Ha the typical "but think of the country side". 80% of americans live in a urban area.
No they do not. Half of Americans live in the suburbs or equivalent, which are not urban environments and certainly nothing remotely compared to what qualifies as an urban environment in eg Europe. Having a Target, Costco, Home Depot, Whole Foods and Starbucks doesn't qualify a region as urban. 70%-75% of Americans don't live in urban environments:
"America Really Is a Nation of Suburbs"
"According to the newly released 2017 American Housing Survey (of nearly 76,000 households nationwide), about 52 percent of people in the United States describe their neighborhood as suburban, while about 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent as rural."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...
It probably makes sense. Having yards and trees and driving 2 miles to Target is more similar to not having trees and driving 2 miles to Target than it is similar to driving 200 miles to Target.
Have sidewalks? Probably urban.
Given the choice, how would someone living there most often visit a grocery store?
In an urban area walking might be the common mode.
In a suburban area driving is OFTEN going to be the preferred mode, and even in small cities (particularly ones still small enough to have free parking at a nearby grocery store) driving there is still going to be preferred; at least in the US. In my experience Bellevue WA is a small, still suburban like city, while Seattle has crossed the anti-car (and expensive real-estate) line to 'big city'; but is neither old enough (pre-industrial grocery store layouts) nor big enough to be a healthy big urban city.
Offhand, I would define rural as any area where a drive to the third closest typical grocery store is at least a one hour round trip (by car, at legal speeds, including delays at any traffic device or from commute volume).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...
Large swaths of the US are what that page calls 'micropolitan', centered around small urban clusters, which are the areas I think cause the most confusion, built up areas that are treated as urban in statistics and conversely thought about as rural by lay audiences.
There’s a reason that suburban is distinct from urban.
Outside of NYC, Chicago, and SF, there’s very little mass transit to speak of, even in urban areas. Texas and Florida have significant population centers where car ownership is required, and that’s where folks are moving to.
30k / year die in car accidents in the USA. This is a real problem with a huge human toll, akin to drunk driving or building codes.
Step 1 is slow the vehicles down. As soon as they slow down, one of the main drivers of size - fear of an accident with a bigger vehicle - will be greatly decreased and we can do step 2: shrink them.
I can't even imagine what that would do to traffic that is already pretty congested. Large swaths of suburban metros would just grind to a halt.
> 30k / year die in car accidents in the USA
Closer to 40K. Even then, that is compared with almost 3 million people who die for all reasons combined. It's actually sort of amazing how low the fatality rate is given just how much movement there is every day. One for every 100,000,000 miles driven. That's remarkable.
Crashes are common. Accidents are exceptionally rare. While "accident" is a statement of intent, and outside of extreme road rage scenarios, nobody intends to cause a crash, people do deliberately create dangerous situations that lead to crashes.
You might not have intended to rear-end somebody, but you did choose to text while driving.
You might not have intended to side-swipe somebody, but you did choose to not check your blind spot before changing lanes.
The word "accident" implies a mistake that you couldn't see coming. But when someone chooses to create the dangerous situation, it's no longer an accident, because the situation could have been avoided entirely.
Cars aren’t sized to our average use case, they they are sized to frequent use cases.
I’m getting tired of the “all I need is a tiny tin box thus so should you” crowd.
But if you live in the real world, why not drive a car that makes it easier to do all the things you want to do, if it’s easily affordable?
My smallish wagon does everything a typical family (2 adults, 2 kids, dog) has a regular need for (heck, I carry trees and 2x12s and gravel in it, which is more than most people need). On the rare occasion that I’m buying furniture and they don’t deliver or whatever, I rent a van. As a result, my day-to-day driving experience is infinitely more pleasant.
Then they suggest that the other use cases are valid but people like them don't need such a car despite those use cases.
How did you interpret that as "hectoring other people with different use cases"??
The average number of kids in the US is 1.9 and the median age interval is 2-3 years. That's not that many years of carrying around kids and their gear; one, maybe two cars in a lifetime.
On the other hand, so many Americans drive by themselves, long distances, every day, in giant cars. A lot of people like larger cars because it makes them "feel safe." Or people buy the largest vehicle they can "just in case." I was taken aback when I found out about 10 years when a friend had to run his credit card twice to fill up because it capped the sale at $50 and when gas prices went up he couldn't fill his tank for that.
I feel like I'm the weirdo in the US for preferring smaller cars. I couldn't stand poor pickup of fleet vehicles a decade ago, but as long as they have decent pickup I really love the maneuverability, the ease of parking in smaller spots, and the mileage of a smaller car.
Station wagon with a roof rack can do any two of those things at once. And I say this as someone who also owns a minivan and a couple trucks. I actually prefer station wagons for hauling sheet material that's too long or wide to fit flat in a pickup bed because it's less of a pain to deal with strapping it to a roof rack than any of the other options.
The problem with this approach is that despite the fact that modern vehicles can support thousands of pounds on (or in) the passenger cabin and that modern air suspension and dynamic shocks (as found on many higher trim SUVs these days) would be fine with the extra weight) it is not socially acceptable (and social norms are very much defined by vocal minorities) to use vehicle at 110% their capacity if you can reasonably avoid to. Imagine the "think of the children" themed hate you'd get if you posted a picture of a Mercedes wagon hauling 300lb of I-beam on the roof or a minivan hauling a ton of paver bricks or a bunch of people crammed into a Honda Fit for a road trip. That's why we can't made do with less.
Most roof racks have a capacity of 100-150lbs. You certainly aren't hauling plywood or furniture on your roof.
They are called “SUVs” today Mr Griswold.
A lot of the arguments here read like people want an SUV that will fit all the stuff you'd normally just use a trailer for, like moving furniture or a bunch of lumber. This seems very odd to me.
And it’s not big enough for me. If we take a trip, it’s the Cayenne, because it’s far more comfortable with 4 people plus dog plus luggage.
> I’m getting tired of the “all I need is a tiny tin box thus so should you” crowd.
I don't care to tell people what they need, but I do want my public space back. Car owner's aggregate decisions absolutely do effect personally and the commons so they have no right to hide behind that shield.
Also, of course, bad mass transit is fixable. And potentially fairly cheaply; for the lowish density cities common in the US BRT systems would likely largely be fine.
I've never been to a drivable wilderness area, or on a freeway where I'd be comfortable going all that fast. And if I was going there just to drive hard it would probably be rare enough that I'd rent a really nice fast car.