I think vehicle taxes should be proportional to vehicle footprint and empty weight.

Footprint because larger cars need more parking space, which is generally at a premium in cities. I get that many people need a car but we really don't need people to fight over where to cram their giant SUVs when they usually need to move one or two people and very little cargo.

Empty weight because most cars are nowhere near fully loaded most of the time. And if you spend 99% of your time driving around with one or two people plus maybe a half dozen kilos of cargo there's a big difference in road wear between a car that weighs one ton versus one that weighs two.

Wanna pay less car tax? Get yourself a kei car. Wanna drive around in a battleship with wheels? Pay up for the road wear and space you take up.

If you think that's too onerous for people in rural areas who actually do move stuff regularly you can introduce a truck rebate for vehicles registered in rural areas. (Note: This assumes a system where the car has to be registered where the owner lives.)

They also kill more children because visibility is shit.

He might want to make this toll expressly about that because the SUV loophole has pushed everyone intobuilding them, and there are small SUVs with visibility on par with cars, and monstrous SUVs with horrible visibility. You can't realistically discourage people from buying SUVs in this market, but you could nudge them into buying smaller SUVs with better visibility.

The people outside of the city didn’t vote for him. They don’t matter.

I have family just outside the city and they insist on driving in. I keep telling them just take the train. They're like "no we'll get lost". It's a train. It goes two directions. Follow the sign for New York.

Except that electric cars are quieter and leave no emissions, but batteries are heavy.

I get this is !fuckcars@lemmy.world but I would still prefer not to punish electric cars as much as fossil fuel powered ones.

Weight, engine sound, exhaust, and size. That combo of things is what everyone else is having to deal with and the money to mitigate the damages and build around them should be paid by them

There are landmines in New York?

oooo, don't say that too loud elsewhere or you'll have angry people claiming that the Outback is still a wagon, despite not having been one for over a decade now.

I also had this trouble replacing my third gen Outback. I went with a 2012 Elantra Touring, which has very similar cargo capacity (but lower towing capacity). but it's hard to come by 14 year old cars that aren't rust buckets.

I can still get a newer BMW, Volvo, or VW wagon, but they're outside of my budget and/or offensive/dangerous (distracting tech, LED headlights, etc). because fuck people who just want a Toyota Matrix, I guess. the VWs were probably the closest to my low budget in the used market

Tunnels types love their big black throbbing Suburbans.

Simple enough: Index it by weight.

People buy bigger cars simply for the tax deduction for their business. My wife has no real need to drive a 6,000 gross weight vehicle but the government awards you with accelerated depreciation for only vehicles over that weight

Deliveries aren't coming on pick-ups, which is what "truck" usually refers to in American English.

I think this only applies to people using pickup trucks as passenger vehicles, which is an epidemic in the US because of a dumb legal loophole. Not to commercial trucks.