Big cars are killing Americans
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Not only are these vehicles massively more dangerous to pedestrians and people on two-wheel vehicles, but they're also more stressful and dangerous for anyone driving a normal car on the road, because you can't see through them, they block ahead. When multiple normal cars are in a line on a highway, you can usually see beyond the cars in front partially by seeing through their rear window and windshield, but when all you can see is a solid aluminum tailgate, the pumpkin for the rear differential, and a hanging pair of truck nuts, it means you cannot plan ahead and react as quickly as possible to changing road conditions ahead.
Nothing is quite as disturbing to me as a conscientious driver as being behind a "brodozer" where I can't see anything ahead of me or having one with an unnecessary cattle/bull bar right behind me, essentially threatening me with certain death as their unnecessary monument to their small penis would roll right over the top of my normal car crushing me if we were to be in an "accident". These vehicles violate existing regulations in nearly every state in the US, yet seem to be epidemic on American highways and not disappearing any time soon.
Absolutely, and every inch of it fully justified. I stand by my comments, in their entirety, without any desire to mitigate my spite for those who go out of their way to make the world a worse place and get off on threatening physical harm and intimidating other people. That is anti-social, nihilistic, and unacceptable behavior and I have every intent and desire to incur as much shame and derision in the direction of people who engage in such behavior as is possible.
People who modify their trucks into "brodozers" are people who understand that a vehicle is a weapon, and then choose to make it /more dangerous/ and /more intimidating/, intentionally, at great expense, to appease their own ego and sociopathy. I have no respect whatsoever for that type of behavior and it has no place on public roadways or in polite society.
The end result is that night-driving is incredibly dangerous, because the brightness is spiraling out of control. Instead of increased visibility, you are forced to squint from the brightness of incoming traffic.
I try to avoid night-time driving as a result of this like the plague. It is simply too dangerous for me (I've been in 3 near-accidents in 2021, despite driving the least I've ever driven in a year).
By the way, they are crazy comfortable - as a tall guy, I’m never squatting and folding my ass into a little Eurocar again.
Is this sarcastic?
I write this wall of text to say "truck bad because (our conception of what is toxic) masculinity bad" isn't necessarily helpful. Maybe you only meant to mention the safety, but you could have said all the things you've said about safety without making any specific reference to gender (or at least doing so with a reminder to continue to check the demographics). When we talk about these things and genderize them without referencing the true demographics, we open things up for the wrong conversation. The narrative can shift to "less men are driving trucks" (when really it's less men are driving trucks as a percentage of total truck drivers) after Ford rebrands to a gender-inclusive image for trucks. I think it's just more important to focus on the safety aspect and try to turn it from "men driving trucks aggresively" to "less people driving unsafe trucks". Marketing would love for you to just make this an "irresponsible men" thing so they can keep selling unsafe vehicles. This is not to say that men aren't aggressive drivers or don't get into more accidents, just that I want to make that conclusion on my own and not have marketing departments deflect the true cause of these safety issues.
[0]: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
I live in Texas, in a working class community, and I don't denigrate "brodozers" because of the politics, gender, or other demographics of this community or typical truck owners. I denigrate them because I'm someone who loves cars (and trucks) and I understand when a modification is reasonable, safe, and necessary and when it is not. If you are modifying your truck specifically to get into off-roading hobbies, go for it, but if you are putting a lift-kit, 36" tires, oversized wheels, and a reinforced bumper on your truck to primarily go down the highway where you are massively endangering everyone else by doing so, that is not okay.
The amount of badly done and unnecessary lifts where the owners don't even bother to re-aim their headlights afterwards are epidemic in Texas, but they're found all over the US. They're also generally illegal because they violate bumper height restrictions. This behavior is already against the law, but that law is not really enforced. At no point do I go "truck bad because toxic masculinity", you are assuming a lot of things about my personal philosophy that are not only not in evidence, but are false. This is a safety issue, I don't give a crap who the owner of the vehicle voted for, what is between their legs, their general temperament and character, or what color their hair is. When you drive a vehicle on public highways, you need to ensure that it is safe to operate.
