I drive in the metro area about once a week-ish. I hate it. The fleets of livery/car hire/cabs clogging every major route is infuriating. Half are empty and just repositioning for whatever fare they’re picking up. All of their owners fight and lobby against imrpoved public transportation or better train service from the metro airports.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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Fuck Cars
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charge the ugly giant CYbertrucks, or giant TRUCKS more.
Get rid of the shiny, personally owned SUVs first. The black Escalades carrying a single driver causing gridlock while I try and get a delivery truck through.
just do it by weight. if you weigh more u get charged more it should be the same for air planes and all cargo of course. math is math.
Except that electric cars are quieter and leave no emissions, but batteries are heavy.
I get this is !fuckcars@lemmy.world but I would still prefer not to punish electric cars as much as fossil fuel powered ones.
Why not? The heavier batteries are still damaging the road and more dangerous at speed. Just apply a weight levy separate from any emissions levy, that way we don't accidentally encourage huge electric SUVs.
Surely smaller, lighter electric vehicles with max. 100 mile range should be encouraged in cities. I was in a car-free town in Switzerland (Zermatt) over the summer where most of the vehicles were small electric golf carts.
Have a rate multiplier based on fuel source.
excuse me that is subsidizing them. that is a huge no. u can make ev removable batteries then. too bad every single ev company made the replacement of batteries expesnive instead of making it modular so that we can replace batteries whenever we want so we can remove batteries if we want less weight eh? but very simply put based on weight is the fairest way to do it remember weight tears up the road ev or not.
also lifepo4 and sodium ion are MUCH better than lithium ion for the environment. the ev companies restricting chinese cars thus intentionally destroying the environment to prevent drops in prices and competition
They do more damage to the roads, are louder, and take up more space.
They also kill more children because visibility is shit.
He might want to make this toll expressly about that because the SUV loophole has pushed everyone intobuilding them, and there are small SUVs with visibility on par with cars, and monstrous SUVs with horrible visibility. You can't realistically discourage people from buying SUVs in this market, but you could nudge them into buying smaller SUVs with better visibility.
Last time I stayed in Manhattan, there was some sort of organized ride, where modified pickups kept driving by, making tons of noise. It was interesting at first but …… never. Fucking. Stopped.
I support this, but I'm curious to know how he defines SUV. I drive a sub compact SUV (Subaru Crosstrek) because it's the closest I could get to a station wagon; they literally do not sell station wagons on the American market anymore.
The only reason I bought a car in the first place was because my wife and I decided to have a kid and we needed a vehicle with some cargo room. We bought the smallest, most fuel efficient option in the market, so I'd be annoyed if I gpt tolled the same as the jack-ass driving a Ford F-150.
People buy bigger cars simply for the tax deduction for their business. My wife has no real need to drive a 6,000 gross weight vehicle but the government awards you with accelerated depreciation for only vehicles over that weight
Simple enough: Index it by weight.
Yeah, they mention weight being a possible etermining factor in the video, and if it's done on a scale, I'm happy to pay a little more than a sedan. I'm gonna be annoyed if there's a flat cutoff for weight and I'm paying as much as some truck that takes up two parking spaces.
oooo, don't say that too loud elsewhere or you'll have angry people claiming that the Outback is still a wagon, despite not having been one for over a decade now.
I also had this trouble replacing my third gen Outback. I went with a 2012 Elantra Touring, which has very similar cargo capacity (but lower towing capacity). but it's hard to come by 14 year old cars that aren't rust buckets.
I can still get a newer BMW, Volvo, or VW wagon, but they're outside of my budget and/or offensive/dangerous (distracting tech, LED headlights, etc). because fuck people who just want a Toyota Matrix, I guess. the VWs were probably the closest to my low budget in the used market
Yeah, there are still technically some wagons on the market, but they're $75K luxury vehicles. It's weird, because I only see people with that kind of money driving sports cars or luxury SUVs, but I guess someone is buying them.
Tunnels types love their big black throbbing Suburbans.
Fuck those things. If you really need to seat 7 people, suck it up and buy a minivan.
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
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.)
Footprint because larger cars need more parking space,
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.
exhaust they put into the air
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.
He should! Those fucking monsters are huge!
I mean its a start, but what about landmines?
There are landmines in New York?
You sound like someone who's never stepped on an NYC landmine!
Ayyy I’m ‘splodin’ ovah here!
Do it. SUVs and Trucks in a city make about as much sense as working a ranch with a Prius.
Wonderful. This needs to happen in Australia, pronto
Link to article?
A hero to urbanist, the enemy of suburbanites. Let the war begin
I have family just outside the city and they insist on driving in. I keep telling them just take the train. They're like "no we'll get lost". It's a train. It goes two directions. Follow the sign for New York.
Lmfao imagine worrying getting lost on a train while being forced to jersey slide trying to take the highways to the city.
The people outside of the city didn’t vote for him. They don’t matter.
I liked when new Jersey sued New York because of the tolls. I wouldn't be surprised if they do it again
YES.
Won't this increase cost of goods entering the city by trucks, idk if that is how things work.
I think this only applies to people using pickup trucks as passenger vehicles, which is an epidemic in the US because of a dumb legal loophole. Not to commercial trucks.
Deliveries aren't coming on pick-ups, which is what "truck" usually refers to in American English.