Now do literally any pickup truck, or compare sedan to sedan instead of sedan to compact - a category that didn't really exist in America ~65 years ago.
Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.
We should also ease a lot of regulation from states regarding minimum road width, minimum parking spot sizes, minimum height of parking garages, minimum number of parking spots for residential and commercial development. Much of this problem stems from bad regulation. (Developers generally don't want to have all this unproductive space in their buildings, but are forced to by local and state governments.)
>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.
This came up in another thread and while it's sort-of true, it's not really. Passenger vehicles of ANY size do almost no damage to a road in comparison to semi-trucks and delivery trucks. A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road. The average semi vs. that same 3/4-ton pickup is a 2500x increase in damage to the road on the low end (some studies claim as high as 10,000x).
Unless you're planning on eliminating the trucking industry, shrinking cars isn't reducing the wear on our roads in any meaningful way.
This should be obvious to anyone with eyes too. Go look at a neighborhood with no or low through traffic and extremely old roads are in good condition. Meanwhile a nearby through-fare, unless constantly repaired and patched, will be falling apart.
> A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road.
Your source states that relative road damage between two vehicles is the forth power of the ratio of their weights.
The base curb weight of a Ford F-150 is in the vicinity of 4,600lbs. The base curbs weight of a Toyota Camry is in the vicinity of 3,500lbs. So the damage ratio is (46/35)^4 = ~3. The Toyota Camry used to be a small car, but it isn't anymore. The base curb weight of a Ford Fiesta is in the vicinity of 2,500lbs. So the damage ratio between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Fiesta is (35/25)^4 = ~3.8, and between a Ford F-150 and a Ford Fiesta is (46/25)^4 = ~11.5. So a Toyota Camry, being somewhat of a behemoth, should be paying on the order of 3.8x the amount of road tax as a Ford Fiesta.
Road damage goes up at the 4th power of the axle weight. It would be simpler to just make commercial trucks pay the entirety of road taxes. Easy to collect, and it would spread out the cost to everyone who benefits from commercial trucking (i.e. you really do want roads even if you don't own a car).
But on many city streets a very large percentage of heavy vehicles are... public buses. Not sure it makes sense to shift the cost for road repair to the public transit agency.
In some states it is. The total price for registering a car in Colorado takes the weight of the vehicle into account (along with the price and the age).
I remember having a minor panic when registering my car at the DMV and hearing the person in front of me paying well over $1000 for the year. Turns out they were registering a brand-new, very large (and heavy) pickup truck.
I think you want both to be included, but yeah something like SURCHARGE = ((WEIGHT-2500)/1000 + (VALUE-30000)/10000) * CONSTANT. Maybe even make it exponential to discourage upper-middle class conspicuous consumption (think G-classes) since it'll cost them $20k to register a $200k, 5klb vehicle. In the US we actually give (federal) fuckin tax breaks (sec 179) on beastly luxo-trucks to SMBs, that needs to be offset by massive reg increases too.
I would think the tax on the value of the car would be better handled by taxing gas much more heavily. It seems to me that all of the very expensive cars have terrible mileage. If we had a good carbon tax, it should do a good job of taxing what we really want to be taxed, which happens to coincide well with luxury vehicles.
Passenger vehicles, no matter how large and numerous, are a tiny part of road wear compared to heavy trucks. If you want to price road use by what it costs to maintain them, tax the heavy trucks.
If you want to disincentivize SUV bloat, make narrower Lanes and more traffic calming features.
>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.
It is in most states, the problem is the cost difference is negligible.
In Ireland road tax (paid annually) are based on engine capacity for (pre 2008 cars) and CO2 emissions for everything after that. (Engine size is a ok proxy for vehicle size)
That's unfair. If one person drives 1000 km annually in a big SUV and another person drives 100000 km annually in a small and efficient hybrid sedan, then obviously the latter emits more CO2. And if hypothetically they walked the same distance they would likely emit even more CO2 (assuming they eat mostly western-style heavily processed food), but would obviously pay no tax at all. I believe a better system is to include the CO2 tax in the fuel/food price.
Despite being a pretty big difference percentage-wise (the heaviest vehicles pay more than 5x the lightest vehicles!), not sure it’s enough of a difference in absolute dollars to really influence purchasing decisions though.
