Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Tolls should be proportional to vehicle (maximum) weight. Doesn't matter where, it's a good way to charge tolls.
Even from a highway-lover perspective it makes sense - the damage vehicles do to the road surface increases with axle load exponentially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
so are we going to import chinese evs yet? no no subsidies for ev companies.
America has the Chevy Bolt, $26.5K and people are not lining up to buy them.
I think vehicle taxes should be proportional to vehicle footprint and empty weight.
Footprint because larger cars need more parking space, which is generally at a premium in cities. I get that many people need a car but we really don't need people to fight over where to cram their giant SUVs when they usually need to move one or two people and very little cargo.
Empty weight because most cars are nowhere near fully loaded most of the time. And if you spend 99% of your time driving around with one or two people plus maybe a half dozen kilos of cargo there's a big difference in road wear between a car that weighs one ton versus one that weighs two.
Wanna pay less car tax? Get yourself a kei car. Wanna drive around in a battleship with wheels? Pay up for the road wear and space you take up.
If you think that's too onerous for people in rural areas who actually do move stuff regularly you can introduce a truck rebate for vehicles registered in rural areas. (Note: This assumes a system where the car has to be registered where the owner lives.)
That only matters if you actually have differently-sized parking spaces, like Japan does for its kei cars. Otherwise, even the smallest hatchback takes up exactly the same one whole space as a big SUV.
That's part of why this community is "fuck [all] cars," not "fuck big trucks."
That assumes uniform marked parking spots. A lot of cities make heavy use of roadside parking where your car takes up as much space as it's long plus what's needed to be able to pull out. With roadside parking there's a big difference between a 3 meter ultracompact and a 5 meter SUV. Likewise, wider cars might take up space on the road and/or the sidewalk.
Even with marked parking spots long cars may exceed the length of a parking spot that was perfectly adequate when it was designed. I have something like that near me. There are parking spots perpendicular to a road and long cars routinely obstruct the sidewalk because otherwise they'd be obstructing the road.
I'm all in favor of having way fewer cars around in general but I also want the cars that are there to coexist better with everyone else.
No, it also matters for some admittedly unfortunate street layouts. E.g. here in Oslo we've had some one-way streets with parking on both sides, where we've had to remove parking on one side to allow buses and emergency services continued access in the age of SUVs.
Anything that has some sort of geometric constraint gets worse with big cars, and having an extra disincentive on huge cars is good.
edit: Car size creep will also eventually find its way into parking requirements, and parking norms, terrible as they are, require a certain amount of parking spots, not area dedicated to parking, which will make construction even more expensive.
Most parking garages do have compact car spaces, but otherwise street parking and parking lots are standard sizes.
Although for areas with open street parking (no metered spaces) the smaller cars allow more people to park
Use the full weight to discourage oversize trucks
Admittedly, those are already handled by something else where I live: A regular class B license only lets you drive vehicles with a max weight of up to 3.5 metric tons; everything beyond that requires some kind of appeal l special license and those cost a couple thousand bucks a pop and have additional strings attached. Not something you get casually.
So I would handle commercial vehicles like freight trucks, buses, tractors etc. differently from regular cars. The use case there is usually that someone has a specific professional need for such a heavy vehicle and not that they want to drive their kids to soccer practice in an Actros.
If your country doesn't have truck licenses and random jackasses do drive around in semi trucks for fun you can just go with a tiered approach. I'll use the European definitions of vehicle classes here; adapt as necessary.
Commercial vehicles get taxed by maximum weight. That includes everything designed to pull a semi-trailer, tractors, self-driving farming equipment, everything capable of seating more than eight people, and everything with a max load above 3.5 tons.
Personal vehicles (ie. everything that don't match the above criteria) get taxed by empty weight.
So if someone decides they want to drive around in a Peterbilt with no trailer attached they still get taxed as if they were hauling heavy loads all day because that's what semi trucks usually do. But someone in a regular car gets taxed as if their car was mostly empty because that's usually the case there.
The average American is like a third of an average car's load capacity and a family surely exceeds it. Use the full weight.
I think we need to toll based on Vehicle Efficiency standards. Some trucks are necessary for logistics, though trains and ships are obviously preferred.
For example, the SUVs being tolled higher is perfect, as are the newer models of truck which intentionally increased weight class to skirt around efficiency standards requirements, but an electric box truck should qualify for a lower toll than them.
I also realize this complicates enforcement, I wish vehicle efficiency data were more easily documented and identified.
Minivans are are as big as suvs, but the Toyota Sienna gets 35mpg, great visibility, and a low hood for pedestrian safety
Seeming necessary doesn't lower the amount of damage that large trucks do to the road, the exhaust they put into the air, the danger they pose to pedestrians, the space they take up on streets. There should be no exceptions to vehicle class tolls, Manhattanites are willing to pay marginally higher goods costs to live in one of the most culturally vibrant places on Earth and have the streets there be a pleasant place to exist. And I really do mean marginal: The increased toll spread over all the goods a large truck can haul comes out to pennies or less for most items.
My proposed metric does in fact incentivize a lower number of that, yes.
I understand, and I'm saying I don't think there should be exceptions for that.