Some SUVs Have a Serious Weight Problem
Terence Davis packed tennis gear and two boys into his black Mercedes-Benz ML320 and drove along residential streets to a park in Santa Monica one recent Wednesday. He didn’t realize he was breaking the law.
“You’re kidding,” said the 57-year old.
Like many locals queried that day, Davis didn’t know that almost all residential streets in Santa Monica prohibit vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating -- the heaviness of a car or truck when loaded -- of more than 6,000 pounds. Davis’ sport utility vehicle rates 6,283 pounds, and other SUVs, such as the Cadillac Escalade, are even porkier. A few vans, including the GMC Safari All-Wheel-Drive Passenger Van, also exceed the limit.
More of those heavier vehicles seem to be taking to the road. In the last year, sales of luxury SUVs, which tend to weigh more than their cheaper cousins, jumped 20%, according to research by J.D. Power & Associates.
State and federal tax breaks for vehicles above 6,000 pounds also have encouraged Californians to buy bigger.
Daily traffic by heavy vehicles can crack roads, which cost from $1 to $8 a square foot to repave, said engineers and transportation planners. But the weight limits intended to protect the streets may have been passed in the first half of the 20th century when commercial trucks weighed three tons and passenger cars didn’t, they said. But times have changed.
Still, since weight rules tend to lie in municipal code sections about commercial vehicles, cities rarely enforce the laws when it comes to private vehicles.
“The intent of the law was looking at gross violators,” said Santa Monica police Lt. Frank Fabrega. “If there’s a mom driving down the street taking the kids to soccer, and we say, ‘By the way, we’ve got to weigh your vehicle,’ is that prudent or reasonable?”
Besides, said Lucy Dyck, Santa Monica’s transportation planning manager, if cities are worried about potholes in roads, they should operate bus systems to discourage people from driving or build speed bumps to prevent heavy cars from barreling down roads.
“There are laws against raising chickens,” Dyck said. “Cities have a lot of laws. Somebody has to prioritize what you’re out paying attention to.”
Pasadena police spokeswoman Janet Pope said officers would enforce the law if someone complained, but probably wouldn’t issue a ticket.
“We’d look at other options ... such as asking the owner to keep the car on the driveway instead of parking it on the street,” Pope said.
Some traffic engineers said strict enforcement may not be necessary because the real road crushers are well over the 6,000-pound figure.
“It’s once you get to a much higher limit that the damage starts growing exponentially,” said Hamid Bahadori of the Automobile Club of Southern California. “It’s really 18,000 pounds.”
But the lack of enforcement nettled Andy Bowers, a senior editor for the internet magazine Slate.com, enough that he wrote a column about the issue last month.
Bowers, who lives on a weight-restricted street in Los Angeles and owns a small SUV himself, said recently that he appreciates the merits of the roomy vehicles.
“But I also appreciate that weight limits are put in place for a reason,” he said. “We all know how bad L.A. streets are.”
He would like police to conduct occasional crackdowns to keep heavy vehicles from driving on roads where they don’t belong.
“We all know we’re not supposed to go over the speed limit and we’re careful about it,” Bowers said. “But by and large, we don’t know large SUVs shouldn’t be driving on the streets.”
Several dealers said they didn’t realize that some of their cars might be over the weight limit allowed on residential streets.
“When you say it, I know I’ve seen signs prohibiting trucks from being used in residentials,” said John Symes, who owns a Cadillac dealership in Pasadena. “I didn’t know that applied to sport utilities.”
The line between commercial and private vehicles was further blurred by changes in a tax law giving buyers of vehicles over 6,000 pounds a break if they use the SUVs for business purposes. Practically anyone can take advantage of the law, which was aimed at stimulating the economy and helping small business owners, said Long Beach tax advisor Kathleen Hansen.
Davis said he bought his ML320 simply because he has two kids who like camping, soccer and tennis.
“Where do you put everything?” he asked. “Later, I want to get a smaller car. I’m looking into a Prius.”
For now, he thinks police should focus on the Mack trucks lumbering down sleepy streets, and policymakers should update laws that seem out of date.
“Things have changed,” he said.
Davis, a composer, likened the weight restriction to a law governing royalties that doesn’t cover the new digital media. “It’s like when they made the law about record players and recordings. That was before we had DVDs and CDs.”