In the UK at least, Road Tax has no relation at all to the cost of repairing roads and is just treated as (yet another) tax.
And as a general point, any tax that is intended to encourage a behaviour should be revenue-neutral i.e. if you raise taxes for large cars, lower than for small cars so that the total tax take to government is the same. Otherwise it just becomes one more way for the government to ratchet up the amount of money they take from their citizens.
> Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.
Probably the only thing New York State 'gets right' from a regulatory perspective: register a Lotus Elise? It's cheaper than an F-250
Minimum road width tends to be set for use by emergency vehicles. Can't really reduce those unless you want to mandate smaller emergency vehicles. Kei-class fire trucks exist, but don't seem popular.
While European roads are far smaller than American roads their fire engines are still based on large trucks and only about 3/4 the size of US ones. Look at the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_engine
I did read of one town in the UK that bought a Kei-class truck but it was an unusual situation.
Unfortunately most EVs are way heavier and cause more wear on roads, so we'd be paying an even higher green tax to reduce emissions and fossil fuel usage.
I have to agree with OP, taxes should be based on weight. If you EV causes 10x the wear that a ICE car then you pay 10x the taxes. If the goal is fossil fuel usage, we cannot ignore the fact that pouring tar and repairing roads is not horrible as well.
If the goal is to encourage usage, then just subsidize it, but eventually it all comes down to wear and taxes, you cannot ignore a car that weights 10x as much as a normal car.
There are ways to make the road stronger if the government really cares about such things. But they don't it ends up being yearly cost = total upfront cost / average life span which in there mind is cheaper than a bigger upfront cost that lasts longer.
Heavy EVs cause more tire wear. I've seen articles claiming that particulate pollution from tires on EVs is a problem. I can think of a few other reasons to want lighter EVs. But you need a really heavy vehicle to be the dominant cause of roads wearing out.
Sounds great! I’m glad my family and our disabled daughter will have to pay more because our wheelchair accessible vehicle is so heavy. I really appreciate your opinion here.
After all, my wife is being very selfish to want to get a terrible gigantic minivan so my four year old can visit with friends and so my wife can transport her without literally popping a hernia (has happened once already!) to move our daughter in and out of the wheelchair on a regular basis.
Maybe I’ll encourage her to get a basket to transport our kid on our backs to get around in a convenient world where we don’t have parking spaces, or perhaps we can have a top unloading vehicle to get her out since the minimum width has been reduced when a handicap spot isn’t available (which considering how many elderly people there are is quite often when we go shopping).
I’m glad developers are forced to make the USA handicap accessible, and would encourage you to consider the knock on effects of the less advantaged when heavy handed legislation is passed to ban “wasteful” vehicles. Minivans and SUVs being mass produced and thus relatively affordable (although still quite expensive) are a ticket for people like my daughter to be able to even leave their houses on a regular basis.
Wouldn't it be even better if people who have a legitimate need, like you, could get the vehicle and associated taxes subsidised or even free, while people who don't need it do pay more for their choice?
(This was the case for a relative of mine in the UK who got a car paid for by her local council because of her husband's disabilities; organised by the same department/funding as pays for caters for him.)
You have a perfectly legitimate reason for using a large car, and you should advocate for support. Laws can be designed to discourage things bad for society, while not further punishing the disadvantaged. I realize this doesn't always happen the right way, but using that as a blanket reason for not even trying the reduce amount of tanks off the road also doesn't seem reasonable.
Sure, all those trucks, pickups, vans out there are all for disabled people and of course it is totally unthinkable that disabled people could get exceptions. Sorry, your comment actually makes me want to question if you really have a disabled child.
Reduce the number of parking spaces by half for every store and make 10% disabled parking only, 2 disabled parkings minimum and you would be fine. Give a 50% rebate on car tax for cars for disabled people and you should be fine overall.
Which argues that because larger cars are more likely to injure/kill someone in the event of a crash, buying a larger car makes you morally culpable for all such harms.
I hate the mentality of "bigger car is safer for me and my family". It is safer because you will have more mass and in the event of a collision likely do more damage to the other vehicle. It is a mass/kinetic force arms race when people are using that as a reason for vehicle purchase. Similar logic can be applied to why many US citizens buy guns.
People in this thread almost make it sound like people don't want SUVs, its a decision being forced on them by others.
