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More than 1m cars sold in UK each year too big to fit typical parking space
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Fuck Cars
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I reckon doing what Norway does and just tax them by the weight of the vehicle to to discourage people buying them while alps making those that do pay for the extra wear and tear in the roads they cause.
Road damage goes up proportionally to the 4th power of vehicle weight: double the weight, 16 times the damage. Vehicle tax should include that as a component. That also indicates that we massively subsidise the use of huge lorries to transport goods.
Sadly this does discourage EV growth which I do think still should continue instead of having fuel cars. I'd love if air quality would go up again.
This could be offset by tax rebates for the EV, or by taxing gasoline and diesel so much that you break even or still come out on top even with the weight tax.
Stop fossil fuel subsidies in terms of fuel for vehicles and use that budget to: subsidize EV adoption + charging instead.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/fossil-fuel-subsidies
Issue with this? The people who already don't have much money will have a very hard time as driving will be even more expensive for them and getting a new car already requires a good amount of spendable money (certainly when they'd have to sell their car to an exporter with less people wanting gas cars). I personally don't know how we'd tackle this issue.
I'm also for a usage based tax, after x Liters of fuel you pay more taxes (on a yearly basis) but don't think they could realistically do this
Cyclists will be thankful that they're being killed by electric SUVs, not petrol SUVs.
That'd require a tachygraph or intrusive surveillance of road use. Taxing vehicle dimensions and weight is much simple.
IMO the money would be better spent to subsidize electrified trasnit. In north america that money could also be used to support dense housing projects along that transit corridor, providing more ridership for the new transit and tackling the housing crisis. This is a better solution because electrified transit is even more energy and resource efficient than private electric vehicles and the transit is more accessible to everyone than private electric vehicles are
Oh yeah 100%
Here in the Netherlands our public transport is pretty well done, but the main issue is that the cost of tickets is unbearably high for our train system so having that cheaper would certainly increase ridership and decrease car dependency
Its so hard hearing the term "car dependancy" come out from the netherlands while I'm stuck in North America. Theres definitely room for improvement still in the netherlands but at least the bones of the city are still intact. Its arguable harder to fix most of north america in its current state than starting fresh would have been.
Oh yeah it isn't nearly as bad as the US but outside of big cities you're still dependent on your car
Forget about the housing. If the cost of personal-car commuting were to skyrocket, people would naturally gravitate to be near transit hubs.
North America has a density problem ever since they bulldozed downtowns to build surface level parking. We need to increase the density in those areas to support transit. For the most part that housing doesn't exist, and what does is often considered luxury and is in high demand because even north americans like transit oriented developments.
Someone has to increase the density around major transit corridors and the private sector has proved they only care about developing luxury condos in those areas. A government run and funded affordable housing initiative could help people who need access to transit the most move into transit oriented neighborhoods.
The roads don't care about whether the car is ICE or EV. There are plenty of gigantic SUV's that are hybrids or even electric. Eventually we will see electric 18 wheelers.
There should be an additional tax on ICE's for their emissions as well to capture that higher externality. But remember EV's are not emission-free. Anything with tires is a source of pollution.
Personal vehicles cause a lot of problems for humanity, and only some of those are exclusive to ICE's.
A large percentage of microplastics come from car tyres.
Just another reminder that EVs don't magically make cars green or safer. You still have the ashphault, the tire pollution, brake dust, end of life recycling, stormwater runoff, noise pollution, roadkill, wasteful car centric planning, and dangers to pedestrians.
Just stagger the classes not just by size and/or weight but also by motor type. For instance, a tax class for ultracompact cars could look like this:
(I basically went with Japan's current definition of kei cars and replaced the displacement restriction with a weight restriction.)
If you tax them the same as gasoline, sure. In the Netherlands, there are so many huge EVs, and I think that's partially because all EVs, large or small, weren't taxed. We made a distinction between gasoline and diesel for tax, no reason we can't do that with EVs.
Not all EVs are bloated SUVs.
Small EVs generally have more weight tho