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America’s obsession with big cars has fatal consequences
- brucethemoose2 4y agoAs someone bouncing between Florida and Texas: Amen.
- outside1234 4y agoYikes - sorry man.
- krmbzds 4y agohttps://archive.is/iU5Sy https://archive.is/iU5Sy
- cjbenedikt 4y agoWhile at it: the tendency to text while driving is significantly higher too. Plain stupid!
- warning26 4y agoIndeed. American car-dependency has had the added side effect of making driving miserable for everyone. Because everyone "needs" a car to get around, getting a driver's license is laughably easy, and even the stupidest, worst drivers can easily get one. In an ideal system, getting a license would require extremely stringent road and written tests, re-administered on a regular basis. However, doing that in the US is a political nonstarter because how can anyone live without a car?
- vuln 4y agoThe US tried that with voting. Didn't work out too well. Edit: Here's more information on voter literacy tests that were once conducted. The outcome kept POC from being able to vote. https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voice/keeping-vote/state-rules-federal-rules/literacy-tests https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voi...
- warning26 4y agoTotally different; a car is fundamentally an expensive luxury item, even if the US tries to justify that everyone should own said expensive luxury item via dumping tons of tax money into car-focused infrastructure. Voting is many things, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue it should an expensive luxury.
- tablespoon 4y ago> a car is fundamentally an expensive luxury item Says you.
- vuln 4y ago> you'd be hard-pressed to argue it should an expensive luxury. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just pointing out that _tests_ can have unintended or intended outcomes. Testing and retesting doesn't seem like a viable scalable solution.
- dtgriscom 4y ago> you'd be hard-pressed to argue it should an expensive luxury. Or, that my voting constrains your freedom.
- crote 4y agoThe entire point of literacy tests was to prevent POC from voting. They were explicitly designed to be virtually impossible to complete successfully, and white people were exempted from them via "grandfather" clauses: if your grandfather was allowed to vote, so were you. Driving tests are completely different. Right now some states basically give licenses away at age 14 for a dollar and a handshake. If you're going to let someone operate a 26.000 pound vehicle in public, shouldn't they at the very least demonstrate that they a) understand the traffic laws, and b) are able to operate the vehicle safely? If you move to a European country, you'll be required to re-take your driver's test, and it isn't without reason. They simply don't trust the USA to do it properly and that's not entirely unfounded.
- tablespoon 4y ago[flagged]
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agolonger with free healthcare?
- 908B64B197 4y agoFree? The Queen pays for it now?
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- reidjs 4y agoHave you been to Western Europe lately? Their infrastructure, culture, activities, education, and social values dominate the USA in every way. We have bigger cars, more money, and more guns than them though.
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- orwin 4y agoI agree with you that on HN, people see europe with rose-tinted glasses (or rather, only see the bad part of the US, because Europe is pretty cool to live in or to visit, as are the US). But your comment should be left on twitter or reddit, please.
- nxm 4y agoEurope also has much higher taxes, strikes, and energy costs. I’ll happily stay in the U.S.
- locallost 4y agoThe article mentions viewing driving as an expression of freedom. What really ticks me off with that is that it's based in denying freedom to everyone else. As a pedestrian or cyclist you have to make a lot of concessions because laws, either human or of the jungle dictate it. The worst part is, all of that is because of cars. Without notorized vehicles we would literally not need the overwhelming majority of traffic rules, signs and regulations.
- warning26 4y ago> expression of freedom [...] based in denying freedom to everyone else You've just summed up the entire American ethos, sadly.
- tablespoon 4y ago>> expression of freedom[...]based in denying freedom to everyone else > You've just summed up the entire American ethos, sadly. That summation is just tendentious framing of the concept of tradeoffs. If the situation were changed so "pedestrian[s] or cyclist[s]" don't have to make "concessions" to cars, that could also be framed as and "expression of freedom[...]based in denying freedom to everyone else." And that framing would be less tendentious than the OP's, because in America the pedestrians and cyclists are a vocal minority.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoCyclists especially have a superiority complex. I always get voted down here when I point out that between precipitation, the winter darkness, the cold and age, there aren't many days when very many people can commute by bike. Oh, sure, there are a few great spring days. And there are some strong, hearty folks in their 20s who can cycle through the winter, but for the most part, it's not very practical for many people on many days. Now electric scooters and eBikes will change the equation a bit, but there are plenty of purists who hate on them too. They seem to feel they're sort of like lite versions of cars.
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- dstnbrkr 4y agoThe language of US fuel economy standards likely plays a role as well: https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...
- causality0 4y agoThe article has linked large cars to increased fatalities without even offering an idea as to how they're related. Why are larger cars more fatal? Is it the hood being higher off the ground? Increased mass leading to lower maneuverability?
