this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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You might be right, but it would be a good motivator to have people pay the true cost of big heavy cars — including the negative externalities to health, safety, road wear, parking, and pollution. Drivers don't currently pay those costs, which means we essentially subsidize big heavy cars now. If we stopped doing that, Canadians would act more like consumers in the rest of the world.
Also, strong agree on fewer cars being the ideal solution. In fact, fewer cars is a mathematical necessity. We can't electrify ourselves out of terrible land use, e.g. the oceans of parking lots, crumbling roads, and inefficient highways that contribute to carbon emissions and environmental degradation.
see: Car Insurance Costs
you're thinking a Road Tax like the UK? That's coming; but I'll only vote on it if it pays MoT AND MoT takes over a completely-public mass-transit
User-fees
E car; but I can get behind a levy on car insurance through our publicly-managed consolidated regional single-base-insurer, for Internal Combustion Engine cars.
It seems the only thing missing is the road tax; and that's just because they're in love with their volatile user fees for transit despite the near-collapse of CEO bonuses during the pandemic.
Car insurance only covers a small number of externalities. It does not cover tire particle pollution (tires are the number one source of microplastics in the world), air exhaust pollution, noise pollution, etc etc. Even if they never got into accidents, cars would remain one of the most hazardous things to our health. Cars are also the number one killer of children, by far, and insurance doesn’t bring them back to life.
Agreed that a road tax is a good start. But a road tax wouldn’t cover the fact that bigger cars cause MUCH more of all these harms than smaller cars, so externalities remain.