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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of vehicles should be treated like tractors. Very limited road access. You shouldn’t be able to drive to Walmart in one.

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I hate to tell you this, but I can and have driven a tractor to Walmart. They’re legal on the road here in most cases - they don’t even require registration, just a red triangle do denote it as a slow-moving vehicle.

Normally when I want to take one of our tractors somewhere… I pull it with the aforementioned truck.

Your replying to someone who is very far removed from the realities of productive life on a large or small farm. 250+ pickup trucks are literally just a (very valuable) tool and people like your parent's commenter think that someone who just dropped off a trailer and goes to Walmart afterwards are worthy of giving shitty looks at. Every american should drive across the country and look at all the maintained rural land being worked and realize the founding stock of america are yeoman farmers. They may be busy and their voice actively suppressed but go ahead and start legislating what they can and can't do with their necessary tools and see what happens.

> These kinds of vehicles should be treated like tractors. Very limited road access. You shouldn’t be able to drive to Walmart in one.

Having driven tractors, everything from small Renaults to large JD in tight and some larger trucks on narrow roads in EU/CH, the two aren't Comparable, one actually has utility and is needed in keeping people fed the other is just some eyesore on which to project your insecurities onto ~80% of the time.

These monstrosity should just have immense gas guzzler/taxes attached to them like in Switzerland and the Nordic countries and allow for reductions if its proven to have actual use and isn't just something that gets used to 'go to the walmart' as most are in the US.

Funny enough, gas price alone isn't deterring anyone, Hawaii has always vied with CA in as price and they are everywhere--perhaps just as many as I saw in Texas per capita.

You seem to be confused. A Ford F350 isn't particularly large. It's just a regular pickup truck and will fit into most parking spaces at Walmart. It's quite easy to drive unless you're towing a trailer. Nothing at all like a farm tractor.

The hood is above head height for many people. How exactly could you justify calling this not very large?

The vehicles that deliver goods to Walmart are much larger.

If someone wants to spend the money to buy one and pay the $200 to fill it up, so be it.

If they think it’s somehow less money to buy a $80K truck than to rent a truck once a year, cool.

But to say it should somehow not be allowed on the road is absurd.

How exactly should they be paying for the increased risk to peoples safety and the extra air pollution they create. Should we be calculating the number of years they took off people lives due to the particulate pollution? If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?

In terms of paying for increased risks to safety, the usual answer is to require drivers to be insured, and higher risk drivers or vehicles will result in higher insurance premiums.

For pollution, I am not aware of anything currently, but it'd be reasonable to treat that similarly (probably as a tax that funds treatment of pollution-caused health issues rather than insurance, since the harms are more distributed).

> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?

If the vehicle is not street legal, yes. If the vehicle is street legal, and the driver was insured, and otherwise not negligent, then no. Perhaps the vehicle should't be street legal, and in that case the laws should be changed moving forward (but penalties should not be applied retroactively).

Incidentally, in the US, the Department of Transportation seems better than usual for government agencies in actually doing a cost-benefit analysis where they show their work with actual numbers: see https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...

> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?

By this logic, every vehicle would have a different punishment associated with it.

Replying to the other sibling comment here about paying for its cost. Vehicles in the US are taxed mainly by taking the gas that goes into them, the more gas (diesel) they use the more taxes they're paying, so it works out as the commenter hoped, if you have a bigger more thirsty vehicle you pay more taxes to maintain things like roads and infrastructure.

A) gas taxes only cover about 30% of the cost of the roads.

B) the wear on the road is a fourth order funtion of weight. It would be fantastic if taxes were also proportional.

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