[article] What to do about America’s killer cars
[article] What to do about America’s killer cars
The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous as the rich-world average. It doesn’t have to be that way
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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Tax by weight. These things destroy roads so it'll be easy to avoid the "government overreach" yapping.
Yeah I'll pay more in taxes for my fat sedan, but it'll be worth it.
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
Sounds reasonable.
That'll work to make them less popular.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.If they stopped making the truck part of their personality, they'd probably be easier to convince.
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.
Stop using vehicle footprint for trucks on CAFE standards.
Starting in 2012 truck fuel economy standards changed to being based on vehicle footprint, which essentially outlawed small trucks and encouraged manufacturers to keep making them bigger and bigger.
It's why the Ranger, Dakota, and S10 were all suddenly discontinued. The Ranger eventually came back, but is now bigger than the F150 was before.
It's hit cargo vans too. Between 2021 and 2023, all small cargo vans (Transit Connect, Promaster City, and NV200) were discontinued as they got passed by stricter fuel economy standards that penalized them for not having a larger footprint.
Yeah, somehow the MPG count as well, they have a formula where a bigger car has higher MPG in the end, smaller cars are lower MPG by that formula.
What people do here is they use the loophole that they are super cheap in insurance and road taxes because they are A: "work" trucks. And B: they only count the usable space and not the bed or some stupid shit. Which means a ridiculous dodge ram is cheaper than a smart four four that i use to drive around for work. If they would just stop that it would help A LOT. But talking to these insane people just hurts my head. Some guy told me that bicycles should pay as much road taxes as cars, because they also use the road.
I am more than happy to pay road tax by fourth power law axle weight on all my bicycles.
Since currently I pay for roads in my property taxes AT THE SAME RATE AS EVERY MOTORIST, this would result in a tremendous household savings for me.
Well his idea was that they pay the same as a normal car, because they use the same road. What is even funnier was that he was just in america and praised their car centric culture.
I mean, that's an option too. Bike could pay 1/8th-1/12th the amount cars do based on amount of road used.
Of course, there's the whole problem of cars don't fucking pay for the roads. In Ontario, vehicle registration is a whopping $32. Since the average car lifespan in Canada is around 11 years, Ontario vehicles pay less than $3 per year (less however much of the registration fee is administration and overhead)
Since bikes take up abouth 1/10th the road, they would pay $3 for registration.
Sounds good but as a person who drives a wheelchair-modified minivan, which was already twice as expensive, is heavier, and is the smallest vehicle that can accommodate a power chair, I hope you'll remember a carve-out for disability-access vehicles.
There would be lots of carve outs I imagine. The goal wouldn't be to remove useful vehicles from the road.
If I'm wish listing laws then those vans would just be given to people who need them, or at least the mods would be covered.
Specifically, this is what the yearly road tax should be. It should scale faster than linear, and be agonistic to gasoline or electric powertrains (since road tax is already part of the price of gasoline).
Weight, exhaust and distance driven should all be factors.