Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
My case is that manufacturing vehicles is a public good. We can talk about restoring city centers to human beings and I'll agree with you all day, but if you want to make the case that motor vehicles, cars included, are themselves immoral, we don't share enough values to have a productive conversation.
So these companies, to provide this benefit, must comply with the law. Consumers have choice in what to buy, but strictly limited by price tag and availability.
Note that we don't have a cultural trend of buying cars with enormous rotating blades on the bumpers. It's not so much because this is illegal, as none are available for purchase.
The government decided, correctly, that the fleet should be more fuel efficient. All the reasons for this are good. So they did the obvious thing: imposed increasing taxes on gasoline.
Ok, let's back up: no, they passed insane regulations leading directly to the prevalence of SUVs and the increasingly hostile road profile of pickup trucks.
The law allows them less fuel efficiency if they make the wheelbase bigger. That's insane. Shall we apportion some of the blame to the car lobby? Ok. Sure.
Ultimately the government is responsible for the law, and the manufacturers are responsible for following it. End the insanity, and the problem goes away over a decade or so.
I would argue that their hands were somewhat tied because raising the federal gas tax during a recession would have been an extremely unpopular thing to do regardless of the reasoning. Maybe we should expect our representatives to make the right choices anyway but we would probably still punish them for it.
The IRA has a similar problem, its all climate change 'carrots' because all the various forms of carbon taxes necessary to go the 'stick' route would be deeply unpopular despite probably being more economically efficient. I'm sure in a decade we will be talking about all the bone-headed perverse incentives that came out of it, but I'd rather that than us talk about how we missed the chance to pass the biggest climate bill in US history.
All that said, they definitely still could have crafted better legislation that had fewer side effects than the footprint system they went with.
Hopefully in the next boom time we'll do the sane thing and finally tie the gas tax to inflation, or at least increase it at the same rate as we do federal wages. Making it a fixed amount of pennies is about the dumbest thing we could have done.
As profit in the industry has grown, so too has the amount of available credit. We now see 7 year loans on vehicles becoming more common.
The monthly payments are dictated by the purchase price and interest rate. Guess who controls the interest rates?
But the point you're making is missing something: term of the loan. That's the easy way to get the monthly cost down.
When I said "price" that recognizes the fact that cars are financed. It's like the price of a home that way, you're not disagreeing with anything, you just didn't know what that word meant in this context, for some odd reason.
We don't have SUVs here (Eastern Europe), but I think they're a closer to vans than to compacts.
I guess we do have larger 4x4s like Land Cruiser, forgot about them. They're somewhere in between? Wouldn't want to hit one, but it's not a guaranteed "splat".
As a pedestrian or a cyclist I'd take my chances on against it before something like the Chevy Suburban any day of the week.
I haven't seen one in person for a while but but a Chevy Suburban is practically flat until 4ft off the ground. A Dacia Sandero isn't nearly that tall. I find it hard to believe that it is the same as a Sandero at least at potentially survivable speeds around 30mph.
Sorry not all of us live in a place where a $100k electric car is feasible or would work well, or I could even get one.
Which one of the above is the most consequential?
I'm guessing height. at 2500 or 5000 lbs, neither is going to be pleasant when you bang in to it. size maybe there is more surface area to get hit by, but that's unlikely to be significant.
mass does influence stopping distance though, so that could be, but at the same time we now have large disc brakes with anti-skid.
They are not tanks. They are suburban armoured personnel carriers.
A US local News did a segment on that recently, they lined up sitting children in front of a truck, I think only the 7th or 8th child in the row was visible and even then barely. You basically can’t see anything shorter than the hood for 10 feet in front of you, and that’s assuming you look at the road from over the driving wheel not between the dash and wheel arch.
Edit: turns out “recently” is optimistic (or more likely this is a recurring segment), found this from 3 years back: https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0
Tho it’s not the segment I was thinking of.
This shouldn't even be a problem; these massive vehicles literally don't fit in street parking spaces, where they're designated with paint or verge on a bike lane.
Don't get me started on cheap CDL training programs.
Driver's testing in the US is a joke.
Ah yes, the natural environment of the 4ft tall tired diesel monstrosity truck.
I understand that you want this vehicle for offroading. But in my opinion it should be treated like a dirt bike or a 4 wheeler: you should have to tow it to the trails. If you live in the wilderness, feel free to drive it right onto dirt roads and trails. But it just shouldn't be allowed at all in a suburban or urban environment. A truck like that cannot possibly fit in the parking space at the grocery store. Not being able to see over the hood is a danger to anyone walking or biking in your suburb, and probably contributes to the fact that nobody walks or bikes in your suburb.
