Yes, we're at the stage now where democracies need to become far more dictatorial, otherwise their populations will continue mindlessly along the path of 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
People in the majority prefer large, powerful cars, given the choice. And those cars already cost a lot, so any strategy of price increases to discourage them will have to be significant. This is why most people in Europe drive small, economical cars. Big cars are heavily taxed, and so is the fuel they use.
Small streets mean fewer drivers. That means your overhead demands that you charge more per customer since you have fewer of them.
All that said, smaller roads mean smaller trucks which means more trucks more often which means more tires.
The US has dumb mileage policies to get everyone to drive huge trucks, and pretty much bans things like the N-Box.
In Japan you get a parking exemption with cars like the N-Box and it seems quite useable - top speed 87 mph. Review https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/honda-n-box-slash-review-...
I wouldn't mind them bringing in something like that - I'm in the UK where they don't have N-Boxes either but it would do the job and I mostly get around by e-bike these days so I prefer others to drive small light cars.
They already make plenty of them
Alternatively, new tire technologies could maybe also solve the problem.
Hiwever, taxing new tyres may be counterproductive, since encouraging folk to keep using their worn tyres is not a good outcome for road safety.
No, it's not.
You're taking a very loose rule of thumb for road surface wear and baselessly applying it to tires.
Tire wear follows the rubber the tire is made out of. Soft rubber wears faster. Once you control for that it's acceleration and braking loads (i.e. driving style) that dominate. After that is when weight starts mattering.
If what you said was even remotely true then heavy vehicles would get obviously less life out of tires compared to compact cars when in reality they get about the same
Are you assuming that the tires of heavy vehicles have the same thickness as lighter vehicles? My bike has much thinner tires than any car, and they can last ten thousand kilometers.
I'd be quite happy if I could get that kind of lifespan out of my cars tyres.
Are you saying you can't even get 40,000 km out of your car tyres? You might have a defective product on your hands or need to look into the way you drive or inflate your tires.
There are a lot of people who can't easily change their behavior, e.g. because your theory is that they should buy smaller cars but their business requires a vehicle that can carry heavy loads once a week and they can't afford to buy a separate vehicle for that so the larger vehicle has to be their daily driver. Then a tax meant to induce a change in behavior is received by them as an unavoidable tax hike, which they naturally resent and oppose, and because of the nature of politics they'll then propose the opposite of whatever you're trying to do to them.
What you really need to do is to make it more possible for them to do the thing you want. For example, right now if you want to have a modern compact car for most use and an old truck you use once a week for truck stuff, you have to register and insure two vehicles. That isn't currently economical, but it's what you want to happen so they're not just driving the truck at all times.
What you want to do is to make it economical. Only charge a registration fee for someone's primary vehicle and waive the cost for a second one, and make insurance work in such a way that having two vehicles doesn't have any higher liability premiums than driving the same total number of miles in one vehicle.
Then they can do what you want, and in fact have the incentive to, because the smaller car will save them gas most of the time but they still have the truck when they need it.
I don't have a citation to point to, though!
edit: there are roughly 100x registered passenger cars in the US as semis
You can write me at [email protected]. Thanks for any info!
BTW, thanks for explaining that you cannot prove things about a single permutation using random permutations--it's so obvious that it is very difficult to explain, and the same absurd argument pops over and over.
Semi truck tires have hard, slow-wearing compounds.
Fact: In California, the number of trucks is about 300K vs cars at 14M (about 40x).
Fact: California AADT on roads for trucks ranges from a couple of percent up to almost 50%. Very few roads have less than 10% AADT from trucks.
Fact: Damage to roads goes as fourth power of axle load.
Speculation: Given that tires are the primary means to transmit that damage to the roadway, it wouldn't surprise me if the trucks are responsible for the vast majority of tire particulates.
Reference: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/traffic-operat...
This is why states operate weigh stations — overweight trucks cause significant damage.
20% * 18 = 3.6 vs 80% * 4 = 3.2, so barring some 3rd category semi’s would have more tires. They also have a lot more weight on each of those tires.
Semi tires are hard, long-lasting compounds relative to soft consumer tires with deep treads and soft rubber.
