So yeah, sociopath. Shrug

That is the definition of unbridled selfishness, bordering on sociopathy.

If this is truly what you think and drives how you behave then you are a leech on everyone else that will follow in your footsteps.

I won’t have children either, but I still want the world to be better for them, and I do the best within my means to make that happen.

People like you, when they’re competent, are the ones that rise to the top of the corporate ladder and own businesses that expound the worst parts of capitalistic society. Greed, selfishness, disdain for the plight of others, no thought for consequences as long as they don’t affect you personally.

So, don’t care if you don’t want to. But internalize that you’re a POS if that’s actually how you feel.

I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there’s merit. Seems like it’s a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I’ve learned stuff today!

I still don’t think it’s as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.

There’s a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I’ve seen. It’s a shame, because they really have the resources, it’s just all such a mess.

I lived in California for 11 years and had out of state plates for the entire time, legally. Not even weird. There’s so many ways and reasons that you can live in a state, or work in a state full time and legally be able to register your vehicle in another state.

Registration fees are simply not the way. There HAS to be some kind of equitable use tax or fee.

A gas tax seems pretty dang effective to me. It doesn’t capture electric vehicles correctly, but honestly right now we WANT to encourage the use of electric vehicles so I don’t think it’s quite time to flip the table and try to implement a new system.

We’re still in a transition period and we need to do everything possible to discourage gas powered vehicles, and taxing the shit out of consumer unleaded and diesel is an awesome way to do it. Honestly, anyone suggesting otherwise raises my hackles. There’s not that many electric vehicles on the road in the USA, even in urban California.

I’m suspicious of any new laws that would reduce the costs of fossil fueled vehicles while offloading more costs to electric ones.

Not obvious, there’s tons of holes in that plan and I’ll throw down a couple I thought of while I brush my teeth. I lived in California for years.

-Out of state plates are not included. Sooo many out of state vehicles

-This has an outsized impact on shipping and industry such as work vans, small business trucks (can be argued that it should be, but I’m not convinced that the cost should be borne by those areas vs the bajillion people that don’t carpool to/from LA everyday)

-A heavy vehicle pays a premium at registration, but what if it’s only driven a couple times a year? Vs a lighter vehicle that drives 40k miles in a year. Has to have some kind of use component to plan.

I’d argue that it’s way more complicated than any sentence that starts with “the obvious thing to do…” Everyone wants a simple and fair solution buddy life is not that simple and California’s traffic, transportation, road maintenance, and road based industry is about as complicated as it gets.