It's the good Christian thing to do

Isn't this just the road trying to solve the problem for us? I say we should have more ditches and guardrail barriers!

Fuck that. The problem isnt that people want bigger cars. The problem is that NHTSA's CAFE standards favor manufacture of larger cars.

CAFE slowly reduces the amount of emissions that vehicles can have, but they fucked it up: the required reductions are greatest on the smallest, most efficient cars, and lowest on the largest vehicles. Manufacturers "comply" with these standards by dropping their smallest cars from their lineup, and increasing the sizes of everything left on the market.

Fix the fucking standards to favor smaller cars, and manufacturers will follow.

At least here in Cali we do. My HD truck gets an extra $500~ a year tax on top of the Gas guzzler tax I paid when new. Plus the fuel costs/taxes for that. Compared to my other cars I pay about $600 more for newal on it. The Average car is like $245 a year but the truck is like $840.

Definitely fine with paying the extra taxes though. I use more infrastructure and I also require additional strengthening of crash systems and cause road damage so I’m not opposed.

Rather than tax them a bit more, which won't actually improve safety if people just opt to pay the tax and drive them anyway, why not just straight up legislate weight limits for private vehicles, with commercial licensing as done with cargo trucks expanded to fit more conventional vehicles driven for commercial purposes that have to be large and heavy? Car companies will start making smaller cars again real quick if they're not allowed to sell them otherwise

And they're not meant to stop cars but rather redirect them

It would be 5k lb at high speed. I would say higher than the speed limit just to be safe. There would also be specs for height, etc.

In the Netherlands you pay a road tax every 3 months. The amount is based on weight (because a heavier car does more damage to a road) but also on eco label. So an electric car that has the best eco label can have less tax than an old (but much lighter) diesel car.

New lanes don't reduce congestion. When you add new lanes, drivers who had previously avoided those routes suddenly think "oh more lanes, it'll be less congested" and it just fills back up to capacity. Except it's worse because there's even more cars now in the extra lanes you just built. Adding lanes makes congestion worse, not better.

What we need to do is get people off the roads and onto public transportation. That's how you reduce congestion - get people off the roads. Unfortunately that means actually investing in public transportation, so that'll never happen in the US.

The guard rails are pretty good enough as is. When you hear of something like this it's very often caused by lack of maintenance/poor installation/assembly. There is a guy on youtube that has videos of a whole bunch of guardrails that are simply unsafe because they are missing bolts or were assembled incorrectly.

And remember - guard rails are meant to slow you down enough to try and prevent a worse situation rather than always turning you back into the roadway to create a larger accident with other traffic or stop you completely.

fuel eff requirements tied to weight

just another oil company + car company scam

There's a guard rail guy on YouTube who investigates how the guard rails have been fitted. They often have bolts and the tension wire incorrectly installed so much so that they don't even effectively stop small vehicles. That guy lost a family member to this type of accident and so is on a crusade kinda.

I'm willing to bet the super tall pickups and SUVs are more likely to hop over those steel guardrails, too. Related: Those sloped concrete dividers that have a slightly shallower slope at their wider bottom? Those are super effective, because that bottom slope deflects the vehicle's front wheel, causing it to turn slightly away from the barrier instead of continuing to smash through it.