8 ms·

The widespread use of huge, highway-built vehicles (that is, all American cars) for short trips in US cities has been sticking out to me recently as a major saf

The widespread use of huge, highway-built vehicles (that is, all American cars) for short trips in US cities has been sticking out to me recently as a major safety hazard and detractor from pleasant urban living. Highway-built cars are fundamentally incompatible with human-scale living: they are loud and accelerate quickly while being soundproof, isolating the occupants from the effects they have on their environment. Sleek, reflective windshields and tinted windows also make it difficult for pedestrians and bikers to make eye contact with car drivers, dehumanizing interactions with vehicles and increasing reliance on inflexible measures like traffic lights that would not be required on a more human scale. I would love to see small cars like these come into more widespread use in the the U.S., with carsharing programs providing cars as needed for highway driving. This change could come much more quickly than the large-scale urban design improvements we will eventually need to totally reduce reliance on cars in cities. As it is, many city streets are too fast for these cars to be comfortable. I would love to see a general slowing-down of vehicles in US cities and towns that makes city vehicles like these practical, and, on top of the obvious safety benefits for all the cities that claim to have “vision zero”, I don’t think it would come with many downsides. Even outside of a city center for in-town trips of a few miles, 28mph is really quite fast—a matter of a few extra minutes compared to current dangerous city speeds.