No, it scales at the fourth power of the axle weight.
So more and much larger tires and fairly similar lifespan = they liked make up a significant majority of tire pollution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
> The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the stress on the road caused by a motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load
Think about this...if car does 'x' damage to the road, 2 cars does 2x damage. 2 cars welded together side by side (axle to axle so the axle count stays the same) would also do 2x damage, but the 4th power law says it does 16x damage.
If it's wrong by a factor of 8 in the simplest thought experiment it's not a law. You can obviously make a heavy load act like many small ones, or concentrate a light load so it does a lot of damage.
Constant * X^4 just coincidentally went through the data in a single 1950s dataset...and for some reason we're calling it a law 70 years later, when it's really just a loose trend that we could easily break with a little engineering. And we probably have broken it...tires, roads, and vehicles have changed a fair bit in 7 decades.
Are you removing the two inner wheels from the axle? Those would also support weight
You'd need to stack the two cars on top of each other to increase the axle load. In which case I'd say it's not obvious how much more the road wear would be without looking at data.
I'm not saying the 4th power law is absolute truth, I truly don't know what the wear patterns would look like on a modern surface. But your example isn't proving it wrong at all.
But never manufacture and sell in the same country, or the government might try to get you to pay for your negative externalities!
And now, there’s this annoying predicament where as you introduce more laws and more enforcement, you only cripple your own economy and rarely cause any significant improvement along the lines of what you hope. Look at Australia — we have all these appliance safety laws, but all of the appliances are made overseas and there’s no good point for the government to inspect and enforce compliance with those laws. I just bought a generic vacuum sealer from an online shop the other day. It was cheaper than buying at a brick & mortar store, even with delivery, and it definitely does not comply with Australia safety standards.
We’ve killed our local industry, and our economy is suffering for it. I don’t think the answer is to remove the safety/etc laws, but instead to tax all imports enormously. Be aggressive and unfair so that local industry is immediately viable. It’ll be painful, but it’s what most countries need. Comparative advantage turned out to be a terrible basis for international trade.
Look no further than the failure of the Paris Agreement and the ascent of authoritarianism worldwide. No one cares about environmental agreements, certainly not those in the rarified airs of billionaires, oligarchs, and other captains 9f industry.
They happen all the time. Just look at how the European Union operates on a day-to-day basis.
This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.
What's clear is that the attitudes of those of us in favour of such measures has only achieved the opposite is the last decade, as the user you're replying to has rightfully pointed out. Optimism has gotten us nowhere.
If we're talking about Global climate or pollution impact, the EU alone agreeing won't cut it.
You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
Right now that means protective tariffs are a fashionable “something” to do.
I work from home and get paid an enormous salary. I literally do not care. But (1) in turn I make decisions which are purely convenience based because of that disposable income and (2) I'm just one vote.
The message you'll be selling to everyone else is: "hey, that multi-thousand dollar vehicle you use for getting to work because there's no public transport and your job requires you on-site? Pay more money to have it."
Or did the US not just have an entire election apparently determined by the price of eggs and the cost of living?
People with more disposable income have much more ability to make long term, efficient economic choices by forgoing short term gains or even taking losses.
It's similar to subsidizing roof top solar panels: there's a not unreasonable argument that this is just a hand out to the fairly wealthy who own houses, when we could more efficiently use that money in a government program to build industrial scale solar which benefits everyone through net lower emissions/prices.
So long as you don't have to pay the actual costs associated with your car use, why would you _want_ to find an alternative?
> You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.
Registration fees tax ownership of a car, not use. IMO that's... not great; if you want to own a car you rarely drive, why should you pay for everyone else's pollution?
Gas taxes could be a fair way to target CO2 emissions, but (given heavy EVs don't pay them) are a poor way to target tyre particulate pollution.
As a response to particulate pollution specifically, a tyre tax is quite closely targeted (although possibly ill-advised for other reasons, as I mentioned in my comment).
This is simply not true. Protectionism can have massive benefits. China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it. I happen to live in Korea which is similar in ways, and here too it's an enormously good thing for the country and its citizens.
The dream that protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era.
