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The Reason Why Are Trucks Getting Bigger

(toddofmischief.blogspot.com)
173 points yasp | 1 comments | 11 Aug 22 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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bambax ◴[11 Aug 22 13:49 UTC] No.32425510[source]▶
An idea for a regulation would be to measure the ratio of maximum weight of living things that a vehicle can transport / weight of vehicle when empty, and make this ratio grow progressively bigger.

The ratio is probably around 0.1 today on average (just an intuition, I don't have the actual numbers), and ideally it should be close to 1, or maybe over 1.

For an ebike for example, it's around 3.

Moving 2-5 tons of metal to transport just one human being is positively insane.

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1. dont__panic ◴[11 Aug 22 17:00 UTC] No.32428663[source]▶
The ratio is tricky. We don't really need vehicles to potentially carry more people -- we need folks to buy smaller vehicles.

If we try to penalize people for buying a two-seater truck, they'll just buy an even bigger extended cab with more seats. This is pretty much the exact kind of metric game the article cites as causing these giant trucks in the first place -- companies were penalized for building small fuel-inefficient trucks, so they just built big fuel-inefficient trucks that weren't penalized as much.