I despise "brodozers" for the same reason I despise stance cars. They're intentionally unsafe, anti-social, nihilistic shitboxes that get people killed needlessly. They're also a huge waste of money. There is no world in which it is reasonable or safe for people to be driving around monster trucks that can literally drive over a normal car on public roads. It's deranged.
As to the point of demographics, the /majority/ of trucks purchased are used for work and are left unmodified as they rolled off the lot. Those who are modifying their trucks with lift kits are vastly predominantly men, and they're marketed to specifically on how these modifications enhance the appearance of their masculinity, with much of the same imagery and word choices you see in marketing of motorcycles. I don't care if 90% of truck owners are women, these are not the truck owners going out and putting an 8" lift on their 3/4 ton pickup, adding in stacks with clappers so they can roll coal "in style", a hoop with a lightbar, and a steel reinforced bumper guard on the front. The entire marketing and /point/ of these modifications is to make the vehicle appear more menacing and literally use its oversized physical presence to intimidate and dominate other people on the public roadways. If you spend more than a week driving in any major Texas city or on any interstate highways here you'll no doubt get tailgated by a brodozer with a huge lift, intentionally aiming their lights (and possibly turning their lightbar on) behind you at night while doing 20-30+ over the speed limit even when they have a clear lane to pass you, just because it makes these people smile to intimidate others on the roadway and threaten others with imminent physical harm and death.
The definition is something that comes from the NHTSA and the legal statutes of each state.
Most often it’s those super white LEDs even on cars noticeably lower than mine (ie: SUVs. ).
I put LED lamps in my truck because my headlights are missing a mount point (the bottom exterior bracket was shipped non functional) and the vibration had me going through a ton of head lamps as the filaments shook loose.
I noticed the following
1. I immediately was constantly flashed by others as if my brights were on and the only difference was the bulb color temp.
2. I adjusted my headlamps down to basically the legal (and my comfort) limit as I do a fair amount of driving on back/country roads with deer crossings. This cut down those flashing me about 75% but I still get it here and there.
I cannot find LED lamps in 5000 k color. They are all 6500 k. I’m are fairly sure moving back to a 5000k lamp color would fix the issue for most.
The temperature isn't the issue, it's the brightness and incorrect angle. When 99% of consumers simply shove a LED into where the Halogen bulb was, not only is it 3x brighter as a result of LEDs being more efficient, it is another 3x brighter, because the diffuser was never designed for a LED-like light source.
I personally still drive with old halogen lights. Whenever a more recently manufactured vehicle comes up behind me, their lights usually completely flood the road, to the point that I'm not even sure I have my headlights on.
They could be 50 feet behind me, and their lights are BRIGHTER than both of my lights. This is insane. I'm not sure why this isn't being legislated out of existence ASAP. I guess I'll have to start wearing sunglasses for nighttime driving.
I THINK I looked up the lumens of the lights I had previously used and bought the same/most similar I could find. It was definitely one of those things I spent at least some time researching. I actually returned the first set I ordered and got a different set.
And I’m not one of those savages that runs my fog lamps 24/7 either.
So that left me at the temp being the main difference maker as to why it was blowing people out. At least to my estimation. And like I said, I’ve seen new SUVs and even cars that blew me out and my truck does sit on the higher side I would estimate (it’s stock, but the suspension is designed with clearance for light off-road duty)
The housing for many halogen based car lights is very specific. It’s completely designed around a specific light bulb and doesn’t have as much tolerance as you might think.
I was told that the headlight adjustment in some large vehicles are meant to accomodate for weight (2 people in front vs 5 people in vehicle), but it seems that most people simply adjust this as high as it goes because they can see further. Even in Australia, which doesn’t have quite as much of a large-car problem, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to drive on the highway at night in a small car due to incredibly bright lights from behind.
The usual arguments I see here on HN which are pro cars are "what about the children/disabled/elderly". Completely nonsense pro car argument. An efficient, humane public transport system that is well connected, gets you to where you want to go, well funded and maintained would probably be better for a majority of the people in these groups anyway. Im not even advocating for removal of cars, but Im sure the majority of the population could easily reduce dependence.