A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things. They prefer the more upright seating (higher h-point). They prefer the higher entry/exit point. They feel they need all the cargo space. Lots of people which I agree would probably be just as well served by a sedan or a hatchback just don't care for those car styles these days. Even if the sedan was a few grand less than the SUV (they often were when they were still sold), these people probably still go for the SUV if they could afford it. People didn't generally like them in the past because 1) modern SUVs are kind of a new-ish concept which only really started in the 90s where they absolutely exploded in popularity 2) those 90s body-on-frame SUVs drove like trucks while modern unibody crossovers drive more like cars and 3) it wasn't until about the 2000s that car makers started actually trying to make these vehicles appealing to average drivers as opposed to just work vehicles.
These kinds of people are incredibly common from my experiences.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree things like the chicken tax and CAFE requirements drove sedans and "light trucks" closer to the same price points, but generally speaking a ton of consumers want it this way.
It is also fair to hate the player, as often they are making the decisions consciously. They are supporting the game, which would die if there was no demand. Same as the meat industry for example. It's too easy to always put the fault on some higher instance.
The game can't continue if there isn't a steady supply of new players. As a pedestrian, involuntary non-cyclist, and someone who prefers normal vehicles, your excuse is paper thin.
Some people also actually need a large car. If you have a 6 person household, the only thing everyone will fit in is an SUV, a minivan, or a full size van.
> Morally culpable, but also defensible since you’re defending yourself from others in large cars. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
This might be morally defensible for players making equal trades between protection for themselves and protection for others, but at some point this is clearly no longer the case. For example, most people would agree that killing 1000 people to save your own life is bad. If players aren't even bothering with this calculating the tradeoff between more protection for themselves and less protection for others -- and I think most people who protect themselves with large cars have not done this calculation -- then yes, it's fine to cast aspersions.
According to this post from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety [1] (which I think is reliable?), going from a 2023 Prius (~88 square feet) to a 2023 Toyota Sequoia (~116 square feet) reduces car driver deaths from 47 per million vehicle years to 26. This seems, uh, fairly low down on the list of interventions your median SUV-driver could take to reduce their mortality, and it's made at a cost to other people, since "light trucks" (like SUVs, trucks, and vans) increase pedestrian fatalities by somewhere north of 50% [2, third page].
At some point, you're just being lazy, which you have a right to do, but I don't think it's particularly defensible.
Actually the safest cars are full size saloons. Trucks and SUVs rollover in accidents so your head changes from going straight ahead at 60mph to tumbling at 60mph breaking your neck.
The question for me is, what is safer for my family? A huge proportion of the cars I see day to day are full-size SUVs like Tahoes, Yukons, and that QX80 monstrosity from Infiniti. There's a decent chance if I'm involved in an accident it will be with one of those cars.
You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
If you want to ban vehicles above a certain weight or a certain displacement, fine let's talk about that. But until that happens I'm not going to intentionally make my kids less safe to reduce some wishy-washy definition of my "moral culpability" for accidents and deaths I've played no part in.
These cars are more likely to kill your children by running over them as they cross the street. You are more likely to kill your neighbor's kids by running over them because you don't have visibility 6+ feet in front of you. This isn't some sort of wish-washy definition. These are hard to swallow facts.
It's The Onion, so you don't need to read the article to get the point. Its title is "Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident."
You'll have to look at individual crash safety ratings; but, if memory serves me, large SUVs have worse ratings than smaller cars, in general. That could have changed or I could be wrong, though.
Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.
> You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.
> You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
I don't mean to be snarky, but most moral dilemmas boil down to some trade off between what is best for yourself and whats best for society. In an evolutionary sense, our monkey brains see our children as an extension of our self. It seems to fit well.
You might decide that trade off is well worth it, which is a fair conclusion, but you can't deny that moral calculus is there to some degree.
Intentionally putting others in danger is immoral to many. But morality is subjective. Putting the whole community at net negative risk so you can squeak out personal advantage is perfectly acceptable behavior to some.
Don't SUV have less safety features than normal cars? They are classified as light trucks to avoid safety regulations. Does the increased mass make up less safe vehicle?