ilyt 3y ago
But slowing down means every vehicle is on road longer, so even more vehicles in peak traffic. I think problem is that many of high speed roads are also very "interfering"; highway circling a city is not really a problem and can be decently isolated, but high speed road full of streets flowing into it just makes for many more chances for accidents.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jonas21 3y ago
  Slowing a road down doesn't decrease its throughput (at least not until you get to very low speeds). The minimum spacing required between cars is proportional to speed.
- bkettle 3y ago
  Slowing down roads also means they are more comfortable to bike in and to walk alongside, which will move some people from cars to other modes and decrease peak traffic for drivers.
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  If the goal is efficient and consistent transportation, then traffic coordination is far more important than raw speed. A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    True but people don't have that either, regardless of speed. > A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless. basic 10Gbit switch works far better than fancy 1Gbit switch in vast majority of cases. Only if you need single digit ms jitter while running storage loads on same switch does it start to matter. It's also absolutely terrible comparision at every level because * now even lower end switches can sustain max speed between every port at once, while traffic often have clear bottlenecks * pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay. Stopping car traffic (with say red light) means multiple second delay till everyone gets up to speed. Even single car acting badly can make massive traffic wave slowing down people behind them for minute or more.
    - CapstanRoller 3y ago
      >pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay. That's because Ethernet has flow control, while car traffic doesn't. That's why my example was about a very fast switch with no flow control or collision detection. Basically, a fast but otherwise terrible hub. We can't solve the inherent problems of hubs by making them faster, but somehow we think it's okay to solve inherent problems of bad road design by adding more lanes or increasing speed limits.
robomartin 3y ago
> I would love to see small cars like these come into more widespread use in the the U.S While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think this is possible. The first layer of the many problems is that people don't have unlimited funds to purchase multiple vehicles. Remember that every vehicle must also be insured. This means they must make a selection based on life's realities. For a family, in most urban areas in the US, that means highway travel to go just-about everywhere, including shopping for food, school and work. A relatively small percentage of people in most towns have the luxury of living so close to work, school, stores, church, whatever, to be able to use this type of vehicle. And then you have the issues you alude to: Speed and size. My street, which is in a nice neighborhood, is supposed to have a 25 mph speed limit. I can't tell you how many people who live here fly down this street doing 40 to 50 mph. It's mind blowing, really. If you can't be considerate in your own neighborhood, I hate to think what someone might be like on the highway. I have almost been hit a few times in the 25 years I've lived here just coming out of my driveway. People are moving so fast that you look right and left, it's clear and, when you are on the road someone suddenly is right on your ass. It's terrible. We've had multiple neighbors call the police for some enforcement. They put on a bit of a show and nothing happens (those signs showing your speed). They don't want to write dozens of tickets on a neighborhood street. They have more important things to look after, I guess. And so, most people look at a car like this and think "That would be nice, but...". I suppose there might be a potential future where self driving cars might be software-limited to maximum speeds based on where they might be and actually cooperate to increase safety (the car coming down the street knows my car is pulling out onto the street and plans appropriately, etc.). I think that's the only hope really. Which means it is at least 25 years away.
- y-curious 3y ago
  Where do you live, just curious? Is it suburbs or city?
  - robomartin 3y ago
    Suburbs.
- bkettle 3y ago
inconceivable 3y ago
china already makes a lot of these but we all know how that's gonna go if they ever try to market them in the US.
- LightBug1 3y ago
  Except they run 2 to 3 Uyghurs pedaling under the bonnet to power the batteries, so I'm not sure they'll meet the required regulations.
proee 3y ago
The industry is heading toward 100 EV for cars. Would it not be possible to create an industry standard that allows for geofenced speed regulators? We have the technology to enforce speed limits on a per-street basis if everyone is diving an EV (even non EV for that matter). This would make it impossible for people to drive 50MPH through a residential neighborhood. Seems like a good idea no?
- colordrops 3y ago
  When all cars are connected we will 100% have geofencing that controls cars. I suspect that this will become a political wedge issue. The right will see it as unnecessary government control, and/or the left will be pissed that rich people coordinated with officials to prevent most people from driving through their neighborhood.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    > rich people coordinated with officials to prevent most people from driving through their neighborhood Gated neighborhoods are already a thing. You don't need geofencing technology to do that.
    - colordrops 3y ago
      You obviously don't live in LA. Google maps does everything it can to route you around rich neighborhoods. And there are countless extremely rich neighborhoods with no gates.
- issa 3y ago
  In the US, I think it is more likely that we will regulate automobile speed than guns. I thought there might be a joke here, but sadly, this is just true.
- bkettle 3y ago
  We can also prevent people from driving 50MPH through residential neighborhoods with good street design. Current safety standards with open roads encourage people to ignore the speed limit. Safety features like raised crosswalks, curb bulb-outs at intersections, and roundabouts at small intersections like those used in Seattle all make it uncomfortable to drive fast. This would go far in reducing egregious speeding without the claims of authoritarianism that would certainly come with technological speed controls.
fishtoaster 3y ago
> with carsharing programs providing cars as needed for highway driving I feel like this is the missing piece for me for the car-less life I dream of: what to do when I want to take a few-day trip to any of the beautiful places in easy driving distance of my dense urban core? Car sharing is an option, but it's quite expensive. If I take a zipcar for 1 drive out to a campground on a Friday, then 1 drive back on a Sunday, I'm spending $240 or more. You can argue that the cost of car rental is way less than the amortized cost of an actual car, but a $5k used vehicle pays for itself after 20 such trips. I don't know a great solution here. Trains + long-distance buses only work if you're going exactly where they're going, or if you're headed to another city with good post-train transit options. Rent other people's unused cars (à la Getaround)? Prices for that seem to be barely better than Zipcar. Maybe rentable driverless cars, eventually: they can drive me to the campground, then drive themselves to the nearest town and rent themselves out to other people for the weekend until I need them again? I dunno.
- mechagodzilla 3y ago
  With that $5k used car, you're also paying monthly insurance and any required maintenance on it. If you were averaging less than once a month, the zipcar probably works out to be cheaper indefinitely.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    In the event of an emergency, your car is available on demand.
    - mechagodzilla 3y ago
      Maybe? It depends if your car is in the shop for repairs, or has a dead battery (especially if driven infrequently), etc. For most people, the carrying-cost of a car is probably a few thousand dollars a year (insurance, maintenance, parking, depreciation, etc). If you're driving frequently and parking costs are sane, it's definitely going to work out to own a cheap car, but if you genuinely use a car infrequently and rentals are readily available, it's worth running the numbers carefully.
swalling 3y ago
Try telling a family who needs to haul multiple children, dogs, and gear for even short trips to the park for soccer practice that they should use a tiny city car instead of a van or SUV. You buy vehicles for the life and city you have, not some aspirational version that exists in a fantasy of urban design. You're supposed to buy a second car just for long trips? Even if you live in a dense city, America is inescapably huge and requires highway travel unless you never want to leave your neighborhood. We don't have a functioning passenger rail network like China etc. Even if this were remotely feasible, which it's not, this kind of tiny car is a total death trap for your family when everyone else is driving large vehicles. I would love to see a crash test video of this against an F-150. Finally, let's say you do live in a city and you are already a two car household. Try telling your wife that she has to buy this ugly toy-sized car that she looks ridiculous in while you get to drive a Tesla or Rivian. Like it or not, cars are lifestyle status symbols where the aesthetics matter.
- toss1 3y ago
  Fine, I will tell you that. The Station Wagon format was perfect for all of that before the CAFE (Corp Average Fuel Efficiency) standards came in with the exception for trucks, btu not a requirement that those trucks have commercial license tags. At that point, the entire production and marketing of the major car companies shifted towards SUV form factors, since they didn't count against their fuel mileage standards. Now, the behemoths are the norm, but what is really selling is the "Crossover", which is in fact indistinguishable from the old station wagon format. Yes, this thing won't likely do well when run over by an F150 or Yukon. Which is why standards should be set such that the larger vehicles are not such a hazard to pedestrians, cyclists, and smaller cars (eliminating the front "wall" would be a start). It's likely you can do just fine with a station-wagon/crossover format, although this is obviously small for a bunch of kids and dogs. No car is not made for every purpose, and I wonder why the mere existence of this thing seems to annoy you so much?
  - swalling 3y ago
    The existence doesn't annoy me. It's the sanctimonious tone that this should be the norm, when it's clearly not even remotely built for the reality of how families actually live, despite their marketing. The actual solution to this short trips problem is better mass transit and cycling infrastructure, with cars reserved for highway travel and other long trips or cargo hauling. Good pre-car suburban neighborhoods existed on a network of walking and electric streetcars. That is the future of urban design, not cars designed for Oompa Loompas.
CalRobert 3y ago
That illustrates that these city "streets" are, in fact, stroads.
annoyingnoob 3y ago
> Highway-built cars are fundamentally incompatible with human-scale living: they are loud Most modern cars are very quiet. There is an alley behind my house, I mostly hear the stupid whirring noises that electric cars make and large trucks, I don't even hear modern ICE cars go through the alley. The safety systems for blind people in electric cars are much much louder than the exhaust of a modern car.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Urban living detracts from pleasant urban living. Pleasant urban living is an oxymoron. If not highway-built cars disturbing the peace, then it's the emergency vehicles, the sirens, the construction. Sound aside, the pollution, the disease, the trash, the smell. It's always something in the city.
golemiprague 3y ago
[dead]

