The sane solution: ban massive cars, give exemptions to people with true professional needs
The ’murica solution: get an even bigger truck yourself, so the other party sustains most of the damage
The ’murica solution: get an even bigger truck yourself, so the other party sustains most of the damage
Secondly, infrastructure is another much better solution than policy. Even if large personal vehicles were outright banned there will always be large vehicles in urban environments - transit buses, garbage trucks, etc.
Thus, to prevent crashes, it is most effective to just separate the large vehicles from the small with separated/protected bike lanes.
US fuel economy standards are, as I understand it on a sort of cap and trade model with respect to a car maker's average fuel economy. Much of Tesla's profit comes from selling fuel economy credits. The result of removing the break larger cars get wouldn't be that they all disappear, but their prices would trend upward.
Every car designed afterwards will try to be as close to the allowed limit as possible, eventually successfully lobbying for the limit to be increased.
Public policy is not a common sense topic, no matter how easy it seems to have an opinion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/16/american-c...
this is like the definition of why liberals cannot win elections. the first instinct is never to solve problems, it is to find some 'wrongdoer' and punish them.
The biggest challenge is that pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers tend to live, work, and shop in the same locations. Even with separate facilities (sidewalks, cycle tracks), there will be conflicts (intersections and driveways). Lack of visibility and a disparity of mass and velocity are always going to be hazardous at these conflict points.
I’m also an even more avid pedestrian. I routinely encounter drivers who struggle to see me over their hood, or even the increasingly high floor for windows in auto designs almost across the board. I’m above average height for US men, but I’ve even had to navigate around trucks with hoods so tall it would be nearly if not totally impossible for a driver to see me at all, much less see my pup.
I’m not exaggerating, I walked across an intersection just the other day where I had to stand on my toes to see if a driver was even at the wheel in a huge truck stopped at a stop sign, while simultaneously forcibly shuffling my pup ahead of me so the potential driver wouldn’t see me clear the intersection and assume that’s all there is to it. All the while, I was imagining what would happen if there was a driver at the wheel and we couldn’t make all of the necessary communications for a safe crossing. This truck wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, the intersection wasn’t either. The experience is even more common for navigating around vehicles in reverse.
I’m not going to make any policy suggestions, and I don’t care about how this affects elections or relative success of any political perspective. I will just say that balancing public safety without requiring automobile accommodations for it is inherently untenable.
And beyond that, larger vehicles pollute more. Even larger EVs require larger batteries and more materials to construct. Sure, you can say that people who want them already pay a higher price in fuel (even if that fuel is electricity), but that doesn't seem to have been enough to disincentivize the proliferation of SUVs.
Incidentally, there's going to be a massive jump in people driving bigger commercial vehicles anyway as gas vehicles get phased out for consumer use. A lot of big SUVs are the result of the regulatory regime already. Stupid regulations almost always make things worse.
This is such an ideological comment. The reality is that stupid regulations make things worse, but non-stupid regulations make things better. We want non-stupid regulations. A world without regulations is a non-starter due to the tragedy of the commons incentive problem. Imagine a world where dumping was legal because there were no regulations. Or where explosives could be purchased from your local corner store because they weren't regulated. It's a non-starter. You would be dead from a resulting illness or terrorist attack. Nobody wants it, including you. So if you can propose a regulation-free solution to the various incentive problems like tragedy of the commons, then I'm all ears, but the burden of proof is on you to do that, and it's a burden you haven't met.