Do you have any actual safety numbers? Or are you just going on your gut instinct of "bigger must be better just because"? There was a time when those big SUV vehicles were more likely to kill your family than a mini-van or sedan because the high center of gravity + no rollbar (and other such protection) made it both more likely to roll and more devastating when it did so.
Driving a car makes you more likely to kill or injure somebody than walking or staying home. Is it immoral for anybody to drive a car at all?
We all take on culpability for certain harms to others. It’s just a question of what as a society we are willing to accept.
I don’t think this is an issue of society “overlooking” the morality of this specifically. It’s just that people have a lot of problems to worry about, and the crash safety of large vehicles isn’t high on the list.
It's more of a creeping normality [0] problem. Some cars get larger and people get accustomed to it, so it's hard to notice. Someone needs to point it out and from the reaction to this post, it seems that people are interested once it's pointed out to them.
I don't have a log in to read the full paper, but from your description and the preview, I can't help but think that this is just a weird extension of the trolley problem.
You're taking an action that means you're more likely to harm someone else, but that same action also means the people in your car are less likely to be harmed.
Its also subconscious bias of legislators on display, because they typically knock around in said big vehicles. Just look at presidential vehicles or ministerial vehicles, or royal vehicles.
I'd love to see a big wig, knocking around in a Peugeot 106, or mini with a cavalcade. Even better if they can drive it themselves!
Do you think car manufacturers would spend more time making smaller lightweight bullet proof crash proof cars, like you see in Formula 1? Something less likely to kill but bounce its occupants around when it crashes and do less harm, like zorbing.
Nothing against cars per se, I love them, but it would be nice to see more Toyota Yaris GRX's or Polo GTI's which are pocket rockets but with better crash protection. Problem is people now haul around so much guff in their vehicles, they need these bigger vehicles.
Blame it on the complicated consumer based form of capitalism we live in today.
I'd think injuring/killing someone because you hit them would make you morally culpable. The guy driving a semi and never getting in an accident should be able to sleep fine at night.
We are likely reaching a point where it is becoming absurd, to have a huge, 4,000lbs vehicle carrying one person most of the time. Feels like an arm escalation, I need a bigger and heavier vehicle so I feel safer.
Not sure what is the best way to bring some sense to this trend. Regulation could put some boundaries I guess. Clearly there is little incentives for car manufacturers to go small & light.
If that trend keeps going, I could see some cities banning cars in some streets (e.g. only bikes or pedestrians) as having foot traffic close to car traffic would become too dangerous.
I'm from Spain and during the last couple of decades cities have experimented a lot with urban planning, including turning streets into one way with broader sidewalks, or turning them pedestrian only.
Anecdotally I can say that every street turned pedestrian has been wildly popular, massively revitalizing the area.
A busy road in the downtown area of my city has been under construction for a while recently. It's entirely cut down on car traffic because all the cars are diverted, and what's really cool to see is there's been a significant bump in pedestrians in the area since the cars have left. When the construction hours end, the street is silent and clear and people are crossing between neighborhoods without any difficulty. Of course, because I live in the US, this is only temporary and once the road is "fixed", they'll allow the loud and dangerous cars to take it over once again. I do have some hope with lots of recent news around this topic that younger generations will fight to remove cars in unnecessary corridors.
I'm not meaning to take away from what you are saying, but your blocks are some of the very best pedestrian designed and sized the world.
American blocks are by and large, boring, stupid and hugely oversized. Making them pedestrian only would solve nothing when most towns in america are covered it "Stroads"
As I have come to learn, Miata is always the answer clocking in at a measly 2,400lb. The katerham advice is good if you're willing to go kit car though.
As an M240 owner, it amazes me how much it weighs. It’s such a small car, and so lively and well handling.
My ‘05 Mustang weighs less, and if it wasn’t for the handling changes I made to it (sway bars, coil-overs, control arms, and more), the BMW would still handle better.
It's gotten to the point where I feel like I'm being greedy driving my little '09 eco hatchback instead of my motorcycle and how much weight a subsequent fuel is being carried around and burnt to move me through the town on my way to work. 2800lbs vs 366lbs
What is mind blowing to me is how little weight impacts the fuel efficiency in my situation. I get ~58 MPG on my 385lb bike and ~55-60 MPG in my 3,500lb Prius prime. Obviously the regen helps, but still it is crazy how efficient the Prius is.
