this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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I think you make want to go the other way. Making tires more expensive wont make people choose smaller cars, they will choose worse tires. And then they will crash into you because they cant stop.
It's a good rule not to make essential safety items more expensive. Because consumers in general will always choose a cheaper, less safe option.
yeah if anything a subsidy for safer tires and doing proper maintenance on brakes and other safety system would be what you want.
what is subsidized, there is more of than there otherwise would be
and the opposite is true for what is taxed.
They’ll still have to replace them more often or won’t be able to drive their vehicles or pass a state inspection to get their annual registration completed unless their car is road-worthy, thus costing them more money in tickets and remedies of said ticket.
Sure, but the problem is that you dont want to make safety equipment more expensive, as it encourages cheaping out and cutting corners. People already buy cheap and nasty tires that dont grip well or stop well (but still meet roadworthiness), its best to avoid further encouraging that.
There is no reason not to just directly tax against the weight of the car, as defined by the manufacturer. There already is a yearly rego payments, just scale that directly against weight.
A direct tax is also clear and obvious. If someone has a large car, the rego weight tax will clearly show they are paying more. Making tires more expensive just gets rolled into the price of the tire, which are already moderately expensive, so its easier to just rationalise it and ignore it.
Sorry, the tax is a great idea but taxing the tires is a terrible idea.
I think he is close though with his initial train of thought. I remember doing some research on this many years ago and road wear does not scale linearly with weight. All other variables being equal a 1,000lb load going across a stretch of road 10 times does less damage than a 10,000 pounds load going across the same stretch once. So what we should really be doing is looking at semi trucks and the heaviest of consumer vehicles. It would theoretically make consumer goods go up in price a little, but it's not like that cost isn't already being paid/subsidized by consumers in other ways.
Maybe it would even push the use of railroads for goods even more than it is used now.
Why is it a terrible idea?
Taking a guess, but it would lead to people replacing their tires less often, making cars more prone to accidents, and thus probably being counterproductive and more dangerous.
It should be linked to what a driver has to do (e.g. registration) so they can't try to minimize the cost by delaying it, especially with maintenance.
Tire inspection is still part of vehicle registration inspections. You can’t delay more than a year, and states can always require a tire change within a certain % of being totally worn out if having tires within x-% is showing evidence of causing more accidents.
Unless the argument is that any additional cost will prevent people from performing maintenance. Like, “gas prices can’t go up because people will stop buying gas”. Or “if you make registration more complicated, people won’t register their cars”.
Taxes in the US also have a precedence of decreasing as you get into higher values. There is nothing saying taxes can’t be a higher % on low quality tires. Buy a better tire that last longer, lower percentage tax tier. The point of taxation is to deter behavior you don’t want while recouping the cost of operation over time. Cheap tires that only last 1k miles can be taxed at a much higher % than those rated at 50 or 100k miles. We do that shit all the time.
Not all states have regular inspection requirements. Some are only every couple of years. But even if they did all implement something, you still would be encouraging people to wait in until the last possible moment to do it, which might decrease the amount it increases the risk, but it would still do so.
For the same reasons others have said. Don't increase the cost of safety equipment.