This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn’t fit in many places around here it’s owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
Follow up: We had PBOT patrolling the neighborhood today for the first time ever. This block, specifically. I have to assume that one of you called them up and told them about this truck. Well guess what? A few dozen cars on this block got ticketed for things like parking contraflow, expired registrations, unapproved window tints, etc. Literally about half the cars on this street, yellow cards on every other windshield. You know who didn’t get a ticket? The big white Denali, which was parked about 5 feet behind the stop sign this morning. Too close by law, but apparently not close enough for PBOT to issue a citation. So to whatever fucking dumbass thought that cops are the solution, you didn’t improve our safety at all and you cost my safely-parked neighbors probably around $1000 in petty citations. I said multiple times in this thread that cops really aren’t the solution, even when they’re enforcing on your behalf they’re biased by culture. You didn’t help at all, in fact you arguably made the situation worse, and I hope you call you council members / PBOT office and request local restrictions on oversized vehicles or a road diet re-design of your street as penance.
Get the city to install chicanes with trees planted in them. You can’t just roll over those and a landship like that is going to have to slow down a lot to maneuver through them.
But yeah, I’d love tax brackets depending on car size. Huge trucks pay more, kei cars pay less. That would make a lot of sense for city liveability and road maintenance.
Ironically, that effort is what landed us in our current predicament. There was a clean air push, and the government wanted to start regulating fuel efficiency in vehicles. They were going to start requiring vehicles to hit certain efficiency minimums. But auto manufacturers lobbied to add a tiny little “efficiency can reduce as vehicle size increases” provision. They said it was because larger cars were naturally less efficient, so they needed that exception to be able to reasonably hit the efficiency targets.
In reality, what happened is the auto manufacturers started making larger and larger cars, so they didn’t have to deal with making efficient vehicles. Because the less efficient engines are cheaper to produce at scale and they can sell them for more. They started doing huge advertisement and astroturfing campaigns, to get people into the “bigger is better” mindset for cars… And it fucking worked. Americans almost universally drive massive cars now, purely because auto manufacturers didn’t want to be held to efficiency standards.
Well, yeah, if the car makers can add exceptions to the law and turn it upside down then the law becomes useless.
I explicitly wouldn’t allow that exception. If larger cars are less efficient then disincentivizing their use by means of higher taxes is clearly beneficial to society. If you want to drive that three-ton gas guzzler then you can surely afford that 30% higher vehicle tax. If you can’t, might I interest you in this comparatively efficient and tax-reduced Subaru Sambar?
Mind you, I would apply different rules to things like semi trucks that (at least in my part of the world) you can’t drive without a special license. But if you can drive it with a regular European class B license then the tax should scale progressively with size and mass because making larger and less efficient cars unattractive is specifically the point.
Holy shit, TIL about Chicanes! I’m definitely going to lobby my city for those!