> to have a huge, 4,000lbs vehicle carrying one person most of the time.
For American EV trucks, you can go ahead and double that weight. The 2022 EV Hummer has a 9,063 lbs curb weight. Just imagine the toll that takes on our roads. Absolutely disgusting, and now imagine what happens when one of those T-bones a Corolla. Instant death becomes the best outcome for the person driving the Corolla.
Here's a depressing thought: I'm from the Netherlands. We're dense and have small roads and parking spots. So monster trucks like these are impractical, expensive to own (road tax based on weight) and expensive to drive due to the poor mileage and high gas prices.
None of these things seems to matter. I'm in my 40s and can't remember seeing a single car like this in my entire life until about 5 years ago. Now I very regularly see them, they're on the rise.
Some people just want to have a huge fucking truck for no apparent rational or adult reason. And it seems that as they make an appearance, it inspires others.
It fits in a generic pattern I'm seeing around me. People with disposable wealth will spent it on ridiculous life "upgrades" that make no rational sense. I'm seeing giant houses being built whilst there's 1-2 people living in it, and most of the day nobody at all. I'm talking about homes with so much space that you don't know what to do with it. Just because you can.
In these times of energy transition and ultra high energy prices, I see neighbors investing in an outdoor sauna.
It's not that I want to police what people can or cannot spent their money on, I'm just saying it's way out of bounds. Beyond the reasonable. Excessive resource usage with no immediate purpose by any stretch of the imagination.
But I'll also come to terms with the idea that perhaps I'm not that much better. My guilty pleasure is annual very remote travel, which as we know is a massive contributor to CO2 output.
If taxation or discouragement does not have the desired effect and banning is difficult if not unwanted, my conclusion is that behavioral change is not to be expected much from.
Well this, plus also cities that are designed for cars first.
I would love to see more cities design for people/pedestrians first, with denser multi-zone areas. I wish more people could walk to a neighborhood grocery, bar, library, etc.
It seems to me there is a chicken and egg problem with (non-car) infrastructure and the demand for that infrastructure. Nobody wants to get on a train full of homeless people or a bus that's always late or a sidewalk that has no shade. There is little incentive for city leaders and planners to invest in things that nobody uses.
So many issues in society can be quickly, intuitively, and uncontroversially identified as a “tragedy of the commons” situation. But it’s a hard sell to give up a personal advantage for a collective betterment.
I think in this case it's more likely that the US government wanted to have light trucks be fairly accessible to individuals that needed them, and somehow it became a cultural icon to have a pick-up truck that doesn't ever pick anything up. Now we're here and it's a hot-button cultural issue proxied as "the left is trying to change my lifestyle, not over my dead body."
I don't blame the government for not seeing a need to regulate this decades ago. Really, who in their right mind would want such a difficult to park, more expensive, less economic vehicle if they didn't need it, right?
> somehow it became a cultural icon to have a pick-up truck that doesn't ever pick anything up
This is actually the struggle I'm going through right now. I rarely need to cart around something large, but when I do it's something large. Like a few full sheets of plywood over 40 miles. I really don't want a pickup for the other 98% of the time, but there isn't really a viable option for renting a pickup for a few hours.
Tax vehicles by weight, regardless of powertrain. Maybe charge extra for ICE. Offer tax rebates for professionals who can justify using a large vehicle for at least 120 days in the year.
Professionals using a larger vehicle for work should already be getting a tax break on the entire vehicle. If they don't, it sounds like it's just a personal vehicle.
Charge extra for EV, they shouldn't be excluded either. A Telsa plaid weighs in at nearly 5000 lbs. In the US there are tax benefits to having a car weighing over 6000 lbs like giant SUV's.
I think you miss the key ingredient, they are tragedy of the commons where a company profits from amplifying the game-theory of the tragedy.
That is a HUGE difference. In one everyone is playing equally and if recognized can be de-escalated. In the other, there is a major monied player with power attempting to enshrine the tragedy into society.
I honestly feel like my small car is really the advantage. It's so much more nimble that I can easily evade road hazards and stop exceptionally quickly.
It would fare worse in a collision, but maybe I'm also less likely to get caught in one because my car isn't so enormous.
