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If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

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Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#81

Post by sandworm101 »

mjhay wrote: post #71
sandworm101 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so should bicycles too. The per-mile injury rate, the stat used when comparing a given journey, for bicycles is several times higher than that of motorcycles. And skateboards... they are per-mile death traps. Rollerblades are likely more dangerous per-mile than driving drunk while smoking. If you have to cover a given distance, the safest is not always the slowest. Often the faster means limits risk exposure and…

The health benefits of cycling outweigh the danger by many times. It's nonsense to only look at the costs of crashes. Besides, it's the cars that are dangerous, not the bikes (in addition to causing pollution, needing more infrastructure, etc).

The health benifits can be gotten from a stationary bike at the gym. There is a reason we have helmet laws for bikes on the street.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#82

Post by [deleted] »

10g1k wrote: post #47
darkteflon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you think would happen then?

The government, at best, and excluding any other criticisms, is a middle man. At the very least, it absorbs money and decreases efficiency. 1) Government taxation model. Tax payer X makes $100. The government takes $40 (excluding for now the additional taxation on every purchase, sale, savings, etc). The government spends $20 of that just to fund itself. The government spends the other $20 on whatever. X has $60, and…

[deleted]

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#83

Post by flangola7 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #81
mjhay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health benefits of cycling outweigh the danger by many times. It's nonsense to only look at the costs of crashes. Besides, it's the cars that are dangerous, not the bikes (in addition to causing pollution, needing more infrastructure, etc).

The health benifits can be gotten from a stationary bike at the gym. There is a reason we have helmet laws for bikes on the street.

Tell that to the Netherlands

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#84

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #74
whalesalad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is being hurt? Deadly machines? This is a very unpleasant curmudgeonly take. The context of this discussion is regarding road use and wear and tear.

Have you taken a look at the road fatalities in the US recently. People are quite literally being killed at an increasing rate. And these oversized cars are directly more deadly. You might not care about putting lives over appearances. But others do.

[deleted]

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#85

Post by coredog64 »

judge2020 wrote: post #28
metadat wrote: post #5

At a hefty 3.5T / 7,000 lbs, the Rivians* aren't much lighter than an E-Hummer (4.5T / 9,000 lbs). Isn't road wear non-linear, with heavy vehicles doing disproportionate damage compared to lighter ones? Ever noticed how the trucker lanes on the highway are the first to get potholes? The taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize luxury toys. Let the owners pay a fair amount relative to the strain they're adding to th…

I mentioned this in my comment, but the "AASHO Road Test" gave us something called the Generalized Fourth Power Law. Explained > It’s a rule of thumb for comparing the amount of pavement damage caused by vehicles with different weights, in terms of axle loads: > (W1/W2)^4 > In the equation, W1 is the weight of an axle on vehicle 1, which we would compare to W2, the weight of an axle on vehicle 2. For W1 of 4 tons on…

The AASHO test comes up frequently, but there’s an easier way to evaluate this: What’s the internal pressure required to inflate the tires? The higher it is, the smaller the contact patch and the more damage it will inflict on the road. Large trucks are between 80 and 100 PSI, while your typical passenger vehicle is going to be 35 PSI or under.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#86

Post by judge2020 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #68
judge2020 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this in my comment, but the "AASHO Road Test" gave us something called the Generalized Fourth Power Law. Explained > It’s a rule of thumb for comparing the amount of pavement damage caused by vehicles with different weights, in terms of axle loads: > (W1/W2)^4 > In the equation, W1 is the weight of an axle on vehicle 1, which we would compare to W2, the weight of an axle on vehicle 2. For W1 of 4 tons on…

> For W1 of 4 tons on an axle and W2 of 1 ton on an axle, vehicle 1 does 256 times as much damage to pavement as vehicle 2. OK so take a loaded semi-truck at 40 tons / 80 000 pounds. How much more damage does it do than the 4 tons W1 of your example? How's the road still even there at all after the semi-truck passed on it? The answer is: because even the W1 vehicle at 4 tons cannot even dent that road. Now I'm not sa…

Indeed. So while a 4.5 ton vehicle, the Hummer EV, does 25 times as much damage as a 2 ton sedan, a semi truck with 5 tons on each axle does ~625 times as much damage to the road.

But 5 tons is not the standard. The federal axel limit is 20,000 pounds, so a fully loaded truck could be doing the same amount of damage to the road as 10,000 sedans. I doubt this is the average axle weight of all semis on the road, though.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#87

Post by landemva »

darkteflon wrote: post #56
10g1k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government, at best, and excluding any other criticisms, is a middle man. At the very least, it absorbs money and decreases efficiency. 1) Government taxation model. Tax payer X makes $100. The government takes $40 (excluding for now the additional taxation on every purchase, sale, savings, etc). The government spends $20 of that just to fund itself. The government spends the other $20 on whatever. X has $60, and…

Yep, totally agree that government is both expensive and wasteful. Absolutely no disagreement there. Let’s say we do away with government and regulating companies then, in the interests of efficiency and liberty. What’s the state of play a few years into that experiment, do you reckon?

I live in a town where the "roads" are private property and everyone has an easement to travel on everyone else's piece of what look like roads. Most of town budget goes to "road maintenance". Everyone understands their role, roads are maintained, and if government misbehaves we will chop our taxes and do the roads ourselves. By not owning the "road" property, government is kept in check and are our servants. There are also zero problems with parking on roads - it gets towed for trespass parking on private property.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#88

Post by coredog64 »

epivosism wrote: post #9

Strange they skipped the step of 1) taxing cars which cause more injuries per mile, 2) taxing resources (including externality cost) so that if you use more, you pay more. Instead they are taxing a pretty bad proxy for those actual policy goals. i.e. this incentivizes companies to reduce weight rather than add safety measures, and to use light materials regardless of if they cause more environmental damage. Hypotheti…

In the early 70s, insurance companies were able to severely curtail the power levels of cars coming out of Detroit by pricing in the actual risk. If a car causes lots of injuries, then that needs to be priced into the insurance. Eventually, that won’t be a car you can buy.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#89

Post by mjhay »

sandworm101 wrote: post #81
mjhay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health benefits of cycling outweigh the danger by many times. It's nonsense to only look at the costs of crashes. Besides, it's the cars that are dangerous, not the bikes (in addition to causing pollution, needing more infrastructure, etc).

The health benifits can be gotten from a stationary bike at the gym. There is a reason we have helmet laws for bikes on the street.

Those don't double as transport.

Re: If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose

#90

Post by landemva »

darkteflon wrote: post #31
unnamed76ri wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom.

Uh huh, nice word. And could you put some details around that, some specifics? What would our society look like, in your estimation, without regulation?

It could look like reciprocal easements throughout the entire town and the roads. The people own the infrastructure and use legal structures to cooperate with their neighbors.
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