5 ms·
I'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plu
by liminal 2y ago
I'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plus lighter vehicles would improve pedestrian safety.
- commandlinefan 2y agoEven more taxes on semi trucks that deliver the food that's already growing unaffordable that will be passed on to consumers then?
- capitainenemo 2y agoInteresting idea. Apparently road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law) Really trucks are probably not paying their fair share in that regard. I wonder how it would be implemented in practice given how variable vehicle weights are depending on how they are being used. Weigh stations like they use for trucks? It might also be a solution for gas taxes being insufficient to maintain roads as vehicles transition to electric. And in concert with the much higher weight of electric vehicles due to batteries still sucking at power density (maybe it would increase interest in things like aluminium-air)
- smileysteve 2y agoUS Federal Gasoline taxes haven't been raised since 1993; meanwhile US interstate systems and bridges are receiving C- rankings. This was the case before the Nissan Leaf or Tesla Model S, much less 5% adoption of new car sales being electric. There is a ~$186B dollar annual shortfall in federal (road maintenance - excise tax revenues)
- chongli 2y agoYes and so what makes the most sense is to make the tax increase with the 4th power of vehicle weight multiplied by the miles they travel. This way there are no perverse incentives. Everyone pays their fair share according to how much damage they cause.
- eldaisfish 2y agoTying a tax to distance travelled requires accurate reporting of distance travelled. How is that not a perverse incentive?
- chongli 2y agoWe shouldn't care if you want to buy a 10,000 lb electric truck if you leave it parked in your driveway all year round. If we're not taxing based on distance then the perverse incentive is to drive big trucks until they fall to pieces.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoEasy in places where it requires annual safety checks
- airstrike 2y agowhich is really most anywhere these days, is it not? having lived in different states in different countries, this was always the case for me, but then again that's still a small sample size
- 2y ago
- tommiegannert 2y agoMy canton in Switzerland uses this formula: tax = k * P*0.9 / m*0.05 P: power in kW m: weight in kg k: currently 7.125 Minimizing tax means a small engine and a heavy car. (Though the tax difference between 1000 kg and 3000 kg is only 6%.) They also don't do subsidies for EVs, with the rationale that EVs affect road maintenance as much as other cars. Given that, the formula is backwards in terms of weight. https://guide.autoscout24.ch/de/auto-unterhalt/verkehrsabgaben-schwyz/ https://guide.autoscout24.ch/de/auto-unterhalt/verkehrsabgab...
- barrkel 2y agoIt's penalizing high power to weight ratio, i.e. sports vehicles.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dragontamer 2y agoMy local state is adding weight to our vehicle registration fees, but only slightly (ex: capping out at 5000lbs). There are vehicles as high as 8000+lbs commonly used, and I think those should have higher tax than the 5000lb class vehicles.
- faeriechangling 2y agoHaving a cap makes absolutely no sense except politically. There’s not a diminishing impact here whatsoever.
- dragontamer 2y agoThere used to be only one weight tax (erm, registration fee). Now we have two weight classes, 3500lbs and 5000lbs. Its an improvement, but why stop at two classes? Its nearly as bad as our previous law that was only at one weight class. Might as well follow the pattern at every 1500lbs up until no common vehicles are covered anymore. (6500lb and 8000lb are a natural extension of this new law). Oh well, we can fix it in next year's debate, I guess?
- _yb2s 2y agoThis would be a good idea, because weight is the major factor in vehicle safety... if everyone else has a 6,000lb vehicle, you need one as well to be safe when they hit you. If vehicles on average got lighter, this would solve this problem. Unfortunately, EVs and modern crash tech have made cars much heavier. A 1970 small economy car like a VW Rabbit was ~1800lbs, that same car now (VW Golf) is now ~3200lbs.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago> Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. there are different tire rubber/synthetic formulations, as another independent (of weight) variable
- lupusreal 2y agoThat would amount to a tax on (among other vehicles) electric vehicles, which weight a lot more than comparable ICE cars.
- mattpallissard 2y agoI'm tired of viewing taxes as a punishment. Taxes are for funding the government. If you're going to tax someone make sure the money goes to something specific, like keeping tire junk out of waterways. Some people like to drive, some people like big cars. Fix the tires, grand-daddy in all the existing cars, incentivize cleaner ones, and let everything age out. They're doing it with heat pumps, why not cars?
- faeriechangling 2y agoAll taxes are behaviour disincentives. If we tax say income but not pollution, we're discouraging people from working while the price of pollution is not paid by the polluter. If we're subsidising clean cars at the same time, w'ere also having wage earners subsidise cars for the upper-middle class. This is great if you enjoy polluting and not working, such as if you're a trust fund kid who likes to drive his big car everywhere while the poor and workers suffer the consequences, but is not a societally conducive state of affairs. With cars, every incentive you can devise has reverse Robin Hood effects since the poor use transit and bicycles, and both incentives and disincentives are being used in practice anyways. It's in fact perfectly fair for people inflicting an unpriced externality on the broader population, through pollution, to pay a fraction of the cost of that externality themselves. If that disincentivizes the behaviour - is that so morally outrageous? Is it truly fairer to instead bribe this wealthier than average group of polluters into not polluting through taxes on the rest of the population? If anything this creates a moral hazard insofar that it would seem the key to getting the government to subsidise your expenses is simply to pollute relentlessly and inflict costs on the rest of society and say "You can't just TAX us, you need to tax everybody else and pay us off!"
- asdasdsddd 2y agoIt's not about punishment, its about pricing in externalities
- txru 2y agoA core economic concept is externalities, positive and negative. Positive externalities are undervalued by the market, negative ones are overvalued by the market, like cigarettes. There aren't many ways to resolve externalities. If you pay people to quit cigarettes, people start smoking to get paid for quitting. For negative externalities, sometimes you just really have to make the good more expensive, or we'll end up bearing the much larger societal costs down the road, like we did for lead in gasoline and widespread cigarette smoking.