Not being able to see for 12 feet in front of your vehicle should be illegal. The only reason trucks are allowed to have that is because they are pegged as farm equipment. Treat them as farm equipment. Special license to drive if visibility is impacted, special taxation for large vehicle without a business use case, you name it.
Readit News
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/paris-charge-s...
We should also ease a lot of regulation from states regarding minimum road width, minimum parking spot sizes, minimum height of parking garages, minimum number of parking spots for residential and commercial development. Much of this problem stems from bad regulation. (Developers generally don't want to have all this unproductive space in their buildings, but are forced to by local and state governments.)
This came up in another thread and while it's sort-of true, it's not really. Passenger vehicles of ANY size do almost no damage to a road in comparison to semi-trucks and delivery trucks. A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road. The average semi vs. that same 3/4-ton pickup is a 2500x increase in damage to the road on the low end (some studies claim as high as 10,000x).
Unless you're planning on eliminating the trucking industry, shrinking cars isn't reducing the wear on our roads in any meaningful way.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
Your source states that relative road damage between two vehicles is the forth power of the ratio of their weights.
The base curb weight of a Ford F-150 is in the vicinity of 4,600lbs. The base curbs weight of a Toyota Camry is in the vicinity of 3,500lbs. So the damage ratio is (46/35)^4 = ~3. The Toyota Camry used to be a small car, but it isn't anymore. The base curb weight of a Ford Fiesta is in the vicinity of 2,500lbs. So the damage ratio between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Fiesta is (35/25)^4 = ~3.8, and between a Ford F-150 and a Ford Fiesta is (46/25)^4 = ~11.5. So a Toyota Camry, being somewhat of a behemoth, should be paying on the order of 3.8x the amount of road tax as a Ford Fiesta.
I remember having a minor panic when registering my car at the DMV and hearing the person in front of me paying well over $1000 for the year. Turns out they were registering a brand-new, very large (and heavy) pickup truck.
If you want to disincentivize SUV bloat, make narrower Lanes and more traffic calming features.
It is in most states, the problem is the cost difference is negligible.
Example fee https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-...
I have never heard of car registration by value
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/41c9cc-motor-tax-rates/#mo...
Despite being a pretty big difference percentage-wise (the heaviest vehicles pay more than 5x the lightest vehicles!), not sure it’s enough of a difference in absolute dollars to really influence purchasing decisions though.
And as a general point, any tax that is intended to encourage a behaviour should be revenue-neutral i.e. if you raise taxes for large cars, lower than for small cars so that the total tax take to government is the same. Otherwise it just becomes one more way for the government to ratchet up the amount of money they take from their citizens.
It’s the snappily titled Vehicle Excise Duty, VED.
That was changed in 1937 to stop drivers assuming it gave them more right to use the road than anyone else.
The roads here were not built for cars, cars just use them.
Probably the only thing New York State 'gets right' from a regulatory perspective: register a Lotus Elise? It's cheaper than an F-250
I did read of one town in the UK that bought a Kei-class truck but it was an unusual situation.
The standard in the UK seems to be a 3.7m (12ft) wide road to access buildings over 11m high. https://www.ukfrs.com/guidance/search/vehicle-access
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If the goal is to encourage usage, then just subsidize it, but eventually it all comes down to wear and taxes, you cannot ignore a car that weights 10x as much as a normal car.
There are ways to make the road stronger if the government really cares about such things. But they don't it ends up being yearly cost = total upfront cost / average life span which in there mind is cheaper than a bigger upfront cost that lasts longer.
And all that extra weight is in the battery. Over time, batteries will shrink to the point where EVs are lighter on average.
Nothing unfortunate about it at all. Why shouldn't an EV Hummer or Ford Lightning pay up for the weight on the road?
After all, my wife is being very selfish to want to get a terrible gigantic minivan so my four year old can visit with friends and so my wife can transport her without literally popping a hernia (has happened once already!) to move our daughter in and out of the wheelchair on a regular basis.
Maybe I’ll encourage her to get a basket to transport our kid on our backs to get around in a convenient world where we don’t have parking spaces, or perhaps we can have a top unloading vehicle to get her out since the minimum width has been reduced when a handicap spot isn’t available (which considering how many elderly people there are is quite often when we go shopping).
