THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest.
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Tax by weight. These things destroy roads so it’ll be easy to avoid the “government overreach” yapping.
Yeah I’ll pay more in taxes for my fat sedan, but it’ll be worth it.
The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load.
Basically a big ass pickup that weighs twice as much as a car should be taxed at 2^4 = 16 times as much by this metric
edit: source
People won’t understand the math, though. They’ll just blame the libs for depriving them of their overcompensation-mobile.
Yup. We can of course exclude semis, construction vehicles, and shit that actually serves a purpose. But it’s the fairest way to tax vehicles overall
Compared to the damage semis cause to roads, everything else is a rounding error.
No. No exclusions.
It doesn’t matter if they serve a purpose; All the damage they still do still happens, and needs to be accounted for. Rolling it into the cost of the purpose is fair.
That’s actually how a lot of people get around these taxes in some European countries. It’s not unusual to see a self employed accountant driving a Hilux
Stop using vehicle footprint for trucks on CAFE standards.
Starting in 2012 truck fuel economy standards changed to being based on vehicle footprint, which essentially outlawed small trucks and encouraged manufacturers to keep making them bigger and bigger.
It’s why the Ranger, Dakota, and S10 were all suddenly discontinued. The Ranger eventually came back, but is now bigger than the F150 was before.
It’s hit cargo vans too. Between 2021 and 2023, all small cargo vans (Transit Connect, Promaster City, and NV200) were discontinued as they got passed by stricter fuel economy standards that penalized them for not having a larger footprint.
What people do here is they use the loophole that they are super cheap in insurance and road taxes because they are A: “work” trucks. And B: they only count the usable space and not the bed or some stupid shit. Which means a ridiculous dodge ram is cheaper than a smart four four that i use to drive around for work. If they would just stop that it would help A LOT. But talking to these insane people just hurts my head. Some guy told me that bicycles should pay as much road taxes as cars, because they also use the road.
I am more than happy to pay road tax by fourth power law axle weight on all my bicycles.
Well his idea was that they pay the same as a normal car, because they use the same road. What is even funnier was that he was just in america and praised their car centric culture.
Sounds good but as a person who drives a wheelchair-modified minivan, which was already twice as expensive, is heavier, and is the smallest vehicle that can accommodate a power chair, I hope you’ll remember a carve-out for disability-access vehicles.
“Where people love to drive”. I hate driving but damn try getting around without a car and spend your whole day just getting groceries.
It was NOT always like this and now the regime made it so that vast majority of Americans have no choice unless you are “lucky” enough to live in a select few cities that were designed pre WW2 and region with some rail infrastructure.
3 generations of malinvestment and chronic infrastructure issues to show for it.
First world country.
There are some truly beautiful areas to drive through. But that also means it would be beautiful for buses and trains too
Bro, groceries can be ordered right to your door even in nowheresville USA.
I guess I would have to see the math of gas and time vs delivery cost which is free after 75.00 around these parts.
Bro, USA isn’t the only country in the world, and some people prefer to see the item before purchase.
Maybe not relevant for this specific discussion, but a decent quantity of Americans are stuck with fucking Dollar General for their groceries and they sure as hell don’t deliver.
I’ve said this before, but create a new license requirement for these, “light duty trucks,” that are causing all these problems. Right now a standard Class D allows any chud to drive one of these things. If you want to drive something that weighs more than 5,000 pounds, you should have to get a special license that teaches you about how huge their blind spots are and why they aren’t crash-compatible with normal cars.
That is kinda like a prisoner’s dilemma. If we all go smaller we all win, but if one person goes big they win and others lose.
We cannot rely on people to do the right thing because there is an incentive to do the wrong thing. Change has to be through legislative incentive.
Don’t need legislation. Simply needed mechanical sorting. Place barriers only reasonably-sized vehicles can fit through without being damaged. Added bonuses: traffic calming, driver competency testing.
I read a different article a few months ago about how cars are now so heavy that guardrails do absolutely nothing to stop them anymore. And while I’m all about small cars for a number of reasons, electric cars are super heavy even if small which of course is growing in demand. I’ll just be glad to move back to the city soon where I can take public transit.
They were not designed for vehicles over 5000 lbs allegedly. Which is weird since lots of the older cars pushed that threshold. Maybe they meant 80’s cars.
