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by eertami 1433 days ago
The government built the roads, to a specific specification of assumed car sizes. If cars get so big that they break these assumptions then roads start getting blocked, or you start to have streets that some cars are too big to fit through (already happens in older cities in Europe) - and this would adversely affect other people.

What next, are speed limits also leading us to a prison society, because people don't have the freedom to drive at 100mph through the city? It's a shared public infrastructure that needs rules to keep people safe and alive. You could always build your own private roads if you want to be free of these oppressive regulations on the shared public highway.

4 comments

As a society where we all pay for these things, we all get a say.

If you want to live in a place where large vehicles are banned, you can always go build your own private roads...

The cars on the road still fit these specifications, you cannot build an arbitrary large car and drive it around. If you really cared about specifications mismatch then the first thing you needed to ban would be buses, each several times bigger and heavier than the biggest SUV offered to consumers.
It sounds more like the older cities in Europe are outdated and need to update their aging infrastructure than us Americans need to take drastic action against larger vehicles. Nobody in the US has ever had a problem with large vehicles previously.
We didn't have large vehicles in the way we do now. Going back and looking at the sizes of trucks – real, functional, agricultural/construction use pickup trucks – over the decades shows dramatic size increases.
Exactly, if I can afford it, can I drive a tank around that hogs two lanes? Why is that illegal? Why is nobody protesting the government banning Juul?