SUV, Truck, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV, sedan, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV.
The culture problem around big vehicles we’ve created with bad regulation and aggressive marketing is depressing.
It isn’t just a culture problem, it’s a tragedy of the commons.
When you’re surrounded by giant vehicles, the only way to be feel safe and see the road is to have a giant vehicle.
The only way to feel safe. The really big ego-support vehicles are no safer than a subcompact to be inside of, but they are far more likely to kill your own family.
Well sure, though not being able to see anything around you when deep in truck/suv traffic is pretty scary in a sedan.
Physics says that in a collision, the heavier vehicle will always come out better. Higher mass means more resistance to acceleration, so it will take longer to change speed and impart less force on the occupants. This is one reason why buses sometimes don’t have seatbelts, when the bus collides with much lighter cars it will be largely unaffected.
If everyone has a heavy vehicle, it’s worse overall because of higher kinetic energy causing more dramatic collisions. And obviously significantly worse for everyone outside a car.
Hence the arms race.
That’s not the tragedy of the commons, and that’s not why everyone drives turboencabulators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
It is, I shit you not, a cold war tariff on fucking chickens. There’s some other shit that’s glommed on over the centuries, but the mad-science breeding program to create a pickup truck big enough to swallow the sun started with a stupid trade dispute over chickens between the krauts, the frogs, and the yanks.
it’s a tragedy of the commons.
A gentle heads up that the guy who coined that term was a huge piece of shit, and was almost certainly wrong.
The basic notion regarding the exploitation of limited, unregulated public resources leading to depletion is significantly older than that term or the essay with that title..
The notion is echoed by a lot of thinkers, including that of Karl Marx in his deconstruction of capitalism. We need to make a society aware of this tendency much the way we have to be mindful, as a society, of prejudice divisionism.
Otherwise, overexploitation of common resources is going to kill us if we can’t find a way to circumvent the problem, such as by reaching out into space as local resources become dire.
It’s also politically wanted. American car companies can’t compete with overseas manufacturers in the small car market so regulations were written to subsidize SUVs and trucks.
It’s funny too that SUVs and trucks also have themselves gotten bigger. I own an 11 year old SUV and I feel dwarfed on the road by every other new SUV I see. Trucks are insane too, some are so big they don’t fit in regular parking spots. Compare that to older pickups with the same bed space that are smaller than some sedans.
some are so big they don’t fit in regular parking spots
And American “regular parking spots” are already much bigger than those in the rest of the world.
So glad they put that thick protective white line there so I know I won’t be hit 🥰
Ironically enough, this is how the pavements are in the ski resort I live in. It’s a “shared zone”, pedestrians have the same rights as vehicles. It slows everyone down because nobody knows when the next braying snowboarder trust-fund baby is going to stagger out in front of you.
Oh and as for the snow, we have adorable little mini snowploughs for the pedestrian bit
Edit to add pic -
Of course it uploaded upside down
Why don’t kids go outside anymore???
What in the stupid is this?
If you are walking you’re either poor or up to no good, in both cases we don’t want you around these parts. Oh, your kids need to walk? Don’t be lazy and DRIVE them where they need to go!