Difficult to accomplish much in a jurisdiction as small as DC. If taxes are noticeably higher than in VA and MD, people will simply buy gas there instead of in town.
Mass transit also isn’t an option in a world where the school will actually call a parent and say:
Your child sat in the grass during recess and the back of her legs have been itchy for 30 minutes. If you aren’t able to pick her up in 45 minutes our sop requires that we call an ambulance and send her to the emergency room.
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Hi from Queensland, Australia, picking my jaw off the floor at the staggeringly low cost of registration for normal vehicles. My last rego for the family sedan (1236kg / 2725lbs) cost 755AUD, or about 525USD. Can we get some other countries or states chiming in with normal vehicles registration costs for comparison?
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So you are saying we need mass transit and public healthcare?
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Germany : about 30€
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Also in Queensland here, though that includes compulsory third party insurance. For other people reading this, CTP covers people hurt in accidents. The example from D.C. seems too low to include any insurance.
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Yeah, insurance and car registration are two entirely different things. Car registration is just the admin cost for entering your car into the system.
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That’s correct, though I suspect that even the Netherlands doesn’t account for the damage that heavy vehicles cause to infrastructure through this method, because relative damage depends not just on axle weight, but axle weight to the fourth power.
Heavy cars and trucks are absolutely being heavily subsidised by everyone else.
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For real, be it cars or mass transit, not everyone can leave work at a moment’s notice short of “your child is dead,” and it may still take 45 minutes to drive to the school!
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The giant SUV/ Truck people are not buying them for functionality. They have been marketed (aggressively) an image and that’s what they’re paying for. They’re not buying them because they have to haul a lot of crap, or tow, or any of it. At the extreme are the rolling coal assholes, but yeah it’s a luxury item in a particular demographic, just like a high end sports car or a high-end sedan would be (of course you’ve got yer mix n’ match with the giant Lincoln SUVs and trucks).
They are not throwing down their dusty worn work gloves and battered tool box into the cab, having a crane dump a load of construction materiel in their truck bed/ hitching up a backhoe and driving off into the sunset on a dirt road across a worksite. TV ads are lying to you.
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But so many times, real people who need B to offset the externalities of A are left out in the cold when only policy A is implemented.
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In CA, this year’s registration for a 2014 VW Passat is $218, while our 2013 VW Tiguan is $202. The Passat is due for its smog check, so maybe add $40? The registration fee goes down a little each year, so next year the Tiguan fee should be under $200.
(In USD, so 313AUD)
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