This seems like a useless place to optimize. Like, what is the total pollution output of all Hummers or similar vehicles? A rounding error, I'm guessing. The only way to make dents is with systemic changes like for entire trucking industry, for example.
Sounds like a good reason to create protected “no turn on red” crosswalks.
The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.
Yes, first and foremost the right to bodily integrity, since rights are no good if you are dead. The two biggest killers of people in the US who are otherwise many many years from dying are guns and cars, and in both cases a large number of those dead had neither a gun nor a car in the moment. If the state is going to use its monopoly on anything, it should obviously be those two.
They can also enforce existing laws better. Don't forget that most states have had truck laws for a very long time. We know there is a direct linkage between vehicle weight and road maintenance costs. We've had laws that required vehicles to be weighed. We've had laws that taxed vehicles that exceeded certain weights on given roads. We've had laws banning vehicles of certain weights from certain roads. We could turn those laws "back on", get back to enforcing them better, adjust their fines and penalties to match a decade or three of inflation.
(For instance, Hummers are allegedly already technically illegal by weight on California residential streets. When was the last time that was enforced? When was the last time an owner paid fines on that?)
This old article mentions a lot of advantages of electric velomobiles vs cars like doing average commutes in roughly the same time, dramatic increase in road capacity, tiny power consumption if everyone was to switch etc etc
But write-ups hardly ever mention how hard it is to damage a pedestrian with it. Crashes involving just velomobiles usually leave little more than a scratch.
I live in a state with many “no right turn on red” intersections, and I can tell you for sure that people very often ignore those signs and do it anyway.
> The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.
May I steal this, please? I know a few people who don't get my political philosophy, and I want to help them understand.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence.
That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
Piecemeal regulations that treat luxury and small business vehicles separately and ignore the rich's pastimes to crack down on the working man's daily bread are why nothing other than an evenhanded carbon tax could ever be applied in a democratic country.
A very funny quirk of human psychology is people drinking water shipped from Fiji in an Uber Black car on their way to a first class flight thinking “those hicks in hummers are really destroying the environment”
We as humans only really internalize the things we see.
Well could be done on all scales. A small Kia with a roofrack / towbar maybe for extra cargo / small trailer is probably big enough for most human A->B needs, even small scale moving house.
Large trucks and SUVs tend to be so expensive to buy and operate that you can pay for a lot of deliveries and truck rentals per year—maybe a boat slip at the local marina, too—while still saving money.
Farther out in the sticks, sure, those things may be so inconvenient or unavailable that it's not an option, but it is for the average Suburban Assault Vehicle owner.
Yes, some people really need big vehicles (and/or we need them to keep farming) and so you need exemptions. In the UK there is Red
diesel for example that is for farm use / private use that is much cheaper than diesel for the road.
Right—it's not a subsidy, at least in the US, because much or all of the gas tax goes to road maintenance, so if you're not driving on public roads, you don't have to pay it.
Doesn't make sense to make e.g. farm tractors that rarely see a public road, pay for public road maintenance when fuel's purchased for them. Or trucks and other vehicles (some farms are really big and may include road-worthy vehicles that hardly drive on a public road more often that the tractors do).
If you're going to only drive on private land, you also don't need tags/plates for your car, at least around here. No registration. Just personal property tax and you're good to go.