I do at least ponder the moral implications of it. It was fun for a while, I will probably sell it soon, it is rather impractical :)
I also noticed when driving a certain Kei car in Japan with no a-pillar airbags and a so-called “split” or “double” a-pillar with a window between 2 skinny pillars, that the visibility is so much better. It feels great when you realize you don’t need to move your head around at all to see past them, the parallax affect of having 2 eyes makes them basically disappear. [2]
[1]https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/12/02/study-diagonal-inters...
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daihatsu_Tanto#/media/File%3...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU
He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit.
Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.
Its sort of defensive driving - expect troubles, idiotic clueless drivers, people having heart attack or just turning head to yelling kid on backseat / nice lady walking nearby. Can't save it all but definitely helps.
Driving in country where people, when averaged, drive like crap is a good learning experience (albeit stressful). For me, whenever I enter France from Switzerland (on average 1x per week), its night and day and training (with cursing) resumes.
I've seen it action when a guy who I was riding motorcycles with got hit on the side by a car (his fault, low speed, he was fine). My car also has the feature.
Obviously impossible if the hood's too high like with an SUV or pickup.
The Prius is an abomination, because it is too low to be comfortable and because of its wrong, arcuate shape. The natural and right shape for a car includes only vertical walls and horizontal surfaces, apart from the windscreen which is allowed to be slanted, but not too much.
If you look at the formula for acceleration (a = ∆v/∆t) and acceleration force (F = a⋅m) the only two things we can truly influence here are speed (slower collisions are less dangerous) and time (collisions where the force transfer takes longer produce less force).
The latter is what makes the difference between getting hit with an cushion and an equally heavy rock. The same difference exists if you run against a brick wall and against an angled grassy hill (or: a bendy car hood). Not only will the elastic hood (and the roll) absorb part of the collision energy, the angle of the hood stretches the acceleration over longer time and reduces the force transfered on your body.
So if you get the choice as a cyclist, the choice is pretty clear.
Newton's 3rd law, implies the more mass you have the less recoil you feel.
For example hitting a massive box will hurt a lot more than a light box, because light box will get some acceleration of its own vs massive box.
One thing it would definitely affect tho is the time within which the car could brake, provided they react in time.
That claim right there is begging for a source. It's hard to imagine landing from a person's height is worse than hitting a brick wall moving 40 km/h, unless that brick wall also threw you more than 6 meters up into the air, which point at which you'd be moving faster than 40km/h when you hit the ground.
As another example, here's a locally-high-profile crash [0] (the driver, a city councilwoman and the daughter of the county commissioner, left the scene and didn't report the crash for hours). Red lights and sightlines aside, even though not much momentum is imparted to the cyclist, the crash was enough to flip him over and knock him into the air, which changes all of the calculus for landing damage from what normally happens when you fall off a bicycle. If you land straight down on your head, it might be worse for you than getting hit in the torso at a higher speed.
[0] Content warning: this is a video of someone getting hit by a car https://youtu.be/X7V_H9bADDM?t=54
Sounds like a horrendous collision.
I will never forget the split second I recognized there was a huge mass of metal coming straight at me at a high speed and I resigned to the fact that it would probably mean life altering injuries. Good thing I wore my seat belt!
The minivan didn't become popular until 1980s, while SUVs remained the domain of niches like families too large for a minivan, or those who regularly drove off road for another decade or two. However the SUV is clearly the older of the two.
60 km/h car will kill you either way, 1 km/h car won't kill you either way, but somewhere in between there's a velocity range where a SUV will kill you and a compact car won't - simply because of the mass difference. I'd argue it's the velocity range in which a lot of collisions happen (especially in city traffic).
Both objects have an overwhelming amount of energy and momentum compared to a nearly stationary 100 kg person. They'll transfer enough energy to bring the person up to their speed, likely mangling them in the process.
Trauma depends on how quickly this energy is transferred to the individual.
More to your point, both a car and a truck have more than enough energy to not be meaningfully slowed down by a pedestrian. The difference is strike location, contact area, and crumple zones to slow the transfer.
