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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Start by putting a heavy-duty "Roadkill Tax" on those vehicles where the driver couldn't possibly see a pedestrian 'till his body showed up in the rear view mirror. It shouldn't be too hard to pack a few congressional committee meetings with families of their victims, to help get that passed.

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The logical thing to do is require drivers of large/high vehicles to have more stringent commercial driver’s licenses as well as liability coverage, just like a dump truck driver or whatever is expected to have.

The next thing would be to increase fossil fuel taxes so that fewer people can afford to waste money on vanity and prioritizing their own safety over others’. Side benefit is it helps the environment. Keep increasing the tax until you see non commercial use of large/high vehicles drop to acceptable levels.

Why should having more money to blow allow you to put pedestrians at more risk?

Ideally - it shouldn't.

Back in the real world - having more money lets you put more innocents at risk in pretty much every area of human life. Doesn't matter whether that's more firefighters at risk in fighting a fire in your big house - vs. a burning tent in a homeless encampment is pretty safe for them - or more passengers at risk when your 184' yacht capsizes and sinks in a storm.

We do have vehicle safety standards in the real world. The government can mandate vehicles meet certain standards, not just levy taxes.

I wonder if this will end up hurting EVs disproportionately as my understanding is that they're usually a bit heavier than comparable ICE vehicles?

While weight is bad, as far as pedestrian killing goes, height is even worse. A car hitting you in the knees is very different than one hitting you in the liver, in the spine, or straight on the ribcage. The pedestrian can also end up going under, instead of flipped over, and there's a big difference in damage.

The issue is that even EVs are being built taller, as we have a race to see over traffic.

That makes sense, and I do often wonder at the wisdom of the EV Hummer for road safety (and at who exactly is the person who both wants a hummer and an electric vehicle)

The kind of person who would have purchased a hydrogen Hummer if the filling infrastructure was in place? It's been a thing for a while.

Now lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce a bill on Friday that would require federal standards for hood height and visibility to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.

I don't think that hood height and visibility are worse with EVs. EVs are heavier than comparable ICE vehicles because they contain dense batteries but they're not larger.

Ah sorry, in OPs comment he says "heavy-duty" which I took to mean as part of the descriptor for what would trigger a fine (as in weight) but on second reading I think he means that the fine itself should be large and is not discussing anything related to the weight of the vehicle.

Yep.

How does that save lives? Think it will change consumer choice?

Get lots of victims? That hasn’t worked for gun control.

I will say that having worked in Congress (albeit briefly and mostly on tech issues) I have seen the victim family card played and it definitely does have a good amount of weight. Hasn't worked for gun control (yet, although you can see it sometimes partially working after mass shootings like Uvalde which led to Texas Senator Cornyn working on gun control), but there may be less of a constituency on the other side of the debate here (or maybe not, car makes do reap tremendous profits from trucks and SUVs so the pushback on anything that could harm those sales might be tremendous)

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