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Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they
by nostromo 3y ago
Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.
We should also ease a lot of regulation from states regarding minimum road width, minimum parking spot sizes, minimum height of parking garages, minimum number of parking spots for residential and commercial development. Much of this problem stems from bad regulation. (Developers generally don't want to have all this unproductive space in their buildings, but are forced to by local and state governments.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway9870 3y agoMaybe it should be based on your driving record? The worst driver you are, the higher the cost to society when you are driving.
- newsclues 3y agoIsn't this how insurance works?
- hkarthik 3y agoUnfortunately most EVs are way heavier and cause more wear on roads, so we'd be paying an even higher green tax to reduce emissions and fossil fuel usage.
- barbazoo 3y agoCompared to other cars, sure but still negligible compared to semis and other _heavy_ machinery
- ericd 3y agoYeah, it’s basically not a real concern compared to semis.
- jackson1442 3y agoI think the optics are bad but the logic is sound. EVs don’t pay gas tax like ICE vehicles do, so it should even out in the end.
- dubcanada 3y agoI have to agree with OP, taxes should be based on weight. If you EV causes 10x the wear that a ICE car then you pay 10x the taxes. If the goal is fossil fuel usage, we cannot ignore the fact that pouring tar and repairing roads is not horrible as well. If the goal is to encourage usage, then just subsidize it, but eventually it all comes down to wear and taxes, you cannot ignore a car that weights 10x as much as a normal car. There are ways to make the road stronger if the government really cares about such things. But they don't it ends up being yearly cost = total upfront cost / average life span which in there mind is cheaper than a bigger upfront cost that lasts longer.
- __s 3y agoNote that suggesting it's 10x the wear is greatly exaggerating Weight increase is ~30% https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/jun/21/carry-that-weight-electric-vehicles-outweigh-gas-c/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/jun/21/carry-that-we...
- dubcanada 3y agoYa I didn't have the figure off the top of my head, it does appear to only be 1.3x to 3x which is really not much more.
- LegitShady 3y agoRoad Wear is related to weight by the 4th power...a 30% increase in axle weight is like 2.85x the damage to the road.
- Zigurd 3y agoHeavy EVs cause more tire wear. I've seen articles claiming that particulate pollution from tires on EVs is a problem. I can think of a few other reasons to want lighter EVs. But you need a really heavy vehicle to be the dominant cause of roads wearing out.
- newsclues 3y agoGreat, EV taxes can pay for EV infrastructure and contribute towards road maintenance! Nothing unfortunate about it at all. Why shouldn't an EV Hummer or Ford Lightning pay up for the weight on the road?
- Zigurd 3y agoMaybe they should pay more but not because they cause more road wear. They don't.
- dahfizz 3y agoEVs are not "way heavier". They are a couple hundred pounds heavier than comparable ice cars on average. And all that extra weight is in the battery. Over time, batteries will shrink to the point where EVs are lighter on average.
- Detrytus 3y agoThat's wishful thinking: battery technology required to reduce weight of EV enough is not in sight yet. It might even be physically impossible.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoEVs are not the solution to our transportation problems.
- mikereedell 3y agoIn some states it is. The total price for registering a car in Colorado takes the weight of the vehicle into account (along with the price and the age). I remember having a minor panic when registering my car at the DMV and hearing the person in front of me paying well over $1000 for the year. Turns out they were registering a brand-new, very large (and heavy) pickup truck.
- _delirium 3y agoIt does work like that in some states. New York state registration fees range from $26 per 2yr to $140 per 2yr depending on weight: https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-and-supplemental-fees-passenger-vehicles https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-... Despite being a pretty big difference percentage-wise (the heaviest vehicles pay more than 5x the lightest vehicles!), not sure it’s enough of a difference in absolute dollars to really influence purchasing decisions though.
- heliodor 3y agoYou don't have to influence decisions though. Just pay for the work in a fair way.
- Zigurd 3y agoPassenger vehicles, no matter how large and numerous, are a tiny part of road wear compared to heavy trucks. If you want to price road use by what it costs to maintain them, tax the heavy trucks. If you want to disincentivize SUV bloat, make narrower Lanes and more traffic calming features.