X_p0 = X of the pedestrian before collision
X_c0 = X of the car before collision
X_p1 = X of the pedestrian after the collision
X_c1 = X of the car after the collision
m_ = mass
v_ = velocity
a_ = acceleration
t = time
//conservation of momentum:
m_p * v_p0 + m_c * v_c0 = m_p * v_p1 + m_c * v_c1
m_p * (v_p0 - v_p1) = m_c * (v_c1 - v_c0)
v_p1 - v_p0 = m_c * (v_c0 - v_c1) / m_p
// a = delta v / t
a = (v_p1 - v_p0)/t = m_c * (v_c0 - v_c1) / (m_p * t)My top priority when driving is safety for everybody, as in doing all my best to prevent accidents.
My second priority is personal comfort, which helps in guaranteeing the first priority to be respected.
Imagine if we had cars that were built like cars from the 80s -- smaller, lightweight, tons of visibility, minimal equipment -- but with modern engine technology and a few of the electronics that don't add much weight, but add a ton of functionality (like 360-degree cameras).
I'll take the road noise, less interior comfort, and all the rest, just for a basic... car.
I'd love to have a modern reboot 80s compact pickup that wasn't a bloated mess like the new Ford Ranger.
Sure a 2022 Toyota Corolla is gigantic compared to a 1985 Corolla, but it's nothing compared to a 2022 F150. The best selling 'car' in North America. I know which one I'd prefer to be hit by.
It was also because a fuel economy rule change.
Saw a review of an old peugeot 505 wagon. It was way smaller than the current Toyota Camry but you could fit 8 persons and still have larger storage capacity.
The A-Segment is well alive and thriving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-segment
What I see instead is very small electric vehicles entering the market from new manufacturers --- the market entry hurdle was not the vehicle safety, it was mastering the EURO-6,7,8 and California environmental norms with such a small engine.
I'd love to get one of those, or their van equivalents, rather, alas they're rarely exported outside Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
Renault Twingo is produced, but is not offered in some countries (I know about UK and Poland).
Peugeot 108 is no longer produced and AFAIU a successor was cancelled. Same thing for sibling Citroen C1. Aygo was also a sibling model.
Suzuki Ignis is a crossover now.
Skoda Citigo is no longer produced. Its sibling model VW Up is still produced, but other sibling Seat Mii is not.
Smart is a bit in a class of its own. It is not cheap though. Toyota had iQ in this class - it is no longer produced.
That leaves us with Hyundai i10 and its sibling Kia Picanto, Fiat Panda which is just a bit bigger then usual in the class, Fiat 500, aforementioned VW Up and Mitsubishi Mirage (also called Space Star in some countries). For me this is a sign of the class being less represented. I think it can go in other direction when electric cars will finally be cheaper, but it will not happen for a couple of years.
This argument is applied for every vehicle except extremely major one, like Corolla?
> Suzuki Ignis is a crossover now.
It's actually just a bit high A-seg hatchback. Its weight is like 900kg. I've driven it and like it because I don't need SUV w/big tires (unnecessary expensive!) but just need a bit high.
I think every manufacturers just want upselling in current market situation, and A-segs needed to be cheap. VW and Skoda that you pick looks good example. Not due to safety.
also the context of my statement is this thread, and a comment claiming vehicle safety being the problem of the A segment, to which your comment seemed to suggest "yah it's also in decline, see: ..."
to which I dare to claim: nope, it will happily come back as the economy recovers and the top mass producers (TMC, VW, Stellantis, RNM alliance) master BEVs.
Larger, but not huge as I said. The gigantism of the best selling cars of 2022 isn't because of the law it's because of consumer preference to the detriment of everyone else.
I have absolutely no need of anything bigger and my car has all the comforts I require. I was also able to buy it for cash.
I've never quite understood the desire to own a large car with all its concomitant costs.
To be clear we do own another car which is an old Skoda Octavia Greenline also bought for cash. Its efficiency is pretty incredible even if it is a 'dirty diesel'.
No law makes an SUV a requirement though. That’s just people getting greedy while the roads are getting larger allowing them to see no difference driving large vehicles.
I have yet to find a mini-van that is able to handle appropriately in the snow and conditions I am likely to face, and a smaller vehicle can't carry my family.
Just because you can't think of a reason doesn't mean someone who does something you disagree with is morally deficient.
And incidentally (getting back to the original point of the article), both models feature a pretty flat front-end for a minivan. I wouldn't be surprised if they are considered among the least pedestrian-safe vehicles of the class.
Well, if you compare a car for a couple to a car for a family...
Modern cars aren't required to be huge, in other words.
