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.
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)
We all know that tires will emit rubber particles down to the point where the tire tred is 2/32th of an inch (from ~8/32ths of a fresh tire).
So just... tax the tires based on the ~6/32ths of an inch outer-diameter of the tire that turns into microplastic dust. Calculate the microplastic dust weight of the outer diameter + weight of tires and bam. You have a 1-to-1 correlation of tax to exactly the amount of particles emitted.
No weight^4th power required. The tire wear directly correlates to the pollution we care about. So tax / measure the tires directly, don't do anything else that's more indirect.
Right? Tire wear has to be directly correlated to road wear. They're in physical contact with each other after all, so it'd be as direct a measurement as any other possible methodology.
As an extreme example, if I floor a 2000lb Miata when the light turns green that will deposit a ton of rubber on the road. But that does nothing compared to just driving through the intersection in a 6000lb suburban.
I'm saying the degregation of rubber is (likely) in direct correlation to the amount of road damage. (Much like gasoline is in direct correlation to miles-traveled, and thus is also an indirect measurement of road damage)
There's no need for causation in this discussion. Correlation is enough to be worthy of a good tax design.
If I were a tire manufacturer I'd love this because I would:
* make tires that have not very much tread to wear through
* make the outer tread extremely hard so it wears (testably) much more slowly
* blame consumers for driving the tires wrong rather than make safe tires because we can hide behind T&Cs and our army of lawyers when accident rates inevitably increase
* put our fingers in all the tire installation and body shop pies to prpfit off of the new economic conditions that were created as a result of this tax
If everyone started making tire taxes across the country, maybe that'd be a problem. But no one gives a care about just one small state making a tax like this.
Michelin isn't going to redesign their tires just to save $50 in tire taxes.
> * make tires that have not very much tread to wear through
That's not how physics works. You need deep tread to safely expel water and/or deep treads to make snow-impressions (if its a snow tire).
Key word here is safely. A large portion of people would care more about saving $100 in tax than about the physics that makes their car less safe.
- Have half the life of regular tires
- Makes the outer tread extremely hard (and noisy)
- Consumers get the blame because they want safety (without the effort of a spare tire change)
- Increases the price
There is a ~$186B dollar annual shortfall in federal (road maintenance - excise tax revenues)
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/verkehrsabgab...
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?
there are different tire rubber/synthetic formulations, as another independent (of weight) variable
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?
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.
They're a restriction the money supply, but they don't determine what funding is.
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!"