As for the "freedom" argument. Sitting in some box confined to miles of endless tarmac with countless rules, regulations, taxes, insurance doesn't seem free at all.
Sure, I like the ability to go out into the country side to go for a trail run, but again that is not the majority of my trips.
The vast majority of trips in a city could probably easily be replaced by public transport for a lot of people. It's just laziness and a deeply embedded car culture. Looking at pictures of American cities with enormous parking lots horrifies me.
I think "car culture" is a bit too broad. I don't have as much of a problem with car enthusiasts, more so our country's continuous commitment to car infrastructure without supporting other options.
I'm actually a huge car enthusiast, I love them. I don't own one though, nor do I drive much at all. But I think there is a difference between being passionate about cars, and forcing that passion to require people to use cars for nearly all transportation.
Totally agree with your other points, although the US has a lot of work to start incentivizing other modes of transportation.
The taxes and insurance on my cars aren't very high. And the rules and regulations don't bother me a bit.
Sitting in a small box that can go almost anywhere you want, even with tons of rules, offers much more freedom than sitting in a slightly larger box that has even more rules and didn't go very many places.
For the people (and there are a lot of them) who live in suburbs and beyond, public transportation is a non-starter.
NB: I didn't do the math, so this is probably mildly hyperbolic, but I think it illustrates the point.
Consider getting hit in the head with a fastball pitched by a major league baseball pitcher. A baseball weighs ~0.145 kg, and a fastball might be going 45 m/s.
That gives a momentum of 6.5 kg m/s, and a kinetic energy of 146.8 J, and a serious possibly life threatening injury.
Now consider getting hit by a fully loaded B-52 (220000 kg) being towed at 0.5 m/s.
That has a momentum of 110000 kg m/s, and a kinetic energy of 27500 J. That's ~17000 times the momentum of the baseball and ~190 times the kinetic energy, but all it will do is knock you over. (You might subsequently get run over by it, which would do a lot damage, but that injury will be from neither the momentum nor the kinetic energy).
Kinetic energy is not a good measure for a car or B-52, as after the collision the large object has essentially the same kinetic energy, and a very small fraction has been transferred to you.
A bicycle is more toward the small object side, as a pedestrian is going to absorb a good fraction of the kinetic energy of the rider, which is much larger than the kinetic energy of the bicycle itself.
The US needs regulation and more driving training to protect the other traffic participants. While we are at it also safer bike lanes and walk ways and crossings.
I've seen this same logic from many people who have asked me for my advice about vehicle purchases. The thing is, the evidence doesn't support the conclusion that larger/heavier vehicles are safer. In fact, it's just the opposite.
We really need stricter licensing requirements for driving in the US. Compare the way people in Germany drive to the way people in the US drive on average, and it's night and day. Most Americans drive aggressively, without regard for others, with little attention being paid, looking just barely in front of their vehicle and never their complete surroundings, and without even basic understanding of vehicle dynamics or roadway rules and etiquette. I daily see drivers, especially in larger vehicles, incapable of even maintaining lane presence while going straight down a highway, which is like remedial driving 020 skill levels. Most American drivers aren't even at 101 level.
Woah, is that an Oldsmobile Alero in the background? I had a coupe as a kid and boy was that car a piece of shit. The same components failed consistently.
These drivers tend to know how to stay out of dangerous situations and how to react when they do come up.
There are plenty of small, cheap, reliable, and efficient cars available, if that's what you want to buy. The Toyota Prius. The Honda Fit. The Tesla Model 3?
Is it a "flaw" in capitalism that some people don't want to buy those? That someone can choose to buy a Chevrolet Suburban instead of any of these options?
The market for automobiles is as competitive as it gets. If a manufacturer is making profits, it's because they're selling what people want to buy.
From my perspective, the only "flaw" here would seem to be that capitalism makes it difficult for you to impose your own preferences on others.
The outcome for the buyers of those vehicles is estimated by those buyers to be positive. I don't know if it is or isn't, but it seems at least a little presumptuous to conclude that a third party (you or I) knows more about the buyer's preferences/value function than the buyer themself.
