Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians

If those are getting tax benefits for being used by specialized industries, they should be treated as such. I want emission standards, but if you tell me that we don’t get a snowplow without exception, I’m amenable. Snow on the road is bad. Where we should all draw the line is having soccer moms do the school run in a snowplow.

I’m not sure though, the overarching problem is that the US is vast, and what is good in one place is bad in the other.

A large 4x4 truck is a menace in a dense city, but a car is crap in places with poor roads and snow. Both are common.

This video details why: https://youtu.be/azI3nqrHEXM

The short version is there is an exploit to meet standards by increasing footprint that is easier to implement than to make vehicles more fuel efficient. That exploit needs to be nerfed.

However, the government screwed up the scaling factor and it basically became impossible to build a small truck, while larger trucks had much easier-to-meet requirements. That led to automakers basically abandoning the passenger car market, and upsizing trucks significantly.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...

But I'd imagine most people don't consider the survivability of pedestrians in a collision when they buy a car, since people generally overestimate their driving ability and underestimate their likelihood of ending up in an accident.

So harsher penalties might not improve car designs much.

California:

A felony vehicular manslaughter conviction is punishable by 2, 4 or 6 years in state prison.

Colorado:

Under Colorado law, vehicular manslaughter in the second degree is considered a Class 4 felony, as outlined in Colorado Revised Statutes Section 18-3-106. The potential penalties for this offense include imprisonment for a term ranging from 2 to 6 years and a fine between $2,000 and $500,000

This all assumes, however, that the accident was actually the fault of the driver. In many cases, it's actually not their fault, in which case the lawsuit from the family goes out the window and the sentence also tends to get reduced. The cases you are thinking of probably involved a pedestrian running into the street without seeing the car or a cyclist doing something equally stupid.

If everybody was guaranteed to get 60 days of community service every time they did something that could have killed a pedestrian then the behaviour would drop right off.

Corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards are regulations in the United States, first enacted by the United States Congress in 1975,[1] after the 1973–74 Arab Oil Embargo, to improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks (trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles) produced for sale in the United States. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

CAFE was adopted in 1975 and effective from 1978. Are you confusing "modern CAFE regulations" with the late 2000s narrowing of the "car" and "light truck" CAFE regulations (which, yes, did push automakers to try to push more vehicles that fell out of the "light truck" category, just as the earlier standards pushed from cars to light trucks), which has effectively shifted back the old gap after the actual (and more complex) modern (2011+) regulations came into play.

They did not. Cited, points, and I'm sure their insurance went up.

We got to fight with their insurance company to try to get enough money for another car and to cover medical expenses. That was fun.

Even though there was no contest that the other driver was at fault, I started driving with a 4K dashcam after that. And I found something interesting: I started driving more carefully myself because if there was an accident, I wanted the record to show I was blameless.

The main issue is that AWD/4WD in sedans isn't that common, while they're nearly standard on an SUV. But that's a matter of market dynamics (people think that SUVs are required for this sort of driving, which is laughable), not any inherent technological or cost limitation.

There is zero reason to get an SUV other than status signaling, and/or wanting to be the bigger vehicle in a collision.

You can fit more in a station wagon like VW Passat than in an SUV and it will be more efficient AND safer.

There's no reason to waste fuel every trip accelerating all that useless mass other than fashion.

Depends on which SUV and which car, granted, but on average SUVs don't have that much interior room. Particularly given their huge size one would expect them the have huge cargo capacity, but most of them don't hold more stuff than your average sedan.

> While being lighter than a van

Not usually. According to [1] mid-size SUV average around 5000lb and full-size SUVs are 5300-6000lb.

Vans are from ~4000lb to ~6000lb with most models around ~5000ish. So weights are pretty much the same. Unless you have a tiny SUV, but then it can hardly carry anything.

[1] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-much-does-a...