- vlunkr 4y agoThey are taller and heavier. I don't know about the studies or numbers, but just imagine that you are walking, biking, or driving a small car, and you are hit by a small car vs. a truck or SUV. The location and force of impact is very different in all those cases.
- yndoendo 4y agoE = mc^2. The bigger the vehicle the more mass the more force and time needed to come to a safe stop. More force on impact to the driver and pedestrians.
- causality0 4y agoI believe you mean e=1/2mv^2. Einstein's mass-energy equivence formula doesn't have much to do with the kinetic energy of being hit by a truck.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoUnless the truck is fast enough to spontaneously trigger nuclear reactions. Or fast enough to have a nontrivial mass from pure kinetic energy (though I think the nuclear reactions would start happening well before then).
- dtgriscom 4y agohttps://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
- dtgriscom 4y agoBig does not have to mean slow to stop; you just have bigger brakes (and since they're power, the force doesn't matter). Once the vehicle::pedestrian mass is high enough, a higher ratio won't change the kinematics much. And how are you thinking that a driver of a big vehicle is more at risk than that of a small one? And, Einstein has nothing to do with it.
- thatfrenchguy 4y agoI’ve always found it fascinating that most (white) Americans I know seemingly manage to find crazy (often highly aspirational) justifications for owning 20mpg giant cars: the alternatives exist, they’re great, and yet a lot of people decide to drive monster SUVs and trucks even though they’re objectively worse to drive. It’s obviously the same people who are always in debt and never understand why, despite their incomes being 2-3x what’d they earn in any other country, they never seen to be saving any money.
- tropicalbeach 4y agoWhy there fun to drive, are bigger and more room inside. Trucks are better especially in the snow, same with suvs.
- eldaisfish 4y agoI love these « benefits » because they are all incredibly shallow. Trucks are better in snow, assuming the snow isn’t cleared where you are. For the vast majority of the urban population, ground clearance isn’t an issue at all. The flip side of increased interior room is exterior width, poor site lines, increased weight, increased energy waste, increased danger to pedestrians, increased road wear…
- LBJsPNS 4y agoYeah, well, I'm not going to carry $10K worth of tools and a couple of ladders on a bicycle. Or on the bus. Yes that's my work truck. Yes those tools get used every day.
- eldaisfish 4y agoI’m not sure what point you are trying to make by describing the exception.
- Eupraxias 4y ago
- Tiktaalik 4y agoAdding insult to injury is the fact that is that this wildly dangerous transportation system is also so incredibly expensive. Compared to the thousands required to buy into using the car based transportation system, not to mention the ever increasing price of gas, the expense of using a bicycle for transportation is practically nil. Unfortunately, as this article shows, cars are so incredibly dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, that unless you're fortunate enough to live in a city where leaders have decided the the investment of safe protected cycling lanes is well worth it, cycling is rarely a safe and viable option.
- _23sd 4y agoThe article makes a point of blaming "individualism" (apparently the author thinks we'd be safer if we could all just embrace "the collective good" and buy Priuses) but many of these problems can be traced to government policy, or lack thereof. The NHTSA has encouraged carmakers to build bigger with size-based fuel economy standards. Outside of California, subsidies for EVs and PEVs have mostly been limited to the federal tax credits, which are lower than the subsidies I've seen in Western Europe. And some of those European subsidies used to be available for plain old hybrids, which was never the case in America. Pedestrian deaths are made worse by larger vehicles, and also by failures to invest in sidewalks, crosswalks, roundabouts, and other safety infrastructure. Speeding can be seen as evidence of selfishness, but if freeways and school zones were blanketed in automated speed traps then the self-interested choice would be to slow down. I'm not saying there's no culture involved here (the point about Republicans buying more big cars is interesting, but the survey is paywalled so I can't look into it more) but there's no need to go straight to culture when there's a wealth of more practical reasons for the state of the US vehicle market.
- 29083011397778 4y agoIf you government isn't comprised of people with a range of typical American values, from West coast to East, I have all kinds of questions. For example, if you polled someone from either side of the aisle on an issue (Christ, any issue), I think you'd find either a begrudging "We had to compromise and ended up there", or one side would support where America has ended up.
- _23sd 4y agoSure, but that's the result of different issues from the kind of individualism emphasized in the article. We didn't get the CAFE standards as they exist today because Republicans wanted "aggressive" pickup trucks. Road upkeep and improvements aren't underfunded because drivers don't care about pedestrian deaths.
- steponlego 4y agoOh good more WEF anti-car spam. I'm so glad that we're being conditioned to give up our cars, I'll totally nod my head in agreement.