161–170 of 172 posts
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Yes and so what makes the most sense is to make the tax increase with the 4th power of vehicle weight multiplied by the miles they travel. This way there are no perverse incentives. Everyone pays their fair share according to how much damage they cause.
Tying a tax to distance travelled requires accurate reporting of distance travelled. How is that not a perverse incentive?
I'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plus lighter vehicles would improve pedestrian safety.
Even more taxes on semi trucks that deliver the food that's already growing unaffordable that will be passed on to consumers then?
Putting EV subsidies instead into electrifying and enhancing train transit seems like a better approach to combat this. A lot of mass transit trains are still diesel powered and pollute heavily (although on a per person basis might be much better than driving cars). I am wondering if a bus is better or worse for tire pollution per capita?
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OK but then how many people are penalised by having to own a car?
A lot of people simply can't work from home due to lack of space, noise and interruptions, etc. It's a lot easier to buy a cheap used car than uproot your entire living situation to a new home where you can WFH, which you also might not be able to afford. Not to mention you probably already own your car for other things like getting groceries.
If we cared we could solve the bulk of problem somewhat easily, the 80/20 rule still applies but you could drastically reduce the number of cars on the road. Of course if all you care about is short term personal convenience and individualism then we're doomed, but if you care just a tiny bit about optimisation, pollution, long term sustainability, well being, the solutions are painfully obvious
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There are lots of ways to adapt to that. For example, you can have localized telework centers or subsidize co-working spaces. The current situation is far worse. People are literally trapped in a cycle of poverty or bad work experience because they cannot get to a suburban office park for want of a car. WFH has lots of limitations. Distribute work geographically and you can lower costs and improve outcomes. Why have…
> subsidize co-working spaces These are called offices. Look, I WFH and I love it. But in the process I probably quintupled my emissions. I might be able to get that down to quadrupling with an EV and full solar array. But the realities of suburban/rural living are simply much harsher on the environment.
What process ? WFH doesn't mean you have to move out of the city and build a huge house with all the modern bells and whistles
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> subsidize co-working spaces These are called offices. Look, I WFH and I love it. But in the process I probably quintupled my emissions. I might be able to get that down to quadrupling with an EV and full solar array. But the realities of suburban/rural living are simply much harsher on the environment.
> But in the process I probably quintupled my emissions. What process ? WFH doesn't mean you have to move out of the city and build a huge house with all the modern bells and whistles
It doesn’t, but within the context of this discussion (“distribute geographically”), it does. The logistics of groceries—even exempting my driving to the grocery store versus walking down the street, and despite being physically closer to farms than I was in New York City—practically doubled my emissions alone. Suburban living is massively more impactful than most people realise. There is a reason most of the world lives in either cities or rural destitution.
I'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plus lighter vehicles would improve pedestrian safety.
I'm tired of viewing taxes as a punishment. Taxes are for funding the government. If you're going to tax someone make sure the money goes to something specific, like keeping tire junk out of waterways. Some people like to drive, some people like big cars. Fix the tires, grand-daddy in all the existing cars, incentivize cleaner ones, and let everything age out. They're doing it with heat pumps, why not cars?
This is great if you enjoy polluting and not working, such as if you're a trust fund kid who likes to drive his big car everywhere while the poor and workers suffer the consequences, but is not a societally conducive state of affairs.
With cars, every incentive you can devise has reverse Robin Hood effects since the poor use transit and bicycles, and both incentives and disincentives are being used in practice anyways. It's in fact perfectly fair for people inflicting an unpriced externality on the broader population, through pollution, to pay a fraction of the cost of that externality themselves. If that disincentivizes the behaviour - is that so morally outrageous?
Is it truly fairer to instead bribe this wealthier than average group of polluters into not polluting through taxes on the rest of the population? If anything this creates a moral hazard insofar that it would seem the key to getting the government to subsidise your expenses is simply to pollute relentlessly and inflict costs on the rest of society and say "You can't just TAX us, you need to tax everybody else and pay us off!"
I'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plus lighter vehicles would improve pedestrian safety.
Interesting idea. Apparently road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law ) Really trucks are probably not paying their fair share in that regard. I wonder how it would be implemented in practice given how variable vehicle weights are depending on how they are being used. Weigh stations like they use for trucks? It might also be a solution for gas taxes being i…
There is a ~$186B dollar annual shortfall in federal (road maintenance - excise tax revenues)
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I love pushing "Tire Taxes". We all know that tires will emit rubber particles down to the point where the tire tred is 2/32th of an inch (from ~8/32ths of a fresh tire). So just... tax the tires based on the ~6/32ths of an inch outer-diameter of the tire that turns into microplastic dust. Calculate the microplastic dust weight of the outer diameter + weight of tires and bam. You have a 1-to-1 correlation of tax to e…
So you want to tax tires separately to whole cars? You don't think your scheme will induce perverse incentives as regards tread patterns, grip in different weather scenarios, etc.? If I were a tire manufacturer I'd love this because I would: * make tires that have not very much tread to wear through * make the outer tread extremely hard so it wears (testably) much more slowly * blame consumers for driving the tires w…
- Have half the life of regular tires
- Makes the outer tread extremely hard (and noisy)
- Consumers get the blame because they want safety (without the effort of a spare tire change)
- Increases the price
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I have to imagine that if Car X wore out 5kg of rubber, that it would have had half the impact of another Car Y that wore out 10kg of rubber. Right? Tire wear has to be directly correlated to road wear. They're in physical contact with each other after all, so it'd be as direct a measurement as any other possible methodology.
But rubber does not damage concrete, it's the weight of the vehicle that damages the concrete. As an extreme example, if I floor a 2000lb Miata when the light turns green that will deposit a ton of rubber on the road. But that does nothing compared to just driving through the intersection in a 6000lb suburban.
I'm saying the degregation of rubber is (likely) in direct correlation to the amount of road damage. (Much like gasoline is in direct correlation to miles-traveled, and thus is also an indirect measurement of road damage)
There's no need for causation in this discussion. Correlation is enough to be worthy of a good tax design.