Prof Christian Brand, the emeritus professor in transport at Kellogg College,

This guy doesn’t even have a degree.

I really hope you are a troll lobbying for the car industry ... because a rando questioning the credential of an Oxford professor which we can verify with a single DuckDuckGo query reading "Professor Christian Brand is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist, physicist and geographer with over 25 years research experience in academic and consultancy environments." from the page of one of the most prestigious university in the World, for centuries, is really weird.

It doesn't mean though that appeal to authority is right and thus that whatever Prof Christian Brand writes is correct. It's not because he's a professor researching in the area of expertise of the paper that he's right... but his credentials are definitely on point.

Pretty sure they are scientists. It's a broad term as far as I know, and anyways these are (probably) smart people (judging by their titles/jobs) and what they are saying or concluding from data is just common sense: heavier car = more wear and tear on road surfaces.

Anyways: Are you saying it could be EVs too? That's probably likely to be causing some of this too, I think they are generally 500kg heavier than gas cars.

Another reason to add to the "EVS ARENT THE SOLUTION" pile?

forty tonners rarely turn up in your cul-de-sac with shagged roads, but nobody has a front garden because everyone has two crossovers.

Por que no los dos.

Plus the lorries and HGVs have an actual purpose and use, whereas 95% of all SUVs could be replaced by a smaller car with their owner still being able to do what they need to do.

found the butthurt suv owner

They're necessary though (unless we're going to spend a lot of money improving freight train and waterway freight infrastructure) SUV's aren't necessary

It is experimentally measured that road damage is proportional to fourth power of weight on an axle. And most of the trucks have multiple axles that distribute the weight. But SUVs while being lighter only have 2 axles, so the road damage done isn't that much smaller. So I wouldn't be surprised if most of the damage was done by SUVs, since there are much more od them.

Yes, it is about weight. It would generally be good to reduce the amount of heavy vehicles on roads or to let heavy vehicles pay more. There are countries who have issues with more freight traffic being on the road than it should be. (Freight trains have cheaper infrastructure for long-distance stuff)