ilyt 3y ago

But slowing down means every vehicle is on road longer, so even more vehicles in peak traffic. I think problem is that many of high speed roads are also very "interfering"; highway circling a city is not really a problem and can be decently isolated, but high speed road full of streets flowing into it just makes for many more chances for accidents.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jonas21 3y ago
Slowing a road down doesn't decrease its throughput (at least not until you get to very low speeds). The minimum spacing required between cars is proportional to speed.
bkettle 3y ago
Slowing down roads also means they are more comfortable to bike in and to walk alongside, which will move some people from cars to other modes and decrease peak traffic for drivers.
CapstanRoller 3y ago
If the goal is efficient and consistent transportation, then traffic coordination is far more important than raw speed. A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless.
- ilyt 3y ago
  True but people don't have that either, regardless of speed. > A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless. basic 10Gbit switch works far better than fancy 1Gbit switch in vast majority of cases. Only if you need single digit ms jitter while running storage loads on same switch does it start to matter. It's also absolutely terrible comparision at every level because * now even lower end switches can sustain max speed between every port at once, while traffic often have clear bottlenecks * pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay. Stopping car traffic (with say red light) means multiple second delay till everyone gets up to speed. Even single car acting badly can make massive traffic wave slowing down people behind them for minute or more.
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    >pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay. That's because Ethernet has flow control, while car traffic doesn't. That's why my example was about a very fast switch with no flow control or collision detection. Basically, a fast but otherwise terrible hub. We can't solve the inherent problems of hubs by making them faster, but somehow we think it's okay to solve inherent problems of bad road design by adding more lanes or increasing speed limits.