It's a great thing because it's basically funneling money from global megacorps to local corporations - which might still be huge, but nothing compared to e.g. Coca Cola or Google. This is a positive thing for everyone except for those companies' shareholders, and in a way the US as that's where almost all these megacorps are based.
This is really an important thing to realize, and I can't stress this enough. It's exactly like the EU imposing lots of regulations on Apple et. al. Apple isn't just going to take their bags and not sell there, nor have they raised prices to EU customers as a result of these rules. They simply comply.
Imagine if, say, Germany ruled that to sell Coke in Germany as an international company, you have to set up a 50-50 owned JV with an existing German company unrelated to Coke. You think Coke is neither going to give up on Germany nor are they going to raise their prices. They're simply going to be making less of a profit in Germany. Great for everyone. It has played out this way in every country with such rules in place.
Is it actually protectionism that gives most of the benefit here, or just comparatively cheaper labor costs, massive economies of scale (aided by a huge domestic market), disregard for other countries' IP, and a willingness to make targeted sacrifices (e.g. environmental impact) ?
Like if you're realistically looking at why China became an industrial powerhouse, it's unlikely protectionism is responsible for more than a few % of that success. The rest of it is simply favorable factors that I listed above.
> protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era
It is just one of the tools in the toolbox of a country, it's not inherently good or bad. For example they way it worked out for USSR and post-CIS countries is absolutely bad. The way it worked out for China is good. But there are multiple confounding factors at play and you can't look at it in such a simplistic way.
All of these have benefited China. I was pointing out how protectionism has done so, independently of the other factors. Those were not necessary for the protectionism to be beneficial. The mainstream assumption in the West in the post-Reagan era has been that this is impossible, that any form of protectionism must be a net negative when you consider the effects on all parties involved.
Of course it depends on the implementation. Blindly slapping massive tariffs on everything and calling it a day just hoping it will work out isn't necessarily going to benefit anyone.
Libertarians gonna libertarian. Even if it kills everyone.
Plenty of blue states have shot down additional taxes. When it comes to pigovian taxes, nearly everyone in America is a libertarian.
Until the externality cost is not baked into product cost it won’t be paid for.
The price is passed on to the consumer. The idea of “making manufacturers pay” in commoditized markets like tires is a feel-good myth. Any additional fees will go to the consumer price.
funny that state with “don’t thread on me” license plate is a bastion of socialism where you are not allowed to own a car but have to pay each year to the state for the right to own the car… the problem of course is all that insane amount of money collected will never be used for anything other than to pay for pensions for former government employees :)
My state realized a couple of decades ago that they were going to have the same kind of problem with their pension system and recreated it to be self-funding. They still have the old pensions to cover but at least they aren't continuing to dig themselves a deeper hole.
"We need to start making consumers pay for their negative externalities."
Alls I was trying to say is that consumers are already paying crazy money. 26 states have property taxes on cars! In VA even with all that PLUS a special tax for EVs PLUS most of the roads around the DC metro area are tollroads it is still not enough :)
I was being facetious talking about pension funds - what I was basically trying to say that whatever money is collected isn't going to where it should be going - if there is a budget shortfall (and wouldn't you know - there always is...) money gets appropriated to other things...
But money is already being collected for these things through 89 different taxations - so more revenue is 100% not the way to fix this problem.
We could add fees to tire manufacturers, but be honest: It will just get added to the price of the tire. That’s fine if the goal is economic incentives or funding remediation, but people start to lose interest in such fines as soon as they realize it comes out of their own pockets instead of from some imagined slush fund manufacturers are keeping to themselves. (See similar problems with conversations about tariffs, which people only like until they realize they will be paying for them.)
Use those taxes to fund public transportation.
Cars need space. Walking and bicycling (and public transit) need density. The environment for optimizing for each of those is completely opposite.
And once a person has invested in a car (the car itself and a home with enough space to store the car), and they use that car on a daily basis to commute to work or drop the kids off at school, they will be very unlikely to support taxes to pay for public transit, something they will almost never use, since they are already leaving the house in a car, they are going to do all their errands while out in a car.
