A City Fights Back Against Heavyweight Cars
Oversized pickups and SUVs are exacting a deadly toll on urban streets. Here’s how one US city plans to push back.
Imagine that you, a city resident, are contemplating swapping out your mid-sized sedan for a full-sized pickup truck. And not just any pickup truck; your eye has fallen upon a heavy-duty one, like the Chevy Silverado HD or the Ford F-250. These are machines intended for towing and hauling, but they’re increasingly popular as passenger vehicles in the US, despite their massive proportions. At 6,695 pounds, the F-250 is 23 inches taller and more than twice as heavy as a Honda Accord.
If you’re a city or state leader, you have a limited arsenal of tools available to discourage residents from operating these behemoths on local streets. A proposal from the District of Columbia would add a new one: The city is poised to require owners of vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds to pay an annual $500 vehicle registration fee], almost seven times the cost to register a modest sedan. No other US jurisdiction has created such a forceful financial disincentive against the biggest, heaviest car models.
“You can’t ban sales of these things,” says Mary Cheh, a D.C. councilmember who developed the new fee structure, “but you can make them pay their own way.”
In other words, a D.C. resident registering a heavy-duty pickup or SUV who would have paid $775 over five years in the old fee structure will now have to fork over $2,500. Notably, no exception is available for residents claiming that they need a heavy-duty truck or SUV for their work.
DC Councilwoman hates pickup trucks and intends to tax the shit out of them to dissuade ownership, even among working people who might need them.
Tell me just how out of touch DC is from regular Americans.
The morons of dc have the precise government that they desire and voted for. Fuck’em all till their ears bleed, gooder and harder.
Then again, Congress can overrule them, if it wanted to do so. The fact there is a DC government at all is by permission of Congress.
That loud rustling sound you’re hearing, that is the sound of every plumber, roofer, HVAC guy, glassier, and painter that still lives in DC all simultaneously filing business registration papers in Virginia.
I can only pray that the gods of the copybook headings decide to send an angel to futz with Councilwoman Cheh’s air conditioner soon… May she experience the full fury of a DC summer without A/C as she waits for an evil capitalist in an evil pickup truck to come and repair it.
If that is the case.
They’ll give Registered Biz exemptions.
And extort feom johnny I want a pickup cause I like them.
Count on it.
She’s going to find that most of the people who’d buy such a pickup don’t live in D.C. but northern Virginia.
“One ought to be wary of that which they wish for, lest they have it.”
Untouched will be the black suburban of their security detail
RWC,
Senior Government bureaucrats never pay for their security, much less the wheels.
The difference between a conservative and a liberal:
If a conservative does not like pickup trucks, they do not buy one.
If a liberal does not like pickup trucks, they try to ban them so no one can buy them at all.
That’s like the conservative vs. liberal definition of “charity”.
Conservative charity: choosing to give to a cause you favor.
Liberal “charity”: raising other people’s taxes to send to a cause you favor.
I grew up in DC and worked there for decades. She’s acting as if they actually maintain the streets.
They don’t. Their potholed and crappy for the most part. One winter, they plowed and sanded nothing. The only plowed streets were from Mayor4Life Marion Barry’s mansion to the city hall. Everyone else was screwed.
And I can guarantee there aren’t pickups all over the place in the city. You rarely see them unless they are trades dudes. Nowhere to park. Can’t fit down narrow streets.