Car companies profit on SUV's more than smaller cars, though, so that's what they push. It helps that they are popular - which is realistically what has happened to the Ford Ranger. Larger bodies are more popular.
I'd happily but such a car for the city, if it was cheap enough to be able to afford a more serious car for long journeys.
You need to have some kind of line that distinguishes moral from immoral, if you can't do that, then your calculation is risk based, not morality.
For that matter, is it immoral for a pedestrian walk down the street because they have some low probability of harming an SUV driver when they splatter off the front end?
And I drive in order to reach my destination, in peace and relaxed, not to impact anybody, and certainly not to kill.
There was a recent case where a vehicle designed for the European market actually had the pedestrians protection hood design stripped off and replaced with more aggressive and deadly styling for the US market.
There is little justification in the modern world for driving a SUV.
Unfortunately it can't be a bright line. Exposing people to "excessive" risk is wrong, that's the basis of things like drink-driving laws. And that ends up turning it into an arbitrary but important line: you break the law if you exceed a blood alcohol content, but the risk you impose on other people increases seamlessly as the BAC goes up.
Trucks over a certain weight require extra licensing. I wonder if this threshold should be brought down to reflect the extra harm of larger vehicles?
I've commuted 10s of thousands of miles by bike the last 30 years, mostly in an urban environment. This doesn't surprise me. I can't read the whole article, and the excerpt doesn't offer any data or speculation about the causes of this. So, with some experience, I'll speculate. I'm happy to have real data instead!
So, why? Well, my first thought is that the impact surfaces of those vehicles are much higher off the ground. Rather than being tossed up onto a hood, people might be more likely to be hit directly.
Also, the visibility in tall vehicles is worse. For the driver of a sedan, my whole bicycle and torso are eye-level for them -- I'm easier to see. To a Suburban driver, my head and maybe shoulders are at eye level. I've ridden next to [ostensibly] passenger vehicles where the drivers are above my head level; they'd have to look _down_ to even see me.
And even aside from the height, modern vehicles have narrower windows and larger pillars. This alone makes a big difference. As a contrast, compare an old car with a modern one. The old Benz has at least 150% the visibility. It's like driving inside a fishbowl.
* A 1980s Mercedes wagon -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_W123#/media/File... * A modern Chevy Suburban -- https://www.chevrolet.com/suvs/suburban
Even WHEN THE DRIVER sees you, some subconsciously ignore you. I'v had people look straight at me, keep driving then looking shocked when they finally realise and hit the brakes.
I can only surmise they perceive traffic in terms of threats. When you're in a bigger car, threats are reduced.
He understood what I was doing and pointed straight at me to indicate he had noticed me.
This is something I've started doing when I'm driving now, too. I wish everyone did it.
In my experience, drivers look for other cars, not for pedestrians. We are not a danger to them, so they subconsciously filter us out, as we are not a threat to them.
To make things worse, in North America traffic rules are particularly hostile to pedestrians, allowing things such as right turns on red. Which is to say, as a pedestrian I am naturally not allowed to cross the street when the light is red for me, but for some unclear reason, if I were to be driving a 2-ton vehicle then somehow it is no longer considered dangerous for me to ignore the same red light. Bonkers.
In fact, eye contact works so badly for me that I prefer looking at the front tyres – their direction and angular acceleration tells me a lot more about where the vehicle is about to be.
Pointing, however, is very explicit and rarely happens by accident.
I think drivers are creatures of habit, especially in heavy traffic on a familiar route such as their daily work commute. They are not really in complete control of their cars -- certainly if traffic is heavy enough that nobody is following at a safe distance. Now throw distractions into the mix.
I'm also an experienced urban cyclist, and I believe that route choice is a major safety factor. I have some rules of thumb for roads to avoid, and am extremely lucky that I live in a town that is fairly cycle- and pedestrian-friendly. I have a hunch that car drivers in my town have gradually adapted to the presence of cyclists, for the better.
I do ride on 55 mph roads in the countryside, but only ones with very little traffic, and the region has quite friendly drivers. Stories from cyclists living in other states suggest to me that straightforward aggression is a factor in a lot of the close passes and other antics that they experience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invi...
Somewhat fittingly "the basic Simons and Chabris study was reused on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists."
> failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting passes of the ball
I'm not sure how this applies to commuting, except when the driver is attentively looking at other cars.
That or just have completely separated pathways for motorized vehicles and cyclists and pedestrians.
