SUV Tax is Bogus
Mayor Daley wants to soak SUV owners with a $90 annual fee because he says that they cause more wear and tear on the roads than other cars.
Engineering and transportation exports say that Daley’s premise is baloney because the roads are designed to carry tractor-trailers that are much, much heavier:
They argued that there is virtually no difference between the road damage caused by a 5,401-pound Lexus LX-470 or a 5,070-pound Toyota Sequoia, and the wear and tear caused by a 3,950-pound Ford Crown Victoria, a 4,049-pound Cadillac Deville or a Mercedes Benz S-Class that weighs 4,200 pounds.
“That much extra weight is not going to cause any more damage than a regular passenger vehicle. You’d have to weigh what a truck weighs — at least double the weight of an SUV” to cause additional wear and tear, said Sidney Guralnick, a distinguished professor of civil and architectural engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