I’m glad developers are forced to make the USA handicap accessible, and would encourage you to consider the knock on effects of the less advantaged when heavy handed legislation is passed to ban “wasteful” vehicles. Minivans and SUVs being mass produced and thus relatively affordable (although still quite expensive) are a ticket for people like my daughter to be able to even leave their houses on a regular basis.
(This was the case for a relative of mine in the UK who got a car paid for by her local council because of her husband's disabilities; organised by the same department/funding as pays for caters for him.)
Reduce the number of parking spaces by half for every store and make 10% disabled parking only, 2 disabled parkings minimum and you would be fine. Give a 50% rebate on car tax for cars for disabled people and you should be fine overall.
Which argues that because larger cars are more likely to injure/kill someone in the event of a crash, buying a larger car makes you morally culpable for all such harms.
Discussed more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35082315
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Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. The real moral culpability is in the people that created and support the policies enabling the SUV Arma race.
A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things. They prefer the more upright seating (higher h-point). They prefer the higher entry/exit point. They feel they need all the cargo space. Lots of people which I agree would probably be just as well served by a sedan or a hatchback just don't care for those car styles these days. Even if the sedan was a few grand less than the SUV (they often were when they were still sold), these people probably still go for the SUV if they could afford it. People didn't generally like them in the past because 1) modern SUVs are kind of a new-ish concept which only really started in the 90s where they absolutely exploded in popularity 2) those 90s body-on-frame SUVs drove like trucks while modern unibody crossovers drive more like cars and 3) it wasn't until about the 2000s that car makers started actually trying to make these vehicles appealing to average drivers as opposed to just work vehicles.
These kinds of people are incredibly common from my experiences.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree things like the chicken tax and CAFE requirements drove sedans and "light trucks" closer to the same price points, but generally speaking a ton of consumers want it this way.
This might be morally defensible for players making equal trades between protection for themselves and protection for others, but at some point this is clearly no longer the case. For example, most people would agree that killing 1000 people to save your own life is bad. If players aren't even bothering with this calculating the tradeoff between more protection for themselves and less protection for others -- and I think most people who protect themselves with large cars have not done this calculation -- then yes, it's fine to cast aspersions.
According to this post from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety [1] (which I think is reliable?), going from a 2023 Prius (~88 square feet) to a 2023 Toyota Sequoia (~116 square feet) reduces car driver deaths from 47 per million vehicle years to 26. This seems, uh, fairly low down on the list of interventions your median SUV-driver could take to reduce their mortality, and it's made at a cost to other people, since "light trucks" (like SUVs, trucks, and vans) increase pedestrian fatalities by somewhere north of 50% [2, third page].
At some point, you're just being lazy, which you have a right to do, but I don't think it's particularly defensible.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight
[2] https://trforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/138.pdf
You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
If you want to ban vehicles above a certain weight or a certain displacement, fine let's talk about that. But until that happens I'm not going to intentionally make my kids less safe to reduce some wishy-washy definition of my "moral culpability" for accidents and deaths I've played no part in.
It's The Onion, so you don't need to read the article to get the point. Its title is "Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident."
Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.
You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.
I don't mean to be snarky, but most moral dilemmas boil down to some trade off between what is best for yourself and whats best for society. In an evolutionary sense, our monkey brains see our children as an extension of our self. It seems to fit well.
You might decide that trade off is well worth it, which is a fair conclusion, but you can't deny that moral calculus is there to some degree.
This can all be priced in. If bigger vehicles are more dangerous, we could make auto insurance premiums a function of weight (and other criteria).
picking up and moving to a location on earth which doesn't require you to own a car to live is the safest bet
it's possible; i'm one (of many many millions around me)
We all take on culpability for certain harms to others. It’s just a question of what as a society we are willing to accept.
I don’t think this is an issue of society “overlooking” the morality of this specifically. It’s just that people have a lot of problems to worry about, and the crash safety of large vehicles isn’t high on the list.
If you ranked the harms you are likely to cause, driving a car would be very near the top of the list.
You are exhibiting an aspect of the myopia the article is highlighting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality
"If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose" https://slate.com/business/2023/01/electric-cars-hummer-ev-t...
You're taking an action that means you're more likely to harm someone else, but that same action also means the people in your car are less likely to be harmed.
Its also subconscious bias of legislators on display, because they typically knock around in said big vehicles. Just look at presidential vehicles or ministerial vehicles, or royal vehicles.