Especially in a urban area where everyone is stuck trying to get to home/work/etc, most cars appear to be looking for opportunities. Opportunities to get ahead, to squeeze through a left turn lane before oncoming traffic, to find an empty bike lane to drop off an uber eats order. With that opportunity, get ahead” mindset, cyclists do not register. Until, of course, something happens.
There are so many incentives for size creep, and improvements in occupant safety features and self-driving functionality just add fuel to the cycle, by making drivers feel like they can adequately control ever-bigger vehicles.
Back home I have two VW cars - a golf, and an Atlas. The Atlas has far superior visibility, is equipped with proximity sensors all around, lights on mirrors that warn of potential blind spot vehicles... I feel much more confident I won't injure a fellow cyclist driving that car than the golf. It also ferries all of my wife and my friends' bikes to distant races very well.
I think you can find any two single cars that prove one way or the other that visibility is worse. In general though one of the selling points of larger vehicles in increased visibility. Now let's just get rid of the "cross over" which seems to have all of the down sides of both.
These 2 points make it very safe for the driver and occupants but disregard any safety for pedestrians. Which is consistent with the papers findings.
Anecdotally, I have seen empty nesters and older men/women buy large SUVs and trucks not because of utility but because of the perceived safety a larger vehicle gives them. Even growing up in TX, rich parents would buy their 16 year old child a truck, SUV, or even a god forsaken hummer because it gives them peace of mind.
In my opinion, if cities were re-designed around public transportation and alternative forms of transportation. We would be better off in the long run: decreased auto v pedestrian fatalities, increased air quality, decreased in air pollution related illness/disease, much more efficient use of space (parking lots/garages vs space for human beings), and much more efficient cities in terms of taxing efficiency (decreased dependency on municipal bonds), and decreased and/or stabilized cost of living for everyone
It’s easy for a driver to assign themself responsibility to “drive safely” - and hard to admit that we take constant risks that sometimes result in harm. Accepting that we need new street designs is taken as a personal affront by many drivers.
I think the only way to solve this is to take street design decisions (and funding for safety improvements) out of the hands of governments - there’s no level of local gov that is immune from the backlash. But how do we do that without some horrible other outcomes?
Exactly. The way we have it concentrates the harm mostly on the impoverished and disabled which is exactly where we want it. You can purchase your way out of the worst of the danger if you have the resources which again is traditional and aligned with our national values. There's nothing here that actually demands action within an american framework of harm and safety. Maybe we'll grow beyond this eventually but for now we have chosen not to.
It doesn't help that half the time these proposals wind up being half-baked boondoggles that result in a great deal of money being spent for a situation that is at best net neutral. In my own city they redeveloped some main streets according to modern principals coinciding with a stadium development. They then patted themselves on the backs for how effective they were at traffic calming without reducing throughput at the points before and after the project zone at which they measured. Of course, nobody was talking about the fact that they basically just displaced the traffic from that main thoroughfare into the adjacent neighborhoods and turned "kids play here" streets into exactly the kind of car-filled hellscape they allege to be against. Of course, only the locals know this. If you're far away in some ivory tower the project looks like a success.
>and hard to admit that we take constant risks that sometimes result in harm.
Modern society is incapable of having the requisite tough discussions about the pros and cons of various risks/rewards when human life and limb is involved. I think the HN classes ought to take a good look in the mirror because we do a great amount of peddling the kind of rhetoric that perpetuates this immaturity.
>I think the only way to solve this is to take street design decisions (and funding for safety improvements) out of the hands of governments - there’s no level of local gov that is immune from the backlash. But how do we do that without some horrible other outcomes?
We don't. Further removed government doesn't exactly have a great track record. Time and time again you'll see local governments do absolutely asinine infrastructure things because checking some box to meet some criteria for state or fed funding results in a lower total cost after the higher level of .gov kicks in some fraction of the money even though the end result is not what they need.
I think the solution here is more direct local control. If some municipalities do figure it out and make improvements then their ideas and patterns of development will be copied elsewhere.
I wonder what would happen if California, or New York, or a consortium of smaller blue states like New England imposed safety standards that banned or heavily penalized trucks and SUVs over 4,000 lbs, oversized A pillars, etc.
Would the automakers blink, and start making cars safer? Or would they just start selling the dangerous vehicles only in red states? Would blue states start to ticket dangerous vehicles purely for existing on roads?
(Yes I know it's not a "right" but there's no political will to ban it federally so the distinction doesn't matter much here.)