- tw04 3y ago>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair. This came up in another thread and while it's sort-of true, it's not really. Passenger vehicles of ANY size do almost no damage to a road in comparison to semi-trucks and delivery trucks. A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road. The average semi vs. that same 3/4-ton pickup is a 2500x increase in damage to the road on the low end (some studies claim as high as 10,000x). Unless you're planning on eliminating the trucking industry, shrinking cars isn't reducing the wear on our roads in any meaningful way. https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
- shiftpgdn 3y agoThis should be obvious to anyone with eyes too. Go look at a neighborhood with no or low through traffic and extremely old roads are in good condition. Meanwhile a nearby through-fare, unless constantly repaired and patched, will be falling apart.
- giantg2 3y agoEven the low traffic roads in freeze-thaw regions need constant repair. So it's not all weight related. Weight is a factor that really only matters once you start looking at commercial size vehicles.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoAlso look at your local bus terminals. That asphalt is damaged beyond belief, even though it sees next to no traffic. A few dozen buses a day braking and accelerating on the same patch of street over and over will wreck it.
- warrenm 3y agoThanks, asphalt! Yeah - it happens to concrete, too ...but it takes way longer
- hnav 3y agoI think you want both to be included, but yeah something like SURCHARGE = ((WEIGHT-2500)/1000 + (VALUE-30000)/10000) * CONSTANT. Maybe even make it exponential to discourage upper-middle class conspicuous consumption (think G-classes) since it'll cost them $20k to register a $200k, 5klb vehicle. In the US we actually give (federal) fuckin tax breaks (sec 179) on beastly luxo-trucks to SMBs, that needs to be offset by massive reg increases too.
- mynameisash 3y agoI would think the tax on the value of the car would be better handled by taxing gas much more heavily. It seems to me that all of the very expensive cars have terrible mileage. If we had a good carbon tax, it should do a good job of taxing what we really want to be taxed, which happens to coincide well with luxury vehicles.
- kansface 3y agoElectric cars are heavy, expensive, and use no gas. This tax would be quickly regressive.
- jenadine 3y agoThe answer to that is to compensate it with other progressive tax credit, or redistribute the benefit of the tax in other means.
- mynameisash 3y agoAs has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, electric vehicles aren't appreciably more heavy than other commuter vehicles, especially given that damage to roads is non-linear. And as for them not using gas -- that's why taxing carbon would handle it. If electricity comes from natural gas or coal, then you pay tax on the electricity accordingly.
- wincy 3y agoSounds great! I’m glad my family and our disabled daughter will have to pay more because our wheelchair accessible vehicle is so heavy. I really appreciate your opinion here. After all, my wife is being very selfish to want to get a terrible gigantic minivan so my four year old can visit with friends and so my wife can transport her without literally popping a hernia (has happened once already!) to move our daughter in and out of the wheelchair on a regular basis. Maybe I’ll encourage her to get a basket to transport our kid on our backs to get around in a convenient world where we don’t have parking spaces, or perhaps we can have a top unloading vehicle to get her out since the minimum width has been reduced when a handicap spot isn’t available (which considering how many elderly people there are is quite often when we go shopping). I’m glad developers are forced to make the USA handicap accessible, and would encourage you to consider the knock on effects of the less advantaged when heavy handed legislation is passed to ban “wasteful” vehicles. Minivans and SUVs being mass produced and thus relatively affordable (although still quite expensive) are a ticket for people like my daughter to be able to even leave their houses on a regular basis.
- johngladtj 3y agoIf you don't want to pay more, Don't cause more damage.
- wincy 3y agoHeavier vehicles use more fuel. Roads are paid for based on fuel taxes primarily. I’m sorry my daughter’s equipment for her wheelchair is causing you such distress and ruining the roads. Let me just sling her over my shoulder and carry her everywhere from now on instead of using all this polluting road destroying equipment.
- johngladtj 3y agoInstead of being sorry, compensate everyone else for the damages.
- swores 3y agoWouldn't it be even better if people who have a legitimate need, like you, could get the vehicle and associated taxes subsidised or even free, while people who don't need it do pay more for their choice? (This was the case for a relative of mine in the UK who got a car paid for by her local council because of her husband's disabilities; organised by the same department/funding as pays for caters for him.)
- gadders 3y agoIn the UK at least, Road Tax has no relation at all to the cost of repairing roads and is just treated as (yet another) tax. And as a general point, any tax that is intended to encourage a behaviour should be revenue-neutral i.e. if you raise taxes for large cars, lower than for small cars so that the total tax take to government is the same. Otherwise it just becomes one more way for the government to ratchet up the amount of money they take from their citizens.
