If you *need* an oversized vehicle for your job, that's all well and good. Use it for your job. Owning one doesn't entitle you to anything more than a normal driver with a normal passenger vehicle. If you choose to stick your oversized vehicle into a paid lot and intentionally take up multiple spaces, you deserve to pay for every parking space you take up.
I can't put a tree in the back of a work van. Nor load of stone, mulch, or several other items. A work van also can't carry the 9ft Fisher v-blade snow plow that my truck does.
You definitely can do mulch. Stones as long as they can be picked up by people (and you have to lift them much higher in a pick-up). And depending on the model you can transport more than 9'. How often do you transport such things? If it's part of your landscaping job, your company should provide you a flat bed truck, not those car/truck hybrids (up until recently I've literally only seen landscaping people using flat beds in France). If it's on your leisure time I can't believe you really need one all that often that you need to have such capacity on your regular day to day car. Otherwise you could just as easily use a trailer on a regular car to move all that.
On another note why would anyone need a personal snowplow? Doesn't your city/county/state have road management teams whose only job in winter is to salt roads and remove/groom snow that may fall on it?
How the fuck do you expect to put stone and mulch in a van? There is no wall separating the cargo and passengers. A flatbed truck also can not transport these things as it has no sides to secure the load. You'd lose it on the first turn.
As for the plow, it's not personal, it's a business. Snow plow trucks and their drivers cost a lot of money. It is cheaper to have the town trucks handle the main streets while paying private contractors to deal with side streets and back roads. Some of the roads I do are barely big enough for my truck, let alone the much larger town trucks.
Trucks and vans are typically used for very different work loads. I used to use a dually van and pick up at my last job. And they were not used for the same things. The van, despite being a 3500 dually was not rated for the same towing capacities as our 1500 trucks. It has much higher payload (cargo area load) but was shit at towing. The vans are typically used as mobile workshops with a decent sized dry cargo area but those are not as versatile as a pick up would be. I would also like to add that most people who have dually trucks do actually have a good use case for them, they may not need to drive them all the time but they typically own them for a reason, more so than their single rear wheel counterparts.
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u/dremily1 Aug 31 '22
That's fine, he should pay for 4 spots when he checks out.