Instead of or in addition to speed limits, roads should have both a momentum and kinetic energy limit that apply for all drivers without a CDL.

Want to drive your dual axel lift-kit F350 that weighs 10x as much as the average car? Cool, you know your rights! You've just got to go $\sqrt{10}$ times slower, it's only fair.

An alternative that isn't quite so draconian, and doesn't have such a hard cutoff would be to have a tax on kinetic energy. Just install this little speed tracker (privacy nightmare, but hey, that's why this is only 23% serious) and then you only have to pay for the kinetic energy you actually use!

Everyone wins, yay bipartisanship!

@xgranade isn't there a per-axle tax and a weight limit per axle that kind of approximates this?

@xgranade when the idea that self-driving cars might be a real possibility was new to me (maybe 10 or 15 years ago), I expected to see more development of traffic-monitoring sensors in non-self-driving cars, and more ability for driver assistance to warn about dangerous behavior, and thought it might be good if the cars started sending videos of dangerous behavior to insurance companies, who could then set prices according to behavior

@bob @xgranade I wouldn’t mind having this extend to weight of the vehicle period so that bigger cars were also taxed more. Heavier cars are more wear and tear on roads, after all.

@xgranade This rhymes with my contention that every road user should have access to the same amount of kinetic energy as a typical car. Which means cyclists get to have a 50-cal.