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Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars
- yrro 3y agoCar size should be regulated and a maximum should be enforced. Pavement parking (and other antisocial forms of parking) should also be banned. In the UK, local authorities are in charge of parking enforcement. In Oxford they largely don't bother: I see vehicles parked on yellow lines every day. I can't fathom why, this is an opportunity to raise revenue!
- Pet_Ant 3y agoAn article shared recently said that road damage is weight^4. Make a car tax based on vehicle weight and the market takes care of itself. For the right classes (such as wheelchair accessible) it can be a tax write-off.
- Angostura 3y agoUK car tax is currently based on vehicle type- but it's based on CO2 emissions https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables typically this is related to weight/size - except in the case of electric vehicles which are heavier than their ICE counterparts
- rob74 3y agoThis (and tax subsidies) is the reason behind the proliferation of large plug-in-hybrid SUVs - being a plug-in hybrid lowers CO2 emissions (at least on paper), but in practice many/most owners will never actually charge the car, so the CO2 emissions will be even more unrealistic than they already are.
- Pet_Ant 3y agoThis doesn’t address needlessly large EVs that damage roads and are a threat to pedestrians and bicyclists. These larger EVs are also inefficient use of battery cells than they’d be in smaller vehicles. Would love to see more Mini/Smart car EVs
- mytailorisrich 3y agoA Tesla is heavier than a petrol Range Rover. All EVs are heavy.
- wcoenen 3y agoThe weight difference of comparable ICE cars and EVs is sometimes surprisingly small when you look at the variant of the EV model with the smaller battery. For example, the BMW X3 is 1670 kg. The Tesla Model Y (SR RWD) is 1778 kg.
- oblio 3y agoThat's only for big cars. The smallest Tesla is a D-segment car, cars around 4.7m: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment There are 3 different car categories smaller than the smallest Tesla. For smaller cars, EVs are a mess, they're between 25 and 40% heavier than equivalent ICEs, that's a humongous difference.
- oblio 3y agoWell, they did say this: > Would love to see more Mini/Smart car EVs Teslas are big cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment, they're not Minis. The smallest Tesla is 4.7m long. There are 3 car categories smaller than the smaller Tesla. But yeah, EVs are heavy.
- Pet_Ant 3y agoThe larger an EV is the less efficient it is because it has to carry the unloaded battery with it, and it needs more battery for the same function. I don't have the number but I would bet that the energy need is a square of the vehicle weight. It's the same problem rockets have where they have to expend fuel just to carry fuel.
- jakub_g 3y agoAlso, there was an article recently that (at least in US) the CO2 emission norms are not absolute but relative to car size; to the absurd point that to fit into the norms, it's easier to make the car bigger, rather than to lower the emissions of a smaller car. Hence, SUVs.
- Angostura 3y agoAbsolute in the UK
- Angostura 3y agoI'm not sure I have seen many large plug-in hybrids on UK roads
- cjrp 3y agoSeeing more Volvo SUV PHEVs recently, big ones too.
- fomine3 3y agoPHEV shouldn't be sold to who don't have slow charging equipment at home. It's one of the best solution with home charger.
- yrro 3y agoLarger vehicles makes less efficient use of precious space. Vehicle size needs to be addressed as well as weight.
- danw1979 3y agoThis is a great idea and would handily deal with the escalating “momentum war” between selfish drivers who buy the biggest, heaviest vehicle they can afford in order to be safer than their counterparts in a collision. I’d propose we make the tax highly non-linear too…
- mytailorisrich 3y agoAs a friend od mine recently discovered, Range Rovers have an airbag under the bonnet that pops up in case of frontal collision, presumably to protect pedestrians. They hit a deer on a country road and that airbag caused £6,000 of damage to the car... Who's laughing now? ;)
- melx 3y agoI hope the deer had survived the encounter.
- odiroot 3y agoYou're right on the money. I've heard it a few times from my associates (in UK), who don't feel comfortable driving. They want to go for the big car so they can be safe. But what about other road users? You can also notice how pushy all these Range Rover drivers are on our very narrow roads.
