SUV, Truck, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV, sedan, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV.
The culture problem around big vehicles we’ve created with bad regulation and aggressive marketing is depressing.
It isn’t just a culture problem, it’s a tragedy of the commons.
When you’re surrounded by giant vehicles, the only way to
befeel safe and see the road is to have a giant vehicle.The only way to feel safe. The really big ego-support vehicles are no safer than a subcompact to be inside of, but they are far more likely to kill your own family.
Well sure, though not being able to see anything around you when deep in truck/suv traffic is pretty scary in a sedan.
That’s a feeling, not a lack of safety. Intimidating people into buying big cars on purpose is still vile, but the people who cave are giving in to irrationality and putting their feelings above the safety of their kids and of others. Tragedy of the commons is when defecting improves your utility. The SUV/emotional support truck arms race is only decreases the utility of others in exchange for feelings of power.
Reduced visibility while driving is absolutely a lack of safety.
Which does not override the lack of safety of a tall heavy vehicle. Small cars are not less safe than emotional support trucks and full sized SUVs, because the latter get specific exemptions from safety regulations.
“I’m going to increase the probability of killing my kid, innocent hystanders because of this one specific critereon i’ve cherry picked” is an emotional argument.
The feeling of power and safety, itself, has utility. Feelings matter.
No argument that there’s been an active propaganda campaign to make people in smaller cars feel less safe, but propaganda works. You can’t just dismiss it.
I can object to it being used to justify killing kids for a feeling though. Which is what you were doing by suggesting it’s a prisoner’s dilemma.
Object all you like? It doesn’t change the actual reality of what is happening and why people drive murder machines.
Physics says that in a collision, the heavier vehicle will always come out better. Higher mass means more resistance to acceleration, so it will take longer to change speed and impart less force on the occupants. This is one reason why buses sometimes don’t have seatbelts, when the bus collides with much lighter cars it will be largely unaffected.
If everyone has a heavy vehicle, it’s worse overall because of higher kinetic energy causing more dramatic collisions. And obviously significantly worse for everyone outside a car.
Hence the arms race.
Which is offset by the lack of safety regulation, high center of mass, heavier weight to crush the cabin in a rollover, and much higher likelihood of running over your own kids.
Stop spreading propaganda by cherry picking,
Which is offset by the lack of safety regulation
Citation needed. SUVs tend to be modern which would generally have stricter safety regulations
high center of mass, heavier weight to crush the cabin in a rollover
I wouldn’t have though that rollovers are a common cause of deaths or serious injuries in cars. The higher center of gravity is going to be offset by the wider wheel base, so it depends on the car.
Traction seems like a much bigger problem, although many SUVs solve this with bigger wheels.
and much higher likelihood of running over your own kids.
Agree 100%
Stop spreading propaganda by cherry picking,
Look, fuck SUVs, obviously. If you aren’t a psychopath you should not feel safe driving those things. My point was specifically about the physics of collisions. What you’re bringing up can’t be answered with physics because it depends on the details of the car, we need real world statistics to continue this conversation.
“Buy a new big car because it will be later year than a new small car and thus have newer safety features” is an incredibly wild way of drawing the exact opposite conclusion to the one you should have from that data.
Citation needed. SUVs tend to be modern which would generally have stricter safety regulations
what? that makes no sense. SUVs in the US are generally regulated as light trucks, which have historically had laxer safety requirements for a given model year
That’s not the tragedy of the commons, and that’s not why everyone drives turboencabulators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
It is, I shit you not, a cold war tariff on fucking chickens. There’s some other shit that’s glommed on over the centuries, but the mad-science breeding program to create a pickup truck big enough to swallow the sun started with a stupid trade dispute over chickens between the krauts, the frogs, and the yanks.
it’s a tragedy of the commons.
A gentle heads up that the guy who coined that term was a huge piece of shit, and was almost certainly wrong.
Dead link
The basic notion regarding the exploitation of limited, unregulated public resources leading to depletion is significantly older than that term or the essay with that title..
The notion is echoed by a lot of thinkers, including that of Karl Marx in his deconstruction of capitalism. We need to make a society aware of this tendency much the way we have to be mindful, as a society, of prejudice divisionism.
Otherwise, overexploitation of common resources is going to kill us if we can’t find a way to circumvent the problem, such as by reaching out into space as local resources become dire.
It’s also politically wanted. American car companies can’t compete with overseas manufacturers in the small car market so regulations were written to subsidize SUVs and trucks.
It’s funny too that SUVs and trucks also have themselves gotten bigger. I own an 11 year old SUV and I feel dwarfed on the road by every other new SUV I see. Trucks are insane too, some are so big they don’t fit in regular parking spots. Compare that to older pickups with the same bed space that are smaller than some sedans.
some are so big they don’t fit in regular parking spots
And American “regular parking spots” are already much bigger than those in the rest of the world.
