As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

With shorter vehicles, your legs will take the hit instead and you'll get thrown on top of the hood, and slide off depending on momentum. Which is much better than going underneath.

My wife is trying to participate in the arms race unfortunately. She was rear ended while waiting to make a left turn and pushed into oncoming traffic. Her solution is to get a much bigger vehicle so people behind her will see the vehicle sitting at a stop with its turn signals on. At some level I can’t fault her. Though I know she’s likely to have the same or a very close likelihood to be rear ended or in other sorts of accidents as in a smaller car. I can’t blame her for feeling like she’d be safer in a massive SUV and then we’re just contributing to the problem.

Late 90s / early 2000s fuel efficiency standards (probably following lobbying from GMC) set much more lax fuel standards for trucks than for sedans. The auto companies responded to regulation by heavily marketing their less fuel efficient trucks and SUVs.

The size of trucks themselves increasing, however, is a result of safety testing, where obviously larger vehicles are safer for their passengers, albeit more dangerous for everyone outside the vehicle.

Fuel efficiency standards should have been set as a function of average vehicle occupancy, rather than vehicle weight and type, which incentivises larger vehicles. Safety standards should require survival of pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles, at least for common scenarios where the driver of the vehicle under test is usually at fault.

I hate to break it to you but even a little car can kill you. Cars and even motorcycles are heavy enough already that an impact at a high speed will be super bad. At low speed they aren't all that different either, provided the driver applies the brakes at roughly the time they hit you.

I think the less car friendly streets is a bigger contributor, drivers have to pay attention more vs blind driving based solely on a traffic light.

If I recall correctly, the average American drives around 2X more miles per year than people in the EU. The country is big. Things are far away.

If you look at a state like Wyoming where everything is very far away the average person might drive 4X more miles.

More miles means more accidents.

Speeds are also higher in many places in the US, which is related to the fact that everything is farther apart.

This is such a plausible explanation I'm going to steal it. I do wonder if this is exactly the difference.

In highways, at least in my country, buses and cargo trucks have a different speed limit compared to other vehicles.

It wouldn't be fundamentally different for SUVs to have a lower speed limit compared to sedans when driving in urban areas.

Do I prefer to cycle next to Honda Fits? Of course, but the cybertruck is better than a lot of other truck alternatives

Get lots of victims? That hasn’t worked for gun control.

The next thing would be to increase fossil fuel taxes so that fewer people can afford to waste money on vanity and prioritizing their own safety over others’. Side benefit is it helps the environment. Keep increasing the tax until you see non commercial use of large/high vehicles drop to acceptable levels.

</s>

This is sounds like urban design from 60s.

It seems like the problem is vehicle size and distractions: why would more surveillance help?

The F-150 is the best selling truck in America, even though Ford produces a smaller pickup truck that is cheaper.

We can blame CAFE standards and automakers all day long, but at the end of the day many people do appear to want the bigger trucks.

Cell phone use while driving is also sharply up in the past decade. Two decades ago almost nobody had a smartphone. Now I can't drive 5 minutes to the store without seeing someone texting or using their phone.