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Comment by wayfinder | Hacker News Reader

Sedans actually kill more pedestrians than heavy vehicles overall despite there being 4 SUV/truck purchases for every 1 sedan purchased.

Deaths by SUV seems to be on the rise though.

Here’s data from a bike site.

https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show...

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F150, Silverado, and RAM seems to still be the worst according to that site?

Maybe it’s because pickups are driven less in cities?

I think most criticism I’ve heard about trucks are for pavement princesses, and not for folks living in rural areas actually using them for what they’re designed for.

In Toronto, which is a metropolis, pickup trucks are everywhere. Is it different in other cities? Most of them get used like regular cars with nary a usage bump or scratch in the back in their lack of use, which is baffling (everyone has their theories), but they are very much not a rarity here.

In NYC I can't remember the last time I ever saw a pickup, unless it's an official city/parks maintenance vehicle or something like that.

People simply don't drive them here, at least not in Manhattan or the parts of Brooklyn I know. Contractors seem to all use vans.

(Obviously there must be some, but truly it would be incredibly rare to see.)

I wonder what explains the difference?

Entirely different culture than the american west and south. NYC is just about as far from the country as you can get on the north American continent.

Right but so is Toronto. Which makes me curious why pickups are a thing there -- that's the difference I'm wondering about.

NYC is a city entirely surrounded by other dense cities and fairly unique in how impractical a large vehicle would be just due to the sheer impossibility of parking it. Looking at a map, I'll bet if you drive out to, say, Monticello you'll find yourself in Truck Territory long before you get there.

If I plotted the number of pedestrian deaths by the kind of phones they use, we'd see that iPhones and Androids are the killers, concluding that BlackBerrys are by far the safest phone to have if you're a pedestrian and don't want to get hit by car.

If you want to see what kind of vehicle is the most dangerous to pedestrians, all of those plots should be normalized by the percentage of people who drive that sort of vehicle.

Well yeah those models would have the most, because people buy way more of them than a Corolla or Camry.

It’s like using an overall statistic versus the per capita statistic.

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2022-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...

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