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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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
Can you believe it that some see walkable neighbourhoods as a conspiracy? I just can’t wrap my head around why…
Wow it’s like you guys are trying as hard as possible to not put in sidewalks.
Next they’ll eliminate the stripe and put up share-the-road signs with the stick figure
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.
I’m just wondering why that corpse was wearing such an unhealthy corset.
Unrealistic beauty standards. The corset is the reason they died.
What dystopian fuckery is this?
Idk. We have similar things around here for when they want to add more walkable spaces and less space for cars but they cannot or do not have the money for a full walkable path. Although usually they put some plastic bollards to avoid people parking or stopping on it.
They ain’t bad, usually is in town and the max speed is 20 - 30 Km/h with the exception of main roads inside the town/city which is 50 Km/h. So although a proper sidewalk would be better they ain’t bad and they are quick to install.
Except that they are bad if you consider safety and convenience of pedestrians. It is a testimonial of terrible planning in the first hand and the most ‘I don’t give a shit’ solution second hand.
Yeah, it seems like there should be something to separate the vehicle traffic from the pedestrian traffic though. Like some kind of low concrete barrier that would actually curb an errant car’s trajectory and direct it back on to the road.
Some are exaggerating a little bit how much a curb protects pedestrians… And yeah that’s the correct approach but as I said this fast to implement, the rest can be done later.
In our local case we are talking about reducing car space in benefit of extra pedestrian space, although keeping safe distanced. Not like the picture were there wasn’t pedestrian space at all to begin with.
Yeah but money though…
I keep seeing joggers in my area choosing the bike lane over the sidewalk, presumably because asphalt is softer than concrete sidewalks. If paving a ped lane next to the bike lane is what it takes to isolate these wrong-way bike-lane-jogging scufflaws, then let’s just do it and be done with it. We can cannibalize a car lane to make it happen. >:-)
Sidewalks in car-brained areas are super dangerous to jog on. People backing out of their driveway or turning across the road at 10-20km/h without looking. Trip hazards. Ankle destroying driveway cutouts or curved surfsces. Uneven grading.
Ya. I think it’s more the cut-outs that they’re trying to avoid. Hard to blame them.
Would running on the road be safer, though??
Running against traffic on the road improves pretty much all of these and puts the new threat (oncoming cars) under their control.
It does leave the runner vulnerable to cars turning right (in drive-on-the-right countries) though if they aren’t hyper aware of it.
I’m a bit late to reply, but this is a great explanation. I always assumed it was just the softness of asphalt vs concrete on the knees, but there is absolutely a case to be made for visibility. It’s unexpected as a cyclist, but I am 100% empathetic to the struggles of anyone not in a car, more specifically one of those Dodge Ram 3500s with smokestacks and truck nuts on the bumper that seem to be so popular right now. :-)
More like it was a guy who got flattened by a car and got painted over, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you try and walk there
Imagine seeing this when house hunting and still buying the house. You’d have to have worms in your brain to want one of these ugly McMansions with no sidewalk
Oh these ain’t McMansions, they’re the “missing middle” it’s basically row houses but with car centric infrastructure
That doesn’t look like middle-density housing, it’s just slightly more dense low-density housing
If the garage is used as internal space, then row houses are plenty high enough density. The occupant could have a much nicer back yard without the setback (front yards are car infrastructure), but the road is not too wide, just awful to be on.
If we assume 1.8-2.1 people per house, then these blocks are about and 300m^2 with about 100m^2 out the front in tye public spacs e per house (property boundary to middle of road]. 5000 people per km^2 for the residential area, assume 50% as much commercial/parks elsewhere (~100m^2 per resident) and you’re at over 3000 people per km^2
This is in the ideal missing middle range if a little bit low, it’s just awful missing middle (that will probably also have its density ruined hy a sea of carparks in the commercial areas and a highway, but that’s a separate issue).
Those aren’t really “rowhouses” how I think of that term. They look quite wide, and have a fairly deep setback from the street. Additionally the street is very wide, and the development looks far too homogenous.
Whatever you want to call them, they share at least one wall, are two story, have a deep aspect ratio and side access on the other wall is minimal (if there at all). The only awful features are the set back and the giant garage (which can just be used for indoor space|.