- bitdivision 3y agoNo, but it does take externalities into account, i.e. road tax is based on CO2 emissions.
- Lio 3y agoIt’s also worth noting that in the UK it’s explicitly not called “road tax”. It’s the snappily titled Vehicle Excise Duty, VED. That was changed in 1937 to stop drivers assuming it gave them more right to use the road than anyone else. The roads here were not built for cars, cars just use them.
- toast0 3y agoMinimum road width tends to be set for use by emergency vehicles. Can't really reduce those unless you want to mandate smaller emergency vehicles. Kei-class fire trucks exist, but don't seem popular.
- laurencerowe 3y agoWhile European roads are far smaller than American roads their fire engines are still based on large trucks and only about 3/4 the size of US ones. Look at the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_engine I did read of one town in the UK that bought a Kei-class truck but it was an unusual situation. The standard in the UK seems to be a 3.7m (12ft) wide road to access buildings over 11m high. https://www.ukfrs.com/guidance/search/vehicle-access https://www.ukfrs.com/guidance/search/vehicle-access
- rootusrootus 3y agoRoad damage goes up at the 4th power of the axle weight. It would be simpler to just make commercial trucks pay the entirety of road taxes. Easy to collect, and it would spread out the cost to everyone who benefits from commercial trucking (i.e. you really do want roads even if you don't own a car).
- thinkling 3y agoBut on many city streets a very large percentage of heavy vehicles are... public buses. Not sure it makes sense to shift the cost for road repair to the public transit agency.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhy not, if their buses literally do >99.9% of the road damage?
- markstos 3y agoBuses carry many more people, so the damage-per-user-mile is mitigated. Also, buses don’t require storage at the destination, aka parking. Cutting parking space allows the city to be more walkable, further mitigating vehicle damage. And increased density is also good for the tax revenue per square mile, which is also good for the city’s bottom line.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoRegular buses (non-articulated, non-double decker) almost never carry more than a few dozen people.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> a few dozen people still a massive win considering that the F-150 is the top selling vehicle in the US. Not car, not truck, overall vehicle. A few dozen people in big trucks will far outweigh the damage of a bus
- delfinom 3y ago>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair. It is in most states, the problem is the cost difference is negligible. Example fee https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-and-supplemental-fees-passenger-vehicles https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-... I have never heard of car registration by value
- cellshade 3y agoGeorgia has an ad valorem vehicle registration tax directly based on the vehicle's value.
- red-iron-pine 3y agothat explains all of the shitboxes around greater Atlanta
- johnflan 3y agoIn Ireland road tax (paid annually) are based on engine capacity for (pre 2008 cars) and CO2 emissions for everything after that. (Engine size is a ok proxy for vehicle size) https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/41c9cc-motor-tax-rates/#motor-tax-rates-2021 https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/41c9cc-motor-tax-rates/#mo...
- pkolaczk 3y agoThat's unfair. If one person drives 1000 km annually in a big SUV and another person drives 100000 km annually in a small and efficient hybrid sedan, then obviously the latter emits more CO2. And if hypothetically they walked the same distance they would likely emit even more CO2 (assuming they eat mostly western-style heavily processed food), but would obviously pay no tax at all. I believe a better system is to include the CO2 tax in the fuel/food price.
- jenadine 3y agoI don't see why that's unfair. Unfair to whom? The person that drive 1000km on a big SUV emits more than if he had bought a small an efficient car to drive the same amount. So that should be incentived. > I believe a better system is to include the CO2 tax in the fuel/food price I agree with that.
- bmicraft 3y agoWhy do you think it's unfair to discourage what amounts to ≥3 hours of driving daily? At that point you should probably switch to trains or move.
- pkolaczk 3y agoWell, not everybody drives alone. Moving one person in a car emits comparable amount of CO2 as a person going by foot and moving only two people by car emits less CO2 than moving those two people on foot. We should discourage driving alone, or driving extremely short distances, but not discourage driving cars in general. Cars are surprisingly more energy efficient than walking/cycling if utilized fully. Also a big car fitting 8 people is more energy efficient per person than a small car that fits 4 people.
- mulmen 3y agoPublic good benefits are too complex to reduce to a consumption tax.
- david38 3y agoIt is in California. I drive a Ram 2500, which is classified as a commercial truck, so I pay many hundreds every year to register it.
- warrenm 3y ago> Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair. Probably the only thing New York State 'gets right' from a regulatory perspective: register a Lotus Elise? It's cheaper than an F-250