And given the choice between putting up with oversized vehicles and completely eviscerating federal authority to set rules for individuals and small local businesses and organizations (which is what reinterpreting the commerce clause would lead to) oversized vehicles doesn't seem that bad.
I'm in NH and drive a modded Subaru and I'm getting fisted by CA emissions standards. Will the SCOTUS back me up when I sue CA?
Edit: Ooh! There is apparently a lawsuit over this exact issue. I guess we can wait and see!
When I lived in College Station Texas I had to use a bike (because I was broke) but I stuck to the sidewalks, rules be damned. And even in the sidewalk had to keep an eye for unruly drivers on the road alongside because the last person you want to trust not to mount the curb is a drunk Texan kid with a raised pickup after a football game.
And when time came to cross a road, even if the light was green, even if I made eye contact with the dude in the truck, I wouldn’t venture out until the road was fully empty. I decided a long time back id never put myself in a place where another American in a car has to brake to not hit me when I’m outside a car.
- taking the lane
- wearing a helmet
- using lights
- filtering to the front of the intersection
- opting for those 25mph residential roads that hardly have any traffic whenever possible
- "dutch left": instead of cutting over across traffic to turn left as a car would, I instead go straight almost all the way through the intersection on the right hand side, turn right in front of the stopped perpendicular cars, and then angle myself to go straight on that perpendicular road when the lights cycle to green.
In most locations in the world -- my null hypothesis includes the US here too -- people who commute by bike (for all its risks) live longer and are sick less than those who do not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
This seems like such a typical American view on cycling. The main aim of regular cycling isn't about physical activity, it's about getting from A to B.
> I had to use a bike (because I was broke)
And this too. Being able to afford to drive a car shouldn't be an aspiration and cycling isn't only for people who can't afford a car.
Sidewalks can be the most dangerous place for cycling when cars come out of hidden driveways quickly. Maybe not where you are (perhaps there's good vision with big verges and/or big yards with no front fences), but this approach cant be applied safely in many areas.
The real underlying issue of course is a disparity in street design between care for vehicle passenger safety (the primary job of extensive codes and standards and those who enforce them) and cycle safety (at best a side concern in codes, and often the codes are poorly researched and enforce impractical solutions that don't help the end users)
I have been hit by a car while riding on a sidewalk. It happened while passing a gas station entrance.
I suspect that attitude also have to do with obesity rates and with people being too sedentary for their own health no matter what their weight.
It should be good and accepted that people incorporate low key physical activity into their lives. It should be good and accepted that people choose mode of transport that have them move little bit. Whether someone craves physical activity or not does not matter.
Cheaper, healthier mode of transport is as much entitlement as car. Making physical activity something for those who "crave it" is wrong.
That's a sad commentary on society in and of itself.
This was essentially my strategy too. Bike lanes in the back streets, exclusively sidewalks on the risky streets.
Furthermore sidewalks have a worse pavement than roads, are full of obstacles (including pedestrians) and are a slower way to get to destination, but that's another story.
If you're a pedestrian walking alongside a busy street, it's almost impossible to hear a cyclist coming up behind you, so unless the cyclist tells you that they're about to pass you, it's easy to unintentionally move into the cyclist's path and risk getting hit.
I've almost gotten hit several times by bikers on the sidewalk, and while such a collision would be much less injurious than a car crash, I can't say I'm opposed to such laws.
Here's a good video on the problems with Americas increasingly large vehicles:
vehicles have gone up in size globally. this might be driven primarily by the whims and desires of the US market, but it's by no means isolated to the United States.
I see your point, but that will only work when small city cars will be cheap enough to let have a "real" car too for non-daily purposes (long journey, huge shopping, out with the family...).
A brand new C1 is about 12K€. That's not even twice the price of an electrified cargo bike (I saw about 7/8K€ floated around the other day).
And if you go for used, you can get cars in good enough shape for less than 5K€.
Obviously, the additional car will have a much higher running cost than if you went for an electrified cargo bike or stuck to a single car. Forcing people to make that conscious choice would be a pro in my opinion.
> electrified cargo bike
Hilly area? Taking children to school or old parent to the doctor's? Not a chance!
> stuck to a single car
Yes, the SUV.
Edit:
> if you go for used, you can get cars in good enough shape for less than 5K€.
Yeah, that's nicer. Unfortunately, you have to add insurance and maintenance, plus a parking spot at home. Still too much for people to accept non-tiny cars to be banned from the city.