- JambalayaJim 3y agoSafety is a reason why many people claim to purchase these cars but frankly I’m not convinced. These cars are comfortable and luxurious - appealing to safety is a way to tell themselves their purchase is practical and not frivolous. In any case I agree; these vehicles do not in fact make us more safe, overall.
- rsynnott 3y agoFrance is doing this (albeit with a carveout for electric cars).
- JambalayaJim 3y agoIt’s my understanding that personal vehicles are irrelevant compared to large trucks for this very reason. Where even the most innocuous residential street will have a garbage truck that damages the road far more than cars do. Not that their aren’t many more problems with large cars in terms of pedestrian safety, congestion, waste of parking space, etc.
- mocopoco 3y agoYes let the rich have the big cars, us peasants will kneel to the taxes as always...
- Pet_Ant 3y agoI mean, I'd rather no one have large cars and the need by addressed by business but that opens up loop-holes and other abuses. For those who are truly waste, let's at least get some other money for other uses. Both McMansions and pavement-boats are grostesque excesses... but policing morality never ends well so taxes are the gentler stick.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoParking issues are caused by number of vehicles on the road and lack of planning. Many roads in the UK are very narrow with narrow pavements: There is no space to 'properly' park even if all cars are small-ish. I have rarely seen roads with parked cars blocking half the road in Europe (at least in France) whereas this is common here in the UK.
- secretsatan 3y agoI'm not sure narrow roads in old cities are due to lack of planning, they didn't have crystal balls
- arethuza 3y agoAnd some of the "planning" that was done to make our cities car friendly was absolutely horrific - look at what someone thought was a good idea for Edinburgh: https://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?p=682 https://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?p=682 Edit: thankfully never built!
- yrro 3y agoSee Glascow's M8 which did get built!
- mytailorisrich 3y agoNarrow roads are not only found in old cities... They are everywhere.
- secretsatan 3y agoBut still for historical reasons, towns, villages, country lanes have been around far longer than cars
- citrin_ru 3y agoWhen most roads/streets are narrow it makes it acceptable to plan new ones narrow too. I live in a neighbourhood built in a green (farm) field in 1990s - residential street are wide enough for two compact cars to pass each other but nowadays half of the street used for parking (for lack of better places).
- moomin 3y agoSeems a good time to drag up this ad that demonstrated how much space cars take up again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYn8aQIpNH4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYn8aQIpNH4
- austinjp 3y agoWow, I watched that with the sound off and was surprised it's actually a car manufacturer's ad. What a misfire. In turn, that reminded me of this legendary ad misfire: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_(cigarette)#Marketing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_(cigarette)#Marketing
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoThis Fiat advert from the seventies is remarkably honest: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/8e/70/228e700a28f190746ea9cc95388cb117.png https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/8e/70/228e700a28f190746ea9...
- gertrunde 3y agoThe article does discuss one of the main causes - safety. If you require various crumple/impact zones for safety reasons, which are usually all about controlling the impact deceleration over a longer period of time, i.e. less g-force on the occupants etc, then the relevant car parts get larger. Doors get thicker, front and back get extended etc. I suspect it would be quite difficult to walk back those changes, so it may be better to roll with them a little, and dictate better minimum sizes for car parking spaces. (Which might dovetail quite nicely with the increased weight of electric cars - which apparently causes issues with multi-storey parking structures which are designed around lighter cars, and may not be structurally safe if filled to capacity with vehicles 50-100% heavier than expected). (Not counting the truly ludicrous outliers - like the mentioned EV Hummer and Rolls Royce etc).
- DrScientist 3y agoYou can get an older reasonably sized car which has an NCAP rating of 5. Note bigger cars will have more mass and thus momentum & energy to dissipate, might be less nimble and certainly in the early days of SUV types were easier to roll.