robomartin 3y ago

> I would love to see small cars like these come into more widespread use in the the U.S While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think this is possible. The first layer of the many problems is that people don't have unlimited funds to purchase multiple vehicles. Remember that every vehicle must also be insured. This means they must make a selection based on life's realities. For a family, in most urban areas in the US, that means highway travel to go just-about everywhere, including shopping for food, school and work. A relatively small percentage of people in most towns have the luxury of living so close to work, school, stores, church, whatever, to be able to use this type of vehicle. And then you have the issues you alude to: Speed and size. My street, which is in a nice neighborhood, is supposed to have a 25 mph speed limit. I can't tell you how many people who live here fly down this street doing 40 to 50 mph. It's mind blowing, really. If you can't be considerate in your own neighborhood, I hate to think what someone might be like on the highway. I have almost been hit a few times in the 25 years I've lived here just coming out of my driveway. People are moving so fast that you look right and left, it's clear and, when you are on the road someone suddenly is right on your ass. It's terrible. We've had multiple neighbors call the police for some enforcement. They put on a bit of a show and nothing happens (those signs showing your speed). They don't want to write dozens of tickets on a neighborhood street. They have more important things to look after, I guess. And so, most people look at a car like this and think "That would be nice, but...". I suppose there might be a potential future where self driving cars might be software-limited to maximum speeds based on where they might be and actually cooperate to increase safety (the car coming down the street knows my car is pulling out onto the street and plans appropriately, etc.). I think that's the only hope really. Which means it is at least 25 years away.

y-curious 3y ago
Where do you live, just curious? Is it suburbs or city?
- robomartin 3y ago
  Suburbs.
bkettle 3y ago

inconceivable 3y ago

china already makes a lot of these but we all know how that's gonna go if they ever try to market them in the US.

LightBug1 3y ago
Except they run 2 to 3 Uyghurs pedaling under the bonnet to power the batteries, so I'm not sure they'll meet the required regulations.

proee 3y ago

The industry is heading toward 100 EV for cars. Would it not be possible to create an industry standard that allows for geofenced speed regulators? We have the technology to enforce speed limits on a per-street basis if everyone is diving an EV (even non EV for that matter). This would make it impossible for people to drive 50MPH through a residential neighborhood. Seems like a good idea no?

colordrops 3y ago
When all cars are connected we will 100% have geofencing that controls cars. I suspect that this will become a political wedge issue. The right will see it as unnecessary government control, and/or the left will be pissed that rich people coordinated with officials to prevent most people from driving through their neighborhood.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  > rich people coordinated with officials to prevent most people from driving through their neighborhood Gated neighborhoods are already a thing. You don't need geofencing technology to do that.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    You obviously don't live in LA. Google maps does everything it can to route you around rich neighborhoods. And there are countless extremely rich neighborhoods with no gates.
issa 3y ago
In the US, I think it is more likely that we will regulate automobile speed than guns. I thought there might be a joke here, but sadly, this is just true.
bkettle 3y ago
We can also prevent people from driving 50MPH through residential neighborhoods with good street design. Current safety standards with open roads encourage people to ignore the speed limit. Safety features like raised crosswalks, curb bulb-outs at intersections, and roundabouts at small intersections like those used in Seattle all make it uncomfortable to drive fast. This would go far in reducing egregious speeding without the claims of authoritarianism that would certainly come with technological speed controls.

fishtoaster 3y ago

> with carsharing programs providing cars as needed for highway driving I feel like this is the missing piece for me for the car-less life I dream of: what to do when I want to take a few-day trip to any of the beautiful places in easy driving distance of my dense urban core? Car sharing is an option, but it's quite expensive. If I take a zipcar for 1 drive out to a campground on a Friday, then 1 drive back on a Sunday, I'm spending $240 or more. You can argue that the cost of car rental is way less than the amortized cost of an actual car, but a $5k used vehicle pays for itself after 20 such trips. I don't know a great solution here. Trains + long-distance buses only work if you're going exactly where they're going, or if you're headed to another city with good post-train transit options. Rent other people's unused cars (à la Getaround)? Prices for that seem to be barely better than Zipcar. Maybe rentable driverless cars, eventually: they can drive me to the campground, then drive themselves to the nearest town and rent themselves out to other people for the weekend until I need them again? I dunno.