Mind you, there's only one other family that does it. Most people just walk, some drive.
1) In pedestrian and cycle heavy streets, you reduce the speed to a maximum of 30kmh (~20mph) and sometimes to 10 near schools and residential area's
2) traffic seperation. to improve traffic flow, the dutch governement made sure to always seperate traffic from destinations and only intersect pedestrians and cyclists in the last mile in a 30kmph area.
3) Careful road design. Its really uncomfortable to drive above the speed limit because they narrow roads, add trees, obstacles and turns that are perfectly safe at 30kmph that make driving only safe at the apropriate speeds. adding trees next to roads also increases safety for pedestrians as an offroad car is bound to hit a tree instead of a person.
4) great investment in public transport and highways. Despite everything someone might tell you, the Netherlands is a great country to drive in with the most ridiculous infrastructure to keep traffic flowing.
5) accident investigations. There's safety focused public design. We blame the road for an accident rather than a driver. Because even if someone was wasted drunk, an accident could have killed an innocent person. Therefore the road design can be changed so that even an imcompetent or drunk driver wont harm someone. Also, everyone in a car has the legal responsibility to drive safe when encountering pedestrians because as a heavy vehicle, the onus is on you to not cause damage. even if some cyclist ran a red light. You should have been able to stop.
look up strongtowns for better accessibility for non-dutch speakers.
I have to move 3 kids and 2 adults regularly over longer distances, so I am pretty much constrained to a van (say a VW T7). But unfortunately, I cannot afford to accompany this expensive car with a smaller, preferrably electric, vehicle. So whenever I have to switch off the bike and move something or someone by car, I switch to the van directly. Car sharing is pretty much uneconomical at that point and a motorcycle or even a cargo bike is problematic due to space constraints.
The trouble is when a society accepts non-sustainable solutions it's very difficult to go back to anything remotely sustainable as any technological progress is always expected to deliver "more". It also leads to people thinking their ridiculous lifestyles are baseline necessity when, in fact, they could be happy with a whole lot less.
The issue is this: Car seat and booster seat laws in the US have changed (I don't know what they are where I live, as I don't have kids. Sister in the US does, though). If you spaced your children 3 years apart, you could easily have 3 car or booster seats in the car, which means your back seat needs to be even larger. The VW golf from the 70s probably couldn't fit 3 booster/car seats, and might struggle with the two youngest using them while the oldest just gets smashed in the middle. Hopefully they aren't large for their age.
First of all, kids need safety seats nowadays and these seats are to be mounted via ISOFIX. And guess how many such seats you can mount in a Golf? Right. Two. When the kids grow older, they don't need such seats but need to be belted properly, potentially including another form of a cheaper safety seat or a particular kind of belt, depending on the jurisdiction. You might consider this some kind of circus or greed, but when it's about safety of my children, I don't go back 50 years just because we all need to be more sustainable while some people (cough, US, cough) seem to think it's a great idea to live in uninsulated homes running their AC on fossile fuel.
Besides that, small children need strollers and more children generally means more luggage. You could get away with a Passat or a Golf Variant, but you'd face a challenge for longer trips. A family car exists to solve a problem and not to cause trouble.
And regarding renting a van: This would easily cost more than ownership (weekend trips are horribly expensive) and be less comfortable (fetching and returning the car).
The solution to this would realistically be to have built-in booster seats or a different style of seat belt that would better fit children and eliminate the need for booster seats for the older children.
I personally doubt the necessity of booster seats for older children at all but that's another topic all together.
And that is one of the horrid consequences of hyper-risk-averse government.
I really wonder how city-focused one must be to not understand the necessity of regular travels to visit friends and family.
Long story short is that insurance companies price everything in — that’s how insurance works - rates are based upon actual losses and payouts.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/uninsured-motor...
Impacts with large and heavy vehicles suck. I can not recommend. Stick with bumper cars.
I was secretly hoping that the high gas prices would encourage auto makers to reintroduce some smaller cars but it seems like supply chain issues have resulted in them only making higher end cars since they can make more money off of them.
They were everywhere in the eighties, and of course critics would describe their drivers as compensating for a subconscious lacking in masculinity or something… they understandably died off in the nineties… and now we seem to be back to compensating with huge trucks?
Sports cars might be dangerous but at least that’s mostly just to the occupiers, what do we have to do to make Ferraris and Porsches (real Porsches, not those disgusting SUVs that have become their bread and butter) cool again?