- therealchiggs 3y agoIt's worth noting that NCAP ratings aren't necessarily comparable over time. New tests are periodically introduced and they generally become more stringent[1]. A 5-star car from 2015 is likely to be significantly less safe than a 5-star car from 2023. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_NCAP#Rating_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_NCAP#Rating_history
- DrScientist 3y agoFair point.
- yrro 3y agoE = 1/2 m v^2 Drive slower and everyone is safer
- robnado 3y agoI feel that all those people who talk about reducing car size and use probably don’t have a family. I have twin 6 month olds and the only cars we currently use is the Toyota Corolla from a local car sharing service. Two car seats in the back leave basically just enough room between for my wife to fit sideways inside the middle seat. She can’t stay in there for longer than a few minutes and if we get in a car accident, she is not gonna have a good time. Also, have you tried putting a child in a car seat while avoiding hitting their head on the roof of the car? It’s a tricky thing. Those are two reasons that two people who worked hard on reducing their environmental footprint end up in a situation where we have to look into buying an SUV. And don’t get me started on avoiding cars altogether: with hospital appointments that take 15 min to drive to but would take hours of public transit to get to, the need to buy more food at a cheaper price and the fact that transit options are often not accessible with a stroller (good luck bringing a double stroller up and down a few flights of stairs) means that you need to use a car. My suggestion: please either fix public transit so families can actually use it and organise the city so services are accessible, or offer cars that can accommodate a reasonable sized family while being environmentally friendly. Fyi, I live downtown in a major North American city that is known for having good public transit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yrro 3y agoAll valid problems. The car lobby (and their pet politicians) aren't going to do anything to fix it though. And we will all have to live with the consequences.
- robnado 3y agoAgreed, instead of addressing any of the problems that push people to buy big gas guzzlers, they leverage those problems to divide the population. If you look, you will see these wedge issues everywhere. We won't get anywhere at addressing any pressing issues in our society if we let the medias keep dividing us.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago>In Oxford they largely don't bother Funnily enough I saw a traffic warden issuing tickets in Oxford last week.
- yrro 3y agoWas it by chance on August the 30th? That would have co-incideded with the ultra rare "blue supermoon". Next one is in 203x...
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoI was in Oxford again today and saw another one.
- bowsamic 3y agoDeleted for personal safety reasons.
- baz00 3y agoTo be fair they are working on legislation to ban disposable vapes now. And they've been seizing millions of illegal and dangerous ones for ages. And the water companies are getting fined heavily for dumping sewage.
- monooso 3y agoThe Welsh government is calling for a ban on disposable vapes [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-66787168 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-66787168
- rjh29 3y agoDisposable e-vapes are planned to be banned literally next week... My region's water company has paid huge fines for dumping sewage, which are invested in improving natural water quality...
- RetroTechie 3y agoHumanity is putting too many cars on the road. And average car has too big an environmental footprint. And: “We don’t need electric windows. In the 1970s, face-level vents were introduced, so the reason for having windows has largely gone away. And why do we need motor-powered seats? Most people don’t move their seat. All these creature comforts that we hardly ever use add weight.” Go back to essentials, and you can shed a looott of weight (and size, too. Besides cost & environmental footprint). That's the heart of the problem. The phenomenon described in the article is just one of many symptoms of this. And we (or our governments) are not addressing the root problem as strongly as needed. Expect things to get worse before they get better.
- timeon 3y agoWhat is strange is that those cars are certified for those roads.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThe main cause of heavier new cars is the weight of the batteries in EVs. If we're all going to get EVs, we're all going to put heavier cars on the road... Regarding size, my experience of UK roads and parking spaces is that the biggest issue is indeed the increased width of cars. In any case wider roads should be built if only to accomodate decent cycle lanes, which is also something touted as the way forward.
- marcus_holmes 3y agoBuilding wider roads in the UK is going to be tricky. A lot of roads have no room to grow without knocking down the houses lining them. Maybe the UK needs less roads?
