THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest.
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Basically a big ass pickup that weighs twice as much as a car should be taxed at 2^4 = 16 times as much by this metric
edit: source
Sounds reasonable.
That’ll work to make them less popular.
Just to clarify, this “fourth power” rule is reasonable because that is approximately how road damage scales with per axle weight (last I checked it’s not an exact integer exponent but it is about 4)
Yup. We can of course exclude semis, construction vehicles, and shit that actually serves a purpose. But it’s the fairest way to tax vehicles overall
Compared to the damage semis cause to roads, everything else is a rounding error.
Which is why they are only allowed on specific roads right now.
My goal is to get rid of useless vehicles, not the ones that deliver goods. And I don’t think my city is going to lay track to every store.
None of this will ever happen anyway, but you don’t lay track to every store…you lay track to distribution centers, and then use lighter trucks to distribute goods for the last 1-10 miles.
No. No exclusions.
It doesn’t matter if they serve a purpose; All the damage they still do still happens, and needs to be accounted for. Rolling it into the cost of the purpose is fair.
Then the price of everything goes up. We already have a solution to semis damaging roads. They can’t drive on most roads unless their delivery is on it. Otherwise they have to use specific roads that were built for the weight.
Roads aren’t built to last forever. They all need maintenance. Semis cause more wear and damage on all roads, requiring more repairs. So yes, if that cost isn’t already baked into the cost of trucking everything, it only makes sense to start doing so.
The other option, is to give up on the idea of vehicles paying for roads. We could just use general tax money from everyone, as everyone benefits from quality roads. That would also be logically consistent.
I am a-okay with the general tax being enough to cover everything instead of dealing with the headaches we have now.
That is what we have now. Mostly.
The current vehicle taxes are never close to covering the costs of road maintenance.
That’s actually how a lot of people get around these taxes in some European countries. It’s not unusual to see a self employed accountant driving a Hilux
Here in the UK, I’ve seen bloody sushi restaurants and hairdressers drive branded pickup trucks FFS. No tax exemptions for businesses. As another poster noted, the damage is being done and needs to be paid for - it doesn’t magically not matter because it was done in the course of somebody using the road for their business
That sounds like a poorly written exclusion then. The goal here is to eliminate useless vehicles, not tax the shit out of a plumber for their van.
Plumbers don’t carry massive heavy plant. But I know you were just picking a concrete example of a business there so let’s not dwell on that particular case. The real point is that if a business causes damage to the roads that has to be repaired, it should contribute an appropriate amount. If that makes the cost of doing business more expensive, that just has to get passed on to the customer - who, ultimately, is the one having the heavy stuff transported
Then close the loop hole that allows it and require certain bed lengths that would exclude most of the bro dozers with dual cabs.
I said “Hilux”. Not “American Fucking Pathetic Tiny-penis Replacement” 😂
There are a few Dodge Rams here, anything bigger would just be undriveable and would make people laugh at you even harder than the Rams
Hilux is the same thing. Unusable bed used for ego unless they’re taking it off road.