True too. There’s one guy at my apartment complex who drives a Ford F350 Super Duty. The monstrosity juts out like 1/4 of an entire parking space into the already tight road we have. Makes navigating into nearby spots a nightmare.
https://xkcd.com/562/, but with the back!
Its deadly.
Failed state which retains cold war revenge tax.
So glad they put that thick protective white line there so I know I won’t be hit 🥰
It’ll be super protective when it snows!
Ironically enough, this is how the pavements are in the ski resort I live in. It’s a “shared zone”, pedestrians have the same rights as vehicles. It slows everyone down because nobody knows when the next braying snowboarder trust-fund baby is going to stagger out in front of you.
Oh and as for the snow, we have adorable little mini snowploughs for the pedestrian bit
Edit to add pic -
Of course it uploaded upside down
And the snow will pile up on that lane, because the street needs to be free and nothing else.
Why don’t kids go outside anymore???
If you let them out unsupervised, I’m calling the cops!
kids don’t play outside because they don’t want their last moments on this earth to be recorded with this in the corner
What in the stupid is this?
Cheaper than a sidewalk, apparently.
The cost being the life of pedestrians? This is insane.
That doesn’t show up on the balance sheet 😬
What do you mean? The white line keeps the cars out…
It’s an impenetrable force field apparently.
If you are walking you’re either poor or up to no good, in both cases we don’t want you around these parts. Oh, your kids need to walk? Don’t be lazy and DRIVE them where they need to go!
Don’t be lazy and DRIVE
For the briefest of moments I felt a spark of blinding hot rage in my heart. Now I am left with the lingering feeling of wanting to smash my head against a rock.
Thank you for that experience.
use a bike with a baby seat or passenger seat instead of driving
Sometimes I’m driving in the night and I just see old women in work uniforms and a lunch bag walking by themselves on a tiny dirt path on the side of the road to a bus stop, with no lights except my headlights. Shits terrifying and depressing. Conservatives are constantly virtue signaling with child trafficking, but they don’t even want to fix the basic infrastructure that allows people to be preyed on
Why even allow people in this neighborhood? Just have cars and no people
Don’t worry, self driving cars will get us there eventually
Megatron, is that you?
This what I hate about North America. Non walkable neighbourhoods.
Weirdly enough it is a walkable neighborhood legit this is the entire street in the picture, for some reason they decided to paint these people lanes instead of just leaving it.
There is no pavement/sidewalk…
Hardly walkable
sharing the road with cars is not walkable
Can you believe it that some see walkable neighbourhoods as a conspiracy? I just can’t wrap my head around why…
Which is funny because anti-communism and anti-unionism were factors in the design layout of the American suburb…
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/workplace/430312/shelter-against-communism/
Y’all can’t hear it because I built a deep subterranean insulated bunker to protect the local ecosystem from the noice, but I am screaming “I HATE LIVING IN THIS FUCKING NIGHTMARE SOCIETY” over and over and over again, as I am want to do.
Is that a pedestrian symbol or the chalk outline of a pedestrian who got hit?
Must be a pedestrian symbol. If it was a chalk outline, it would stretch for two blocks.
Yes.
Next they’ll eliminate the stripe and put up share-the-road signs with the stick figure
And the carbrains get mad about it because they don’t want to share the road because that’s communism
The presence of the paint makes this nightmare area more walkable than plenty of places in the Failed States of America. I once had the misfortune of living in a place where the presence (or much more often, absence) of sidewalk was completely up to the owner of the property the stretch of road in question abutted. The rare property owner who chose to add sidewalk created a completely useless, disconnected decoration.
There’s a storage unit near my neighborhood built on a stroad without a sidewalk, they built a sidewalk that stretches only within the bounds of the storage property.
On that regard: Storage units and hotels are so weird because if they get built in the suburbs no one will bat an eye (despite their density). But if its an apartment complex people lose their minds.
Lots of cities mandate new construction has to build sidewalks in zones without any. I think the idea is that eventually, as long as the sidewalk is up to code, new buildings will handle adding sidewalk instead of the city.
It’s a very long term plan that makes these long term idiotic stretches, but it’s not the worst way to do something that would otherwise not happen.
Wow it’s like you guys are trying as hard as possible to not put in sidewalks.
Soooo…a sidewalk without the extra pavement?
And not an inch of lawn was sacrificed
fuck lawns. uproot that shit and grow vegetables. or weed. or both
Wow, I sure am glad that the kerb is there to protect those blades of grass!
I’m just wondering why that corpse was wearing such an unhealthy corset.
Unrealistic beauty standards. The corset is the reason they died.