So then the next generation grew up and bought trucks because trucks weren't constantly being shat on. And now we're seeing the beginning of a transition back with the high performance EV sports cars.
They were never cool in my eyes. They offer you no space and no comfort, which everybody likes, and they try to compensate with huge speed, that nobody is allowed to attain.
CUVs are built on car style chassis (as opposed to SUV which are built like trucks) and generally are smaller and more fuel efficient (modern turbo 4 cyl designs are pretty impressive). Yet they retain the vast majority of benefits (roomier, higher, AWD, seating up to 7)
Yes CUVs are bigger than sedans, however for a family they check all the boxes and are in my opinion a vastly better alternative to vans, pickups and large SUVs, all of which often come in v6 and v8 engines.
I'm kind of surprised cars don't have external airbags at this point.
They exist because Euro NCAP tests for pedestrian impact safety. NCAP (US) does not.
"When the scoop is open the j-walker simply can't get run over; and sometimes that's more than he deserves."
Seems like a product of that weird period of history where streets used to be mainly for people, but they'd been taken over by cars and car companies were out there asserting ownership of the roads and trying to influence public attitudes by, among other things, inventing the crime of jaywalking.
Driving a truck or an SUV that weighs more than 4 tons is a huge responsibility and we treat it the same as driving a half ton econobox. If a cop sees a 4 ton SUV breaking the speed limit on a residential zone the penalties should be much harsher than a small car, motorcycle or cyclist doing the same.
Black people in the US, due to a wide variety of systemic issues, are more likely to be poor. Which means that issues of poverty are more likely to affect black people.
Ok, you’re saying - but that’s a Camaro. Well, said Camaro is in repair at the moment and they gave me a loaner. It’s a Chevy Sonic. I also can’t fit the infant seat behind the driver’s side.
To be fair, it’s a subcompact. However, even in my wife’s CX-5 we can barely get our hand between the driver’s seat and the latch for the infant seat to get it out. That’s after moving the seat up further than my wife prefers. I’ll be shopping for a new vehicle soon and I can definitely see how people with families instantly jump to SUVs, vans, and to some extent trucks.
Not even the full size SUVs has as much space as a regular old station wagon.
The idiots who cooked up the CAFE footprint rule that resulted in all the OEMs cramming the axles to the far ends of the vehicle (killing a lot of trunk space in the process) are probably responsible for the biggest share but it's very much a death by a thousand cuts situation.
Some things that American aspiring tank drivers say can't be done, are an everyday occurrence in Europe.
For trips with four people we put our child in the front passenger seat, my wife driving and I sit in the back. That's the only way to utilize all the seats. There might be cars available that solve the problem, but not within our budget. I get why, but it is annoying that anything above 185cm is consider outside the range of car designs.
Edit: just looking up the CX-5, and I assume it's the Mazda. Those are useless, I can't even drive those, there aren't enough leg room behind the wheel. On the other hand the Hyundai i10 has plenty of space... Just not for someone to sit in the back seat.
Injury is closely correlated to accelerations applied to various body parts. A sloping hood gives more space to average out the acceleration.
Conversely my stepfather blacked out and fell backwards on a tile floor. A low speed impact with a high acceleration applied to the back of his skull and brain that killed him.
Are pickup trucks inherently more dangerous than other vehicles? Or are pickup truck drivers more dangerous than other drivers? Or are pickup trucks more likely to be driving on more-dangerous roads than on less-dangerous roads?
Unfortunately I wasn't able to read the article due to the paywall, but I didn't see any mention of controlling for confounders in the abstract.
> In fact, passenger car sales in the United States dropped at an annual rate of 2.4% from 2008 to 2018 alone, while pickup truck sales increased at an annual rate of 6.4% (Davis & Boundy, 2020). In 2008 light trucks were about 40% of light vehicles produced, in 2018 they were nearly half (Ibid).
Based on this, I would put SUV's/Trucks conservatively at say 45% of US vehicles.
Based on this,
their combined pedestrian/pedalcyclist crashes are 5.6 + 14.7 = 20.3%
their combined fatality is 12.6 + 25.4 = 38%
With these numbers, given that the crashes are lower in proportion to their overall numbers, I would say that Light Trucks/SUV's are less likely to be involved in a crash with pedestrians/cyclists but when a crash does happen it is worse. However, they do not seem to be a disproportionate cause of pedestrian/pedalcyclists fatalities compared to passenger cars.