Last year I wrote a long post about why people shouldn’t buy SUV’s. The gist of the argument is that they’re more expensive to buy and refuel than regular cars, less safe, and worse for the environment. An article from Slate has a few points that I missed :

Cities throughout California?the nation’s largest car market?prohibit the heaviest SUVs on many of their residential roads. The problem is, they don’t seem to know they’ve done it.

I discovered this secret ban after noticing the signs at both ends of my narrow Los Angeles-area street (a favorite cut-through route for drivers hoping to avoid tie-ups on bigger roads). The signs clearly prohibit vehicles over 6,000 pounds.
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It turns out every big SUV and pickup is too heavy for my street…If you look at the manufacturer’s specs for these vehicles, you’ll discover that they all have a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 6,000 pounds.
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It’s no accident the automakers churn out so many SUVs that break the 6K barrier. By doing so, these “trucks” (and that’s how they’re classified by the U.S. Department of Transportation) qualify for a huge federal tax break. If you claim you use a 3-ton truck exclusively for work, you can write it off immediately. All of it. Up to $100,000 (in fact, Congress raised the limit from $25,000 just last year). Heavy SUVs qualify for similar state tax breaks in California (up to $25,000) and elsewhere. These vehicles are also exempt from the federal “gas guzzler tax” because they’re trucks. (And you probably know that many SUVs are exempt from the tougher gas mileage and safety standards of cars because they’re classified as trucks, but that’s another story.)
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Some proponents of heavy SUVs will argue that these weight limits are outdated or that they should apply only to registered commercial vehicles. Nonsense.

Six-thousand pounds does the same damage to roads (not to mention pedestrians) that it did before the SUV craze. I don’t know about your state, but California’s ongoing budget crisis doesn’t exactly leave cash to burn for road repair. (California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the average L.A. driver pays $700 a year in vehicle repairs because of crummy roads.) Yet despite the increased road wear their vehicles cause, heavy SUV owners can take tax breaks that mean they pony up much less to the tax system that funds street maintenance.

And frankly, a lot of these heavy SUVs are commercial vehicles by any fair definition. Remember that those owners who take the federal and state tax breaks are declaring they use their vehicles mostly or entirely for work. Often they’re doctors, real estate agents, or small business owners. If California and the feds are willing to write off SUVs as work vehicles, why shouldn’t the state also regulate them as work vehicles?

As it stands now, big-SUV drivers have it both ways: They use their trucklike status when it benefits them, yet they ignore the more onerous restrictions that “real” truck drivers face.

Okay, we can argue endlessly about whether or not SUV’s are the greatest form of transportation ever or a curse from Satan, but I’d think we can all agree that the laws should apply to everyone equally, right?

There’s no question that SUV’s cause more damage to the road, more pollution, and are more dangerous. With those risks come problems that are remedied through the use of tax dollars like road repairs, police and fire officials who respond to accident scenes, and the costs associated with having a worse environment like loss of productivity and Medicare costs due to air-pollution related health problems. You can be selfish about the what you drive, but the results are something we all pay for.

What makes this an even bigger slap in the face is that these loopholes go beyond the problem of SUV owners not paying their fair share. With the ability to write off the entire costs of a motorized beast that’s being used primarily for commuting, these owners are essentially being paid to do the damage they do. And just because they’ve gotten their way around being regulated doesn’t mean that the costs go away, it means the rest of us who aren’t trying to game the system are getting stuck with the bill.

I’ll stop here before I get started on my angry rant about how tax avoidance is the most unpatriotic thing any American can do (wars on terrorism aren’t free). If you’ve got a few minutes, check out the rest of the article I linked to. It’s hyperlink rich, so there’s a treasure trove of anti-SUV information waiting for you.