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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The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Then close the loop hole that allows it and require certain bed lengths that would exclude most of the bro dozers with dual cabs.
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
People won’t understand the math, though. They’ll just blame the libs for depriving them of their overcompensation-mobile.
Some will even if they do understand the math.
Becides that’s an argument against all laws.
The people who a law is bad for, will always hate and fight it.