If the outcome were known to be negative for everyone, it would be a lot less common.
The costs will change from society to society, but given the mix of vehicles in the United States and the structure of our health care system I feel confident that A) the accident cost are higher here and B) those costs will be distributed in less equitable fashion.
1 https://stopclimatechange.net/fileadmin/content/documents/mo...
Put another way, why should I be imposed upon by others' preferences, in every respect from potential collisions to parking space to street blockages?
So yeah, I’d like to force my “preference” of having people cease shitting in the stream. Their actions are not taking place in a vacuum and they’re affecting other people negatively.
Given that there are what maybe 1 or 2 command economies on the planet, are they somehow automotive paradises? Im going to say probably not given that cars are a privelege for a small elite class in those places.
Anyway, there are numerous well-functioning cities on the planet that are bicycle-centric rather than car-centric.
Note that the sense of “private property” used in the definition of capitalism by its critics is not typically used or understood within capitalism except by people who follow the theory of those critics, and that “private property” to people more immersed in the theories supportive of capitalism tends to just mean non-public property.
The US has capitalism with a welfare state.
Canada has capitalism with a welfare state.
Norway has capitalism with a welfare state.
Russia has capitalism with a welfare state.
Basically every country on the planet has capitalism with some amount of redistribution.
The socialism / capitalism "debate" is just bickering over the details of how much welfare. But lets be clear, every single one of these countries is capitalist. Every single one of these countries has businesses which can own property and money and make profits. Every single one of these countries has banks which charge interest (yes including muslim countries which have to play financial and verbal gymnastics to hide this fact)
Scandanavian countries and Canada are socialist as much as China and Vietnam are communist (they all arent). None of those places involve businesses which are required to distribute any sizable amounts of profits to workers. You are arguing nuances of how competing utopias (dystopias) maybe could exist because no where actually does those things.
Here go look at the wikipedia entry for socialist countries to see a dumpster fire of failed economies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Mar...
These places are THE MOST CAPITALIST because when everyine has nothing, money can get you anything. I bet you could easily buy human organs or child prostitutes in any one of the places on the list so Im going to say they havent created post capitalist utopias.
I did observe rampant child or underage prostitution in Cambodia, Thailand, Haiti, the Dominican Republic of course, if the American judiciary is to be believed, among certain American billionaires, politicians, and members of the British royal family.
Returning to the fundamentals of the debate I’d enjoy seeing some justification For your assertion that market mechanisms are unique to capitalist economies considering they predate them considerably.
Capital concentration and investment is a fundamental economic activity. No moderately complicated society can function without it. Capitalism is just one way to organize this activity. There’s a case to be made for it that relies on empiricism rather than mere distortion and ignorance.
For small cars (compacts, sedans, coupes), the one thing I've noticed is that they seem to have much less window space than they used to. The reason for this, I've been told, is that there's a minimum height which the top of the door frame now has to reach. In older small cars, I remember being able to comfortably sit with my arm resting on the window sill. Modern cars, my arm has to be at an uncomfortable angle to even attempt to do so. Last time I was car shopping, I had a couple people mention that it was because of a safety regulation.
Which is fine, passenger safety is a nice thing, but there then is the unintended consequence of less overall visibility when driving.
My parents had a Saturn SL2 when I was a child. The car had amazing visibility, huge windows. It felt like driving in a bubble. When I compare that to newer cars, the visibility is much lower because of the smaller windows, maybe larger vertical support beams between the front and back seats... I assume that why they started having to include back-up cameras. You just can't see as much in a modern car as you could in an older one.
(Edited a couple things for clarity)
Either way, there's nothing wrong with trying to make cars safer for pedestrians too.
I do think cars have their place, but I don't understand how people have come to believe that cars in, say, Manhattan or the center of Paris, make a lot of sense.
Cars are safer and more convenient than any public transportation for most of the world.
Humans interrupt traffic in my city far more than cars do.
Cars are easily contained, humans are not therefore humans are the actual problem.
What mostly hinders public transport experience is a chicken-and-egg problem, basically, with more passengers we would have more routes, and more buses/trains on them.
Buses and Trains in my city are dangerous and are rarely on time.
