The incentive needs to be towards the lightest possible vehicles, albeit perhaps with some allowance made for the substantial additional weight of current EVs so as not to kill off uptake, and they’ll need to be substantial.
We’re in a market where almost everything is an SUV. There are manufacturer line ups and whole sectors that are little else. A levy will be ineffective at changing buying patterns.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A levy charged to people who drive large SUVs in the city has been mooted as a possible way to curb Victoria’s “skyrocketing” road deaths since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Among the strategies put forward by the ACRS to help mitigate the problem were financial disincentives for the use of large SUVs, which are known to particularly affect vulnerable road users such as cyclists.
Commercial vehicles provide some of the highest risks of killing road users when they collide with them, but that disbenefit is not offset by any safety benefit to their own occupants,” he said.
Paris last month moved to charge SUV drivers higher parking fees to reduce pollution and tackle “auto-besity”.
While financial disincentives have been shown to benefit road safety in Europe, Australia must first remove incentives encouraging the purchase of large SUV-type vehicles, Newstead said.
Marion Terrill, a transport and cities expert at the Grattan Institute, said Australia’s fringe benefits tax exemptions “incentivise the purchase of larger vehicles”.
The original article contains 612 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good, the size of cars is really getting out of hand. It’s affecting visibility if you’re driving a normal sized car too.
A simple change to the registration fee that scales it up proportionate to Vehicle weight would be a perfect fix for this. They could even scale it down for ebikes / motorcycles and create a much simpler system for evaluating how rego is charged?
Bring it on.
