vehicles.
If you boil down to "why do we care about this" generally the answers ARE easier to come up with.
The obvious thing to do is just base the cost on your insurance and the fee to vehicle registration. But lets be real, the weight of the vehicle has an exponential effect on road wear so they should just charge heavier vehicles a registration premium regardless of fuel type
For those who don't understand the the degree to which this matters, behold, the fourth power law of road stress:
It was shown to be a farce the minute Musk bought twitter and people were following 20 step guides to get their 3rd party apps to work then turning around saying mastodon is too hard.
I have a lot more sympathy for people saying masto doesn't have enough features.
How much of that was subsidized by the US government bailing out AIG?