- mytailorisrich 3y agoOf course it's very difficult to impossible to widen existing roads. But nothing prevent building wider new roads... which isn't done because priority is actually to save as much money as possible instead of delivering good, future-proof, infrastructure. You can't have fewer roads in a country whose population grows by hundreds of thousands every year...
- orwin 3y agoYou can. Paris have less roads (or rather has closed roads to cars) and upped the public transit system frequency in the area despite a small population augmentation. I know one person living in the area, the QOL is now way, way higher.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoComparing a very dense urban area with a whole country is nonsensical, not least because even in your example road access is still needed and still exists.
- 3y ago
- vkoskiv 3y agoAFAIK in many countries there is also the double whammy of heavy electric cars eroding the roadways a lot more, but not paying for the increased maintenance costs with petrol tax.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoIn the UK, road maintenance is paid for by income tax, though reduced fuel duty will affect public finances. However, fuel duty has been frozen for a number of years, so it doesn't look like the Tories want to stop people sitting in cars. The road damage from EVs hardly matters compared to HGVs, buses and the biggest vehicles. Road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, so cars aren't responsible for most of it. This can be verified by looking at bus stops and invariably the road surface is damaged by the bus stopping and starting there. A similar effect can be seen at traffic lights.
- yrro 3y ago> road maintenance is paid for by income tax Isn't it funded through general taxation? Income tax, NI, dividend tax, duties, capital gains tax, VAT and so on all go into one pot out of which comes some money for the highways agency (who maintain major roads) and local authorities (who maintain minor roads).
- EliRivers 3y agoThe current annual car tax in the UK is a freaky thing. For cars registered before March 2001, it's a payment based on engine size (smaller or larger than 1.55 litres); couldn't tell if that's aimed at perceived wealth, pollution, or just leftover because that's how it was back when those cars were new. March 2001 to March 2017, it's a payment based on CO2 emissions. Pollution based. April 2017 to present day, it's a payment in the first year based on CO2 emissions, and each year after that a fixed rate based on fuel type only, EXCEPT that if the list price was over 40000 GBP in which case it's a bit higher for the 2nd to 6th years only. So pollution based for the first year, and then a short period of perceived wealth based, and then just a poll tax. Come on UK, pick one! Are we taxing this based on pollution, apparent wealth or just plain poll? Oh yes, also; if your vehicle was registered in 1983 or earlier, you can register it as exempt from this tax entirely. A UK nod to encourage classic car enthusiasts and people who are just really good at car maintenance, I guess! It changes every so often. There was a time when this annual tax had nothing to do with CO2 emissions; that was judged to then be something that should be discouraged by means of this tax, so it changed. If weight of vehicle is now a meaningful factor, an obvious step is to make this tax higher for heavier vehicles.
- beachy 3y agoI'm not familiar with the UK tax but here in NZ, new car tax has become a political football. The current opposition party tagged it the "Ute tax", which seems to have resonated with the more easily outraged members of society and those who crowd city streets with their stupidly large trucks for school drop-off. I anticipate politics-driven tinkering with it from here on in. Perhaps we will look like the UK after a few more political cycles.
- rsynnott 3y agoAIUI the engine size thing is a relic of the oil crisis; there was a desire to disincentivise high-consumption cars. At the time they wouldn't have been thinking primarily about pollution.
- yrro 3y agoApparently we can't do anything to change how existing vehicles are taxed on grounds of fairness.
- monooso 3y ago> Car designer Chris Longmore... blames safety legislation for the dramatic increase in size since the 1990s. This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. For example, the 2022 Toyota Aygo X has a 4 star NCAP safety rating (out of a possible 5) [1], and is about the same size as the original 1970s VW Golf [2]. [1] https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Toyota/Aygo%20X/46259 https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/Toyota/Aygo%20X/46259 [2] https://www.automobiledimension.com/model/toyota/aygo-x https://www.automobiledimension.com/model/toyota/aygo-x
- secretsatan 3y agoNormal cars (Not SUVs, pickups) have got slightly larger, there's no excuse for cars that are big for the perceived safety of being the largest car on the road
- eptcyka 3y agoCars are crash tested against one-another, not against a benchmark car. This means that the tiny Aygo-X was crash tested with another Aygo-X, not with a Ford "danger" Ranger or a Range Rover or a Juke.
