Drivers May Soon Pay Taxes Based on How Much Their Car Weighs | Hacker News Reader

Drivers May Soon Pay Taxes Based on How Much Their Car Weighs

autoblog.com

11 pointszzzeek11 comments

I used to drive a 1996 VW Passat. If I drove reasonably on the highway, I could average about 57 mpg per tank. I thought that was great, so my next car was a 2006 VW Jetta. That car only got 40 mpg at its best, but that was pretty good comparatively, so I accepted it. The newer TDIs were rated even lower, and then mostly went away, so I got a Honda. It only gets 23 mpg. Each of these cars has also been shorter between maintenance cycles, and with a shorter overall expected lifespan. I don't know what's going on with the regulatory landscape that cars keep getting bigger, heavier, and less efficient (by mile), but it seems like there's plenty of room for improvement. The fact that this is proposed by automakers, though, makes me extremely skeptical.

Makes a bit more sense than charging by how efficient it is at burning gas. Costs should be skewed so that commercial operators who are causing 99% of the road damage, are paying to fix it; not passenger/commuter vehicles that weigh <10,000lbs.

It's more complicated than that.

The fourth power law is only an approximation. If the road is designed for higher weight then the impact of larger loads is less. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

> A 2017 report commissioned by the New Zealand Transport Agency found a wide variation in the best-fitting exponents for a power law on 4T axle loads vs 6T axle loads, depending on the current condition and type of the roading. As a very rough summary of its highly detailed findings: A 9th-power law is most predictive when the road is barely able to withstand the 6T load; and the per-crossing damage is roughly linear to axle-weight when the pavement is able to withstand much higher loads than 6T per axle.

Highways (which this link focuses on) are designed for a heavier load than, say, residential streets.

A mid-size SUV is, what, 1 ton per axle? And a semi is max about 10 tons per axle (I don't know the average). And there are more SUVs on the highway than commercial trucks.

And in any case, there's already a Heavy Vehicle Use Tax which is meant to fund the additional maintenance demands caused by vehicles over 55,000 pounds.

The problem with that is it becomes a regressive tax that impacts the price of all goods transported by truck and raises the prices of basic necessities.

I think the suggestion I saw that all road maintenance should be paid from the general fund makes the most sense.

This would subsidize truck and private car transport against rail, which is counterproductive if you are trying to lower the long term costs of transport and decrease transport externalities (e.g. fine particle pollution, noise, climate change).

wouldn't miles driven matter as well? i could drive under 5k miles a year but pay more because my car weighs more then my neighbor who drives 20k miles a year and lets say he has a lighter weight car...

further disincentives to having more than 2 kids. further inceitive for rich people to buy bigger cars, as they will be bigger status symbols for those with the write offs.

> further disincentives to having more than 2 kids.

I feel like it’d push for the return of station wagons over SUVs/Minivans, over fewer kids outright

> further inceitive for rich people to buy bigger cars, as they will be bigger status symbols for those with the write offs.

That seems to me quite negligible

You can have spacious cars without needing suvs that are land ships

Interestingly people had much bigger families before cars existed at all.

In other words, a world designed for cars instead of people is less friendly to people.

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