mechagodzilla 3y ago
With that $5k used car, you're also paying monthly insurance and any required maintenance on it. If you were averaging less than once a month, the zipcar probably works out to be cheaper indefinitely.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  In the event of an emergency, your car is available on demand.
  - mechagodzilla 3y ago
    Maybe? It depends if your car is in the shop for repairs, or has a dead battery (especially if driven infrequently), etc. For most people, the carrying-cost of a car is probably a few thousand dollars a year (insurance, maintenance, parking, depreciation, etc). If you're driving frequently and parking costs are sane, it's definitely going to work out to own a cheap car, but if you genuinely use a car infrequently and rentals are readily available, it's worth running the numbers carefully.

swalling 3y ago

Try telling a family who needs to haul multiple children, dogs, and gear for even short trips to the park for soccer practice that they should use a tiny city car instead of a van or SUV. You buy vehicles for the life and city you have, not some aspirational version that exists in a fantasy of urban design. You're supposed to buy a second car just for long trips? Even if you live in a dense city, America is inescapably huge and requires highway travel unless you never want to leave your neighborhood. We don't have a functioning passenger rail network like China etc. Even if this were remotely feasible, which it's not, this kind of tiny car is a total death trap for your family when everyone else is driving large vehicles. I would love to see a crash test video of this against an F-150. Finally, let's say you do live in a city and you are already a two car household. Try telling your wife that she has to buy this ugly toy-sized car that she looks ridiculous in while you get to drive a Tesla or Rivian. Like it or not, cars are lifestyle status symbols where the aesthetics matter.

toss1 3y ago
Fine, I will tell you that. The Station Wagon format was perfect for all of that before the CAFE (Corp Average Fuel Efficiency) standards came in with the exception for trucks, btu not a requirement that those trucks have commercial license tags. At that point, the entire production and marketing of the major car companies shifted towards SUV form factors, since they didn't count against their fuel mileage standards. Now, the behemoths are the norm, but what is really selling is the "Crossover", which is in fact indistinguishable from the old station wagon format. Yes, this thing won't likely do well when run over by an F150 or Yukon. Which is why standards should be set such that the larger vehicles are not such a hazard to pedestrians, cyclists, and smaller cars (eliminating the front "wall" would be a start). It's likely you can do just fine with a station-wagon/crossover format, although this is obviously small for a bunch of kids and dogs. No car is not made for every purpose, and I wonder why the mere existence of this thing seems to annoy you so much?
- swalling 3y ago
  The existence doesn't annoy me. It's the sanctimonious tone that this should be the norm, when it's clearly not even remotely built for the reality of how families actually live, despite their marketing. The actual solution to this short trips problem is better mass transit and cycling infrastructure, with cars reserved for highway travel and other long trips or cargo hauling. Good pre-car suburban neighborhoods existed on a network of walking and electric streetcars. That is the future of urban design, not cars designed for Oompa Loompas.

CalRobert 3y ago

That illustrates that these city "streets" are, in fact, stroads.

annoyingnoob 3y ago

> Highway-built cars are fundamentally incompatible with human-scale living: they are loud Most modern cars are very quiet. There is an alley behind my house, I mostly hear the stupid whirring noises that electric cars make and large trucks, I don't even hear modern ICE cars go through the alley. The safety systems for blind people in electric cars are much much louder than the exhaust of a modern car.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Urban living detracts from pleasant urban living. Pleasant urban living is an oxymoron. If not highway-built cars disturbing the peace, then it's the emergency vehicles, the sirens, the construction. Sound aside, the pollution, the disease, the trash, the smell. It's always something in the city.

golemiprague 3y ago

[dead]