- monooso 3y agoDo you mean other cars in the same class? Either way, it undermines the statement that the increase in car size is primarily due to new legislation which makes it impossible to build a small, safe car.
- eptcyka 3y agoNo, I mean the car is crash tested against itself. And not against cars in the same class or a variety of cars that can be encountered on the road. I agree that small cars can be made to be safe nominally, but one cannot argue with the mass component of the kinetic energy equation. I say this as someone who drives a car that weighs slightly above a ton, and I'm well aware that I'd likely be on the losing end of any collision with another vehichle on the road.
- gampleman 3y agoI haven't read the article (paywall), but does it explain why roads in the UK are specifically worse than elsewhere in Europe? Like I've driven this year in Scotland, Czechia and Cyprus and despite constant roadworks in Scotland the road quality is so much worse its not even a contest. Why? At least visually it seems like the same sort of cars one sees driving around (although there may be fewer older cars in the UK, due to rust issues and strict MOT requirements...)
- happymellon 3y agoI cannot comment on the scenario that the roads here are worse than in other European countries, but from my observations of the roads in Hampshire I would guess that: 1. We have oversized articulated lorries running down smaller village roads. The ones that are extra tall, that we didn't have 20 years ago and which also damage trees. Other locations seem to do better with rules barring them from coming off the main motorways. 2. The local council has been defunded by central government, who also tries to take more locally raised money central for pet projects in London. As such we don't have the cash for road repairs. There are a lot of patch jobs these past couple of years that don't last, the roads need proper resurfacing. I see a lot of EVs around here, and I don't know what it's like in Czechia but the additional weight of the EVs are only making it worse when compounded with the other problems.
- ben_w 3y agoFor any problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. On that basis, what would be wrong with the combination of encouraging (electric?) motorbikes while also making changes to road furniture to improve motorbike safety?
- DrScientist 3y agoI think one factor in the gradual increase in car size is the problem of visibility. A lot of new large cars are not only large ( taller and wider ), but have a tendency to have privacy type glass. This means if you are in a traditionally sized car behind you can't see much of the road ahead. Driving in a busy city, the lack of visibility of what's happening beyond the car ahead is very disconcerting. Solution? Get a bigger car yourself, with a higher driving position.
- mihaaly 3y agoBritain's road were inadequate for the ammount of cars pushed into it to begin with. A nation that tries to rationalize napkin sized 'gardens' and two level homes as 'proper' on the basis of 'our island has limited space' pours ever increasing ammount of cars into this limited space, into the medieval sized road network and infrastructure and prioritize personal car use almost everywhere (with relatively negligible exception, most are in London) if it was the prairie of the america's, has priority over public transport and to a good degree pedestrians too (traffic lights favour cars), incentivising personal car use where it has admittably no proper environment! Car parks are erected in the very center of the cities attracting cars, cars occupy one lane of the two lanes available in almost every town's main street and all residential streets alowing single car width for two way traffic requiring patiece and courtious driving style not to grind traffic to a halt but more like to crawling speed (driving time in most regions is pathetic) while the few incentive with P+R and partial separation of public transport is mixed together with car lanes bringing it to halt and making inattractive in the times it was supposed to help the most (high traffic periods). High portion of single lane roads, houses built to the very edge of the road, kerbs in rural area roads, stone or bush fences at the vertical of your rear view mirror to protect pastures and meadows and basically any inch of private property from public access roads making it impossible to improve. Cars were poured into this inadequate situation without any considerable effort to develope proper and sustainable alternatives for many many many decades, and into the forseeable future. All aggravetad by the insufficient funds allocated to the maintainance of the roads so the road surfaces are in increasingly terrible state already, half or whole decades passing by until simple road faults fixed. It is not the SUVs and EVs that caused this problem but decades of ignorance towards building a suitable and proper