I'd love to see a big wig, knocking around in a Peugeot 106, or mini with a cavalcade. Even better if they can drive it themselves!
Do you think car manufacturers would spend more time making smaller lightweight bullet proof crash proof cars, like you see in Formula 1? Something less likely to kill but bounce its occupants around when it crashes and do less harm, like zorbing.
Nothing against cars per se, I love them, but it would be nice to see more Toyota Yaris GRX's or Polo GTI's which are pocket rockets but with better crash protection. Problem is people now haul around so much guff in their vehicles, they need these bigger vehicles.
Blame it on the complicated consumer based form of capitalism we live in today.
Consumption, consumption, consumption.
Not sure what is the best way to bring some sense to this trend. Regulation could put some boundaries I guess. Clearly there is little incentives for car manufacturers to go small & light.
If that trend keeps going, I could see some cities banning cars in some streets (e.g. only bikes or pedestrians) as having foot traffic close to car traffic would become too dangerous.
Anecdotally I can say that every street turned pedestrian has been wildly popular, massively revitalizing the area.
You can also check out Barcelona Superblocks [1]
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=barcelona+superblocks&rlz=1C...
American blocks are by and large, boring, stupid and hugely oversized. Making them pedestrian only would solve nothing when most towns in america are covered it "Stroads"
I want a fast, light car that isn't 20+ years old and falling apart.
My ‘05 Mustang weighs less, and if it wasn’t for the handling changes I made to it (sway bars, coil-overs, control arms, and more), the BMW would still handle better.
Long-Range/Performance AWD: 4,072 lb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3
For American EV trucks, you can go ahead and double that weight. The 2022 EV Hummer has a 9,063 lbs curb weight. Just imagine the toll that takes on our roads. Absolutely disgusting, and now imagine what happens when one of those T-bones a Corolla. Instant death becomes the best outcome for the person driving the Corolla.
Ford F-150 Lightning 6,015 to 6,893 lbs
Rivian R1T 7,148 lbs
Silverado EV 8,532 lbs
None of these things seems to matter. I'm in my 40s and can't remember seeing a single car like this in my entire life until about 5 years ago. Now I very regularly see them, they're on the rise.
Some people just want to have a huge fucking truck for no apparent rational or adult reason. And it seems that as they make an appearance, it inspires others.
It fits in a generic pattern I'm seeing around me. People with disposable wealth will spent it on ridiculous life "upgrades" that make no rational sense. I'm seeing giant houses being built whilst there's 1-2 people living in it, and most of the day nobody at all. I'm talking about homes with so much space that you don't know what to do with it. Just because you can.
In these times of energy transition and ultra high energy prices, I see neighbors investing in an outdoor sauna.
It's not that I want to police what people can or cannot spent their money on, I'm just saying it's way out of bounds. Beyond the reasonable. Excessive resource usage with no immediate purpose by any stretch of the imagination.
But I'll also come to terms with the idea that perhaps I'm not that much better. My guilty pleasure is annual very remote travel, which as we know is a massive contributor to CO2 output.
If taxation or discouragement does not have the desired effect and banning is difficult if not unwanted, my conclusion is that behavioral change is not to be expected much from.
I would love to see more cities design for people/pedestrians first, with denser multi-zone areas. I wish more people could walk to a neighborhood grocery, bar, library, etc.
It's no surprise that subsidized burning of fossil fuels "generates growth".
The growth of cancerous structures that make the average life worse.
I don't blame the government for not seeing a need to regulate this decades ago. Really, who in their right mind would want such a difficult to park, more expensive, less economic vehicle if they didn't need it, right?
This is actually the struggle I'm going through right now. I rarely need to cart around something large, but when I do it's something large. Like a few full sheets of plywood over 40 miles. I really don't want a pickup for the other 98% of the time, but there isn't really a viable option for renting a pickup for a few hours.
That is a HUGE difference. In one everyone is playing equally and if recognized can be de-escalated. In the other, there is a major monied player with power attempting to enshrine the tragedy into society.
It would fare worse in a collision, but maybe I'm also less likely to get caught in one because my car isn't so enormous.
If there was a choice for a smaller truck, maybe some of us would choose it. Right now I'm driving a small (heavy) jeep.