Size: Switzerland 15,940 mi², Bay Area 6,966 mi²
Population: Switzerland 8.85 million, Bay Area 7.76 million
So given that, the bay area is twice as dense as Switzerland
Miles of train tracks: Switzerland 3,241 miles, Bay Area ~300 miles?
SF Bay Area has a bay, Switzerland is all mountains so it's not like Switzerland is particularly easier to cover in public transportation
Plenty of other places in the USA could be covered in trains. LA for example used to have the largest public transit system in the world. It was all torn down between ~1929 and ~1975. A few lines have been created since but, the problem in the USA is, except for maybe NYC and Chicago, public transportation is seen as a handout to poor people instead of the transit the masses use like most saner places. (Most cities in Europe and Asia). Getting it back to that point seems nearly impossible. Building one track at a time, each taking 10-20 years with Nimbys fighting them all the way means the density of tracks always is too small to be useful, and so no usage.
looking at the two respective largest cities: Zurich is about twice as densely populated as San Jose.
this has a huge impact on public transit viability.
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#8/46.894/7.127
vs
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#8/37.766/-120.721
those are the same zoom level.
I'd argue they show the bay area can sustain far more trains than it currently has.
If you check a Swiss train map you'll see they cover tons of tiny cities.
It's true that Zurich is more dense than San Jose. Some would suggest that's part of the problem. San Jose is less dense because it's missing the public transportation and therefore everyone needs a car, everyone needs places to park that car when shopping, working, sleeping. Everyone is driving to the city so lots of large roads are needed for the cars and so everything expands into car infrastructure. Public transportation enables urban density.
The goal should be to tax manufacturers so that there’s a strong incentive/an opportunity for market competition to produce tires that don’t shed microplastics.
And as others are pointing out, buy and drive smaller cars.
The only options to buy smaller cars which means you're now at eye level with a giant truck that doesn't give a single fuck about anyone on the road.
We need robust public transit and pedestrian focused infrastructure with samn multi-purpose zoning. None of these are happening in the next five years at least so it's on manufacturers to eat the cost which they won't do. This means we all get even more micro plastics in our testicles, ovaries, and/or brains.
tires are an essential part of most people's lives, and even city people who don't have cars rely heavily on wheeled vehicles. When I think about the plastics that I take out into the environment where I subject them to wear, I can't really think of anything apart from tires.
It was privately-funded. It worked.
...until the automobile became more common and people stopped started driving cars instead. (The literal-conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire didn't help, either.)
Here's a map from 1908: https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/electric-railway-map-of...
I suspect the best option for most suburban cities to reduce traffic and air pollution is to strongly incentivize employers to allow remote work when feasible.
But in any case, it's not clear that there is a lot of low hanging fruit in cutting down on private transit. Aside from a few outliers, most places with pretty great public transit still have a lot of private transit too. It has many use cases that public transit is unable to fill.
It's an anti-oxidant, to protect tires from UV and ozone degradation.
Tire companies are in the process of switching to a different anti-oxidant.
> Pollution studies in the Los Angeles basin in the 1980s concluded that more than five tons of breathable tire dust were released into the atmosphere there each day, and there’s no reason to think that figure’s gone down since.
[0] https://www.straightdope.com/21343778/when-the-rubber-meets-...
The AQI there looks good.
I'm assuming there are currently no tyres on the market that contain nothing that degrades into microplastics, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Bicycles are so lightweight that the amount they release is negligible compared to a car.
We're not going to win these things by saying "just don't drive". Driving less is part of the solution, but it's not going to work by itself.
Also, there's quite a bit of pollution from break pads and discs, also reduced because of regenerative braking.
I couldn't find numbers though, with a brief bit of googling.
Also, few EVs that are not pickups have 100 kWh batteries; more typically 60-75.
2024 Tesla Model3: 3,862 to 4,054 lbs
That's 20% heavier, and it gets worse when you look at EVs not built from ground up by legacy manufacturers.
2024 Mazda6: 3,437 to 3,582 lbs
2024 Tesla Model S: 4,560 to 4,776 lbs
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-3-2019-5-door...
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-3-2017-sedan-...
Braking is braking. If you're stopping in N meters, regardless of how the braking force is applied (regenerative brake vs discs), the tire is the artifact taking the load.