2. How is a car safer than a train or bus? Definitely agree cars are more convenient given the current design of American cities. But consider if you had a nearby train station with an express line to downtown. By taking the train, you avoid sitting in traffic, get there quicker, don’t have to worry about parking, don’t have to worry about how much alcohol you consume before driving, and help your health by walking a bit more. Of course, few American cities have public transit that good, but that’s because American cities are designed for cars, not because public transit has an inherit problem.
3/4. You’re thinking about this from a car-centric point of view. But that’s totally arbitrary. What actually matters when considering city policies and society? Hunks of metal? No, people matter. The quality of life for people living in the city should be the utmost priority. Why is the person crossing the road? Well, it turns out that you need to walk to places even after you get out of your car. The problem is that humans don’t have a convenient transit option from one side of the street to the other, because cities aren’t designed to promote walking, despite walking being the most space, time, health, and energy efficient transit option for short distances.
Containment is totally irrelevant, imo. Sure, highways must be separate for effective transit. But it’s absolutely impossible to design highways to every single location, especially in extremely location-dense areas. We’ve attempted to do that with the so-called “stroad,” and it has been a massive failure. Those multi-lane roads by strip malls and chain stores are very dangerous for drivers because cars can’t be contained, and that’s without hardly any people walking around. To avoid that, you need to design walkable areas for “destinations,” which completely deprioritize cars.
Also, traffic is irrelevant. The purpose of transit is to allow people to get from A to B. car traffic exists to allow that transit. Forms of transit with large vehicles self-create their own congestion. (Like cars) Some, like buses and trains, can be scheduled to avoid that problem. But individual people walking or biking can saturate a given space with significantly more people per second without creating severe congestion. This is crucial for cities, which is why it’s ridiculous that cars have been prioritized in city centers for so long. It’s such an inefficient transit option for dense areas in basically any way you look at it. It’s not even that good for drivers, since city driving is always dangerous, stressful, and congested.
Keep cars to the highways for medium/long-distance trips. But there are many better options for dense areas, and that’s where big cars killing people is a problem.
There is no legitimate comparason between the two.
When people create the problem by obliviously walking out into the street or if they're on a bicycle being reckless - cars are not the problem.
People have come to believe it because they believed it when cars first came on the scene.
They believed it then because before cars major dense urban areas were not low traffic pedestrian safe areas that got ruined by cars. They were areas full of heavy horse and horse drawn vehicle traffic with pedestrian fatality rates from horse and horse drawn vehicle accidents comparable to modern pedestrian fatality rates from cars in those cities in modern times.
NYC for instance in 1900 actually had a higher pedestrian fatality rate from horse accidents than from car accidents in 2003 [1]. In England and Wales the car rate is a little higher than the horse rate [2]. Here are some accounts of what horse accidents were like [3].
(As noted in the BMJ article, a direct comparison of fatality rates might not be the right comparison because we have much better treatment for injuries nowadays. Many accidents that were fatal back then would be survivable today).
From that BMJ article:
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer, unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung.
So of course people accepted cars in their city centers. They were a big improvement over what they had before.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
[3] https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/exeter-news-...
This is probably closer to the rational solution than your previous statement (about "pedestrians and cyclists being mindful of where they are"). With proper road design, cars are moving slow enough near pedestrians so they can stop within time. Separated bike lanes save the lives of cyclists and lead to less traffic on the road.
North America has been designed to the benefit of cars over pedestrians essentially everywhere, to the great detriment of the local population.
They're 95% of the problem in my city (San Francisco).
If you walk in the designated areas there is no way you'd be legally confined anywhere.
That you place the lion's share of the blame on pedestrians is specious.
The sense of entitlement among some drivers just beggars belief. The other day I crossed the street with the pedestrian signal. Beyond the traffic signal (to my right) there were two police cars with lights on blocking one lane to cordon the scene of a recent accident and redirect traffic. While I was crossing a vehicle just casually ran the red light and nearly hit me. When I angrily pointed to the light indicating I had the right of way, they angrily pointed at the police cars, as if their presence somehow superseded the existence of the intervening traffic light.