> This tax does not apply to minivans, sport utility vehicles, and pick-up trucks. Congress did not impose a gas guzzler tax on these vehicle types because in 1978, at the time the law was enacted, they represented a relatively small fraction of the overall fleet of passenger vehicles and were used more for business purposes than personal transportation.

And the proffered list of current vehicles is a 404!

www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/guzzler

I get that it was an electric variant and aligns with the green message. But to see the political gravitas of the POTUS backing up a design that arguably should not be road legal is very disappointing.

But indeed $$$

Luckily here in Ontario, Canada, small cars are still somewhat normal, with about 1/3 of the road traffic being in the "compact car" class and certainly less than 1/3 in the "gratuitously huge truck/SUV" class. Most inbetween is compact SUVs and minivans.

It's the prisoners dilemna. 2 small cars crash, they are both better off. 1 big car and 1 small car crash, the big car is better off. 2 big cars crash, they are both worse off. People choose the big one.

I'd never realized how bad the visibility was before having a car with that feature. I'm surprised I haven't run over anything important in all of the years I've been driving.

From rolling coal to 2' (.6m) lift kits, to effectively black windows and turn signals, to light bars used offensively against other drivers, reduced diameter dualie road tires with insufficient suspension support for all that torque... and that's just pickups.

Yeah. The roads are perhaps not the place for this kind of weaponized "fun".

Now, why do you think they picked 2009? Were cars magically safer that year, or perhaps because it's the year after the economic crash, and therefore people were simply driving less?

Which was my point, not that there's nothing to be said about vehicle design contributing to this, but that it's annoying to read articles where the authors are clearly massaging the data to fit their agenda.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

If we have zoning requirements for building residences, why not quotas for the number of companies allowed in a city, in a county, in a state? Why the fuck everybody needs to live in a ratcage in NYC, because every fucking oligarch feels like he needs to have his bank HQ in Manhattan? Why can't we have a few dozen smaller high density urban centers instead on this day and age?

something like "sorry Mega Company, we already have MegaCorp and MegaEnterprise here on this city, the quota is over, have you considered PleasantVille for your new HQ? I hear they have a free quota after MBA Business Machines finally fold down and closed their offices there. "

So people spend longer getting to their job site? I don’t get it. Sounds like a waste of human potential, keeping people on the highways longer.

“Mixed use” and “farm” also needs to also die.

Not everything needs to be regulated in such a way as to encourage or require more policing, and the associated budget increases.

The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people.

It should all be priced accordingly, you want to drive your private vehicle into my city? Then be prepared to pay a fair value for parking and road maintenance.

For me, it is great to be able to drive to Home Depot, then Target, then stop and get lunch, and finally return home with a load of goods that would have been impossible for me to carry alone.

As you mentioned, I will strongly vote against, and even campaign against, any politicians threatening my way of life.

Suburbia is subsidized —- the cost of infrastructure is often 10x the property taxes.

Millions of people are accustomed to paying $1,000/year in taxes to live on a street that costs $9,000 to maintain. “Asking” them to pay the true cost of their decisions is considered politically untenable —- until the city itself goes bankrupt.

To put a finer point on it, people who like suburbs live in them. People who dislike them move elsewhere - forfeiting any voting rights they might have had where the problems are most acute. So who's left to fight the NIMBYs and car-lovers where it matters? Too damn few, by a long shot ... and this outcome was obvious to anyone who was actually thinking about society or the long term instead of just themselves and the next few years.

If you want to solve anything, instead of just shifting the problems around, you have to solve them where people are and will remain. Stay and fight. Unfortunately that's hard so almost nobody does it.

People like the environment they grew up in, it's part of their identity. Americans are no different.

Very few people go out of their way to meaningfully explore different approaches to life around the world and form an informed opinion on what they like.

And also, SUV in Europe often refers to compact or sub-compact SUVs. Ie. the best selling SUV in H1/2023 in Germany was a VW T-Roc [1]. Ridiculous super-sized cars like the F150 and its ilk are still quite rare, fortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc I was "upgraded" to one when renting, once. The visibility was shit due to its fashionably small windows and the trunk volume was pathetic compared to the hatchback I had ordered. Otherwise, very little difference.

Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history.

The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.

> more enjoyable living

> freedom to live in more humane settings

> nightmarish big cities

You appear to be arguing as if this was an axiom--cities are this way, and you struggle through it until you can leave. As if the goal is to make bank and leave the city. But this is the cycle, not the cause. It does not have to be this way, and in many places (many European cities, Japanese and Korean cities, and more) it isn't this way. Tokyo is huge, for example, and it is very much not "nightmarish". Nor London, or Paris. Certainly in all these places there are space tradeoffs, but that is very much different than the only reason to be there being to suffer through.

At least in part, cars cause American cities to be this way. Cars are too big for city streets; cars push people out of cities at night making for different concentrations of activity, and so on. This article is a decent enough jumping off point, top of mind because I read it literally today: https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/keep-on-trucking

I believe we can have liveable, walkable cities, and it has nothing to do with "spreading out business activity".

People arguing for suburbs never, ever, ever acknowledge that the only reason that costs are cheaper outside of cities is because huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs.

Much of this money shifting is done at the federal level (subsidized HUD/USDA loans, huge grants, regulations that massively favor cars) so there is no escaping it by moving around in the US. Some states are better about the balance, but there is no getting away from it.

Except of course if you like walking and caring about all the health benefits that come from not needing a 5,000 pound vehicle to do the most basic elements of life like going to a coffee shop, a local diner etc.

> Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies

By simply from the brands referenced above, you seem to live in a very templated suburb that has been copied and pasted verbatim across the country. Being around nothing but epitomes of generic large-scale cookie-cutter grocery stores, where each location is indistinguishable to each other, fast food restaurants serving factory-made food, retailers at strip malls lacking any character etc. is the exact opposite of "freedom" to me. It's dystopian and conforming at its very core.

> The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen.

Except unless you are on the receiving end of these monstrosities, or worse yet, you happen to be a pedestrian. This argument that bigger/heavier cars are safer is incorrect even at the most fundamental level for drivers, because taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone drove bigger/heavier cars for safety as a reason, the net effect would lead to everyone being worse off and unsafe, as two large cars colliding are far more dangerous to both parties than otherwise.

A heavier vehicle is only safer in a crash when crashing into a smaller object. All you're doing is increasing your own safety at the cost of everyone else's.

"If you can't see my eyes, i can't see you".

If pedestrians don't take what's theirs (in a safe manner), there are just far too many drivers who will ignore them. Fixing that will take decades, best case, but I want to walk around my neighbourhood as a first-class citizen now. So I do.

Disclaimer: I am tall, visible, only do this in good visibility, and live in Canada where driver behaviour is a bit better. If the situation is borderline, I never tempt fate, rather I throw my hands up in the air and make it obvious that yes, I hereby assert that this driver is being an asshole.

> Assume they don't see you.

So what about kids? They're usually not the best at that game. Are they not allowed to become autonomous beings because there are killer tanks on the move?

Even if you're in a car and have right of way, if another driver doesn't see you and collides into your car, it's going to ruin your day. The consequences aren't as bleak as if a vehicle collides into your body, but it's still pretty negative, and it's in your best interest to avoid a collision regardless of who would be determined to be at fault.

In the second case the driver stopped after, and told me she’d slowed because she was blinded by glare and then decided to just keep driving.

I don’t even know how you teach that one to a kid — never cross the street?

My neighbor was recently hit while walking her 4 year old and pushing her 1 year old in a stroller. In this case, the driver was making a left turn and as he completed the turn he did not see her in the crosswalk. On that road, it's not easy to make the left, so my assumption is they were solely focused on finding a gap to make the left. I can think of lots of improvements they can make: a crossing guard since there's a preschool there, some crossing flags, a turning lane, etc. But all solutions still seem to rely on driver's not making mistakes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YVxLLIuGM