Even then, most cars don't routinely brake as hard as they accelerate.
Motorcycles, with their high performance, are notorious for eating rear tires much faster than front tires, and they can't be rotated.
Then, there's my vehicle, full time 4WD (not AWD, there's a difference), it wears its tires quite evenly in contrast to 2WD/AWD vehicles.
I believe you mean most drivers. All of this talk about EV tires wearing faster than ICE tires is driven by people accelerating aggressively simply because they now can.
EVs are generally quite heavier compared to similar class of ICE vehicles.
All the people I know with EVs love the feeling of gunning it from a red light on when getting onto freeways. Yeah they don’t peel out, but that’s only because the control system stops them.
I'm going to need a source for that. There are literally tens of thousands of accelerator pedal types, with different hinges, different travel, different stiffness and different engines with different ECUs and different drive modes attached to them. There's no one default way to step on the gas that people would just pull out of muscle memory.
I can see two things. One maybe EV tires are spec'd to be more sporty. Or possible tires aren't optimized for the extra weight.
Pointed comment: No one but no one cares about higher weight trucks and suv's at all when it comes to tire wear. Only EV's get singled out.
But the tires are made of different materials and are different in other ways too. I can tell you first hand you spend far more on tires if you own an EV. Our model y spends more on tires than our giant diesel pickup, and far more than an ICE of similar size. As for the relative amount of microplastics they emit, I really couldn’t know.
You definitely wear your brake pads out far less with an EV. Just eyeing it though, volumetrically, brake pad wear has to be relatively insignificant compared to tire wear.
I’d guess EVs still emit substantially more tire particles, and fewer from brakes but nowhere close to compensating. But I’d not be shocked to death if someone studies it and you turn out to be right.
And on the plus side, those are probably issues materials science could solve (make the tires out of something benign) whereas EVs emit a lot less of other bad things that I’m sure are not easy to solve or they already would have been.
I'm inclined to believe an extreme version of that hypothesis -- I doubt 200k miles at 1mph would wear the tread substantially -- but in practice I don't think that's the case. Electric cars tend to replace tires around 10k miles sooner, so the net effect of everything involved (heavier cars, regenerative braking, rich young guys driving faster, mostly city driving, ...) is 15-50% more tire wear per mile.
After a year you drive normally, I get about 35k miles out of 40k mile rated tires, similar to my old Audi.
IE don't buy the tyres that last 1000[preferred units of measure], buy the tyres that last longer.
But then you could get into "performance per unit of wear" and how that is all defined is a wombat hole of discussion.
I think it would be an interesting comparison, given how often our local light rail trains operate nearly empty. If it has less than about 20 people per train car it is toting around more weight per passenger than a private vehicle with just the driver.
Nokia is also working on green tires with more biodegradation
https://www.nokiantyres.com/about-us/news-article/nokian-tyr...
As someone that bikes or walks over driving, it is still frustrating how much we'd rather blame driving over anything else.
I confess confusion, here, as the article links in this as support of the tire claim. Which is in contradiction to what it says. Specifically, the article links it as support of a 28% claim, when the link is challenging that number.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
This has serious implications for the future of automobile development in the age of heavy batteries.
Considering that friction is symmetric, road wear implies tire wear and vice versa, at roughly the same order of magnitude of severity, relative to respective hardnesses. Tires are generally softer than road surfaces, so they wear faster than roads.
Uhh, what? Not all roads are asphalt, tons aren't. But even then that's irrelevant. If I made the tire out of Vaseline would it have the same wear characteristics? After all it's also made of petroleum.
Road wear isn't just about the friction. A lot of it is the stresses of the road surface being squished into the ground and deformed. If you've ever seen a boat planing over the water, the road surface kind of wants to make a similar pattern but due to rigidity it can't quite do that. So the internal stresses of the system of the road surface are pretty radically different than the layers of a tire being stretched and pressed into an air bubble.
I don't think that taxing vehicles based on weight is the right option though. If the pollution is from tires, then tax tires. Do this based on the compounds present in that tire. If someone drives rashly, doing donuts all over the place, then they as a greater polluter will need to pay more. I don't really know anything about Formula 1, but get them to do the race on a single set of tires. Not for pollution, but for solutions that might make it into regular tires.
Weight seems to be one easy to understand and affecting factor. Why not start there?
A bigger car with more cargo capacity was heavier? Is that a surprise? How _much_ heavier was the Outback? Only 100 lbs or so? That's the surprise.
The weight of electric cars is more proportional to their range than their size, and they also shed the ICE powertrain and exhaust/emissions systems, so the breakeven range where they weigh the same as an equivalent ICE car is a range of something like 200-300 miles. Which is why the BMW 3 and Tesla 3 have a similar weight.
The difference is that as new battery chemistries improve energy density, the weight of the electric car can go down. Whereas ICE powertrains are extremely mature with not a lot of low-hanging fruit, so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
Well and total vehicle weight impacts EV range far more than it does ICE range. So the leaf is both small and with shorter range but the gain is a smaller battery pack.
> as new battery chemistries improve energy density
You can have improved density today. You're just not going to like the charge and discharge characteristics very much. EVs have lots of multi variable problems due to their efficiency and utilization aims. To be fair it just is a harder problem to solve but the years of development and lack of clear gains are still showing obvious bottlenecks.
> so significant improvements in power to weight ratio are less likely to be forthcoming.
You can have vastly improved PWR now. Just ride a motorcycle. I think Power train Weight to Total Vehicle Weight is what you really want to think about. In either EV or ICE case there are still plenty of gains to be had here.
The Leaf isn't really that small. It's 10" shorter in length but 4" taller in height than the Tesla or BMW 3, which in terms of aerodynamics would actually make it worse (larger frontal area), but it's a few hundred pounds lighter because it has less range.
> To be fair it just is a harder problem to solve but the years of development and lack of clear gains are still showing obvious bottlenecks.
Are they? The GM EV1 from the 1990s was using lead acid batteries. A decade later hybrids were generally using NiMH. Current electric cars are generally lithium ion with double the energy density of NiMH.
Things like zinc air or lithium air batteries haven't been effectively commercialized yet but they're under development and lithium air batteries would have an energy density on par with gasoline -- without the weight of the ICE powertrain.
By contrast, what's in the pipe that is going to make the ICE powertrain weigh significantly less?
> You can have vastly improved PWR now. Just ride a motorcycle.
That's just changing the size of the vehicle. There exist electric motorcycles that do around 200 miles to a charge and weigh the same as a Harley.
But you obviously can't use a motorcycle for everything you can use a car or truck, and they're incredibly dangerous. As in, for a third of people who ride a motorcycle as their primary vehicle, that's their cause of death.
In 2005, tyre changes were disallowed in Formula One, therefore the compounds were harder as the tyres had to last the full race distance of around 300 km (200 miles). Tyre changes were re-instated in 2006, following the dramatic and highly political 2005 United States Grand Prix, which saw Michelin tyres fail on two separate cars at the same turn, resulting in all Michelin runners pulling out of the Grand Prix, leaving just the three teams using Bridgestone tyres to race.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_tyres#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_United_States_Grand_Prix
The BMW M340i xDrive weighs about 1818 kg.
Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.
The Leaf, of course, is a very budget car that can hardly be compared to the BMW 3 series.
While EVs are just as bad as ICE cars on the tyre microplastics front, they are at least slightly better in terms of brake dust thanks to regenerative braking.
By the way, there are EV tyres - does anyone know why? Is it just marketing or do they have some special properties?
They have lower rolling resistance, in attempt to extract a bit larger range.
Why not but …
> Do this based on the compounds present in that tire.
I’m not certain we’d want to create incentive for less polluting compounds over security.
Also, tires are generally expensive and people are already driving with worn out tires regularly for this reason.
So why not, in absolute, I agree, but it may create issues.
Sure we do, if that pollution causes a greater risk. Those two security costs seam hard to compare though.
Now there’s a fun tax to implement!
https://da.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A6gtafgift (Sorry in danish only)
This would encourage both avoiding tire wear and proper disposal of tires. That assumes obviously that people don't cheat the system by making tires heavier somehow when returning them.
Why?
Because it gives them more taxes, bigger government and as a bonus more spying on citizens.
The Dutch government has been talking about this type of tax for decades. The idea is to put a mandatory live-tracking device in every car that sends data to the government about where you are at all times.
Currently the tax is based on weight and type of energy source of the car and some of the highest taxes on fuel in the world. This boils down to the same as the weight * distance tax. But why keep it simple if you could complicate it further AND get free live spying as a bonus?
Taxing distance doesn't need to track _where_ the car has been, just how far it's gone.
It isn't precisely easy (MOT and tax timings won't line up etc) and arrears rather than advance etc. We definitely have enough data to do a fair approximation - just high operational overheads to collect
Cars get sold, eventually. You put the odometer reading on the paperwork to transfer the car. Check that against tax records. Purchaser has incentive to check that the recorded mileage is correct, otherwise they’ll have to pay the tax. The odometer is already tamper-resistant. Not perfectly so, and there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.
It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.
Sure, but why bother? That would involve a ton of overhead and server time for a system that's still going to miss a lot of travel, thereby limiting revenue. I question whether the added expense of that kind of surveillance system would even recover enough revenue to break even. The same goes for mandatory GPS reporting devices, plus the civil liberties issues associated with such systems would make passing such a tax even more difficult.
Most countries have some sort of annual safety/emissions inspection, so any mileage-based tax could just use the odometer readings from the inspection. Sure, a mechanic could falsify paperwork, but how likely is that when it'll eventually come to light? If you want to sell the car, you're going to have to eventually admit the miles you hid so that they match the odometer reading at the time of title transfer. That means you're going to have no choice but to pay the tax eventually.
No need to try and build a more perfect mouse trap.
15 peoples civil service salaries = $1.5M say.
They will contact local car park owners, municipalities and states who have ANPR cameras, etc. From each, they'll get a spreadsheet of plate no, date/time and camera lat/lon. Many police departments already centralize that info to search for stolen cars etc.
They'll then run the whole lot through a python script to make a database of plate num + annual mileage. They'll then compare that to the self-reported mileage and investigate any underreporting.
Assume that this is implemented in the USA, and 1% of people fake the odometer by 50%. Assume the tax is 5 cents a mile. Total vehicle miles traveled is 3e12 miles, and assume we can easily detect 30% of offenders, due to them driving long distances on highways, and fine all those detected 3x the fraudulent amount. Total takings: $337M.
Clearly worth enforcing.
The analogy is probably a fuel tax that is paid at the point of purchase.
Still, it seems that we could agree that taxes for a vehicle be paid in the jurisdiction where it is registered and just use odometer readings to calculate the distance traveled.
Why would they need a tracking device for this? If Google is to be believed the Dutch government requires periodic vehicle inspections. Couldn't they just go by the odometer difference between inspections to get the mileage?
God damn.
I would have gone with "mandatory service where the odometer is sent to the government, and government keeps track of when last service was done and fines owners who are late"
Sure, you'll under-tax the more efficient cars but I don't necessarily see this as a problem.
You encourage people to use less, and also tax things such as EVs that use more electricity.
Of course it doesn't quite capture everything discussed though.
you'd also have to pair it with a commitment to making IC use more expensive than marginal electricity use.
As for the Netherlands: there are significant grid capacity problems, EV tax is going up due to expiring subsidies (which will double road tax for EVs in about 3 years) and lots of people seem the be very conservative and cling to their ICE cars because as everyone knows it's vital you can drive for 800km without taking a break. Of course, all can be solved by prohibiting people from buying a non-EV. It just means a lot of people won't be able to own a car anymore. I'm not quite sure how that would work out politically.
One could surmise that there is a similar relation with tire wear and therefore pollution from them as well.
But taxing tires is I think a good idea as it is a consumable and the wear and it's impact can be directly measured.
The problem I see with taxing tires is twofold:
- how is taxing going to solve this problem, it's unlikely that it is going to have a significant impact on driving
- can taxes be fed into tire research in a way that reduces the impact on the environment? Are there any solutions that need funding?
We already tax 'distance' by putting tax on the petrol.
I don't think you can tax tires high enough that it will make a difference, but the same is also true if we attempt to tax by weight. Any tax is going to be the equivalent of slapping €10 on a plane ticket. It's not enough to stop the behaviour, but might be enough to keep some people driving on dangerously worn down tires.
It also doesn't matter if the car is an EV or ICE, the behaviour we want to limit is driving. The idea of taxing the tires could of cause lead to development of tires that doesn't shed microplastic.
By we, what do you mean? If this was true, we’d build walkable cities, public transportation and promote home office as much as possible.
It's sadly also the same "we" that is more interested in preserving the status quo in the name of the al might holy economy as it exists today. The same "we" that doesn't want to upset voters. The same "we" who won't vote for the greener option because "we" can't imagine a future different from yesterday.
Obviously there’s some maths needed on how to apply the tax to both ICE and EVs, and to think about edge cases (super efficient but hard on tyres), although my gut says that likely the harder you are on tyres, the harder you’ll be on fuel.
I don't think you're wrong that we assume every EV to weigh as much as a Cybertruck, but there is a weight cost to EV power storage.
This is a very complex problem that is extremely difficult to solve and shouldn't just be dismissed as people just being married to their cars.
However, I'd love to see a less polluting compound used for vehicle tires, which is also cost effective for the end user. In my country the railroad system is totally buggered due to crime and corruption, so there are trucks everywhere. Reducing reliance on semi trucks for freight could possibly reduce the pollution a bit. In my country at least...
Delivery vehicles in my part of the world are so poorly maintained anyway, so they're really massive contributors to other kinds of pollution as well.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/202... Applied Quantum Materials Inc., in Edmonton, Alberta, is developing a specialized reinforcing additive for tires to minimize microplastic release over different road and temperature conditions. Nova Graphene Canada Inc., in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is developing a graphene-enhanced rubber that could reduce tire-wear shedding and extend the life of tires. Stema Punch and Die Inc., in Cambridge, Ontario, is creating specialized compositions for tires to improve their wear and help stop the shed of microplastics.
Think how much plastic that will release.
It's OK because I myself can afford it and we can just tell poor people to use the public transport that doesn't exist.
The public transport that does exist is also expensive and/or unreliable because ideology in government is that cars are better. But that's also ok, I think, anyway doesn't affect me
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Sarcasm aside people really need to stop this reflexive "scientists say X is bad" -> more taxes and higher prices reaction.
Tax tires, move worn tires to a recycling plant, bill a recycling tax when the owner buys a new tire...
... and then set fire to the tires, keep the money for recycling safe in your pocket, and then keep lying about how good is that we "recycle" things.
"In Spain, a recycling plant burns every four days, a figure that has increased since 2018. In 2023, the record was broken with 109 recycling plants that were [deliberately] set on fire" [1]
"In 2019, a tire recycling plant in Seseña burned for days. This fire produced pollution greater than that generated by the city of Madrid for a whole year" [1]
Or grind it and put the stuff in each children park, as currently.
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[1] (In Spanish) https://www.cuatro.com/noticias/sociedad/20240130/alerta-aum...
And don't even bother commenting about electric cars or whatever: electric cars are a minority of the vehicles in circulations, there are a ton of SUVs and the majority of people live far from their workplace and will have to use cars anyway. People living in cities at walking distance from their workplace or served by functioning/efficient/effective public transport are a small lucky minority.
We should really push for public transport (ON RAILS!) and for more work-from-home arrangements.
You might say this is nitpicking, but not everything that's potentially harmful in its dispersed form is plastic. Asbestos, coal dust, and sand dust are not plastics.
For me, it's like calling any shiny metal 'silver' or calling any clear stone a 'diamond' - they may look similar, but they're completely different materials.
Tires with 6/32" to 8/32" of tread are a scam. They get flats, and wear down to the legal minimum (in Texas) of 3/32" very quickly.
I buy tires with 19/32" of tread. No nail has yet managed to go through 19/32" of tread (or that much air gap) plus through the equivalent of a 10-ply design to puncture my tire, at least not until I wear them down to 6/33".
If we wanted puncture-proof, run-flat, handle-like-touring-tires, last-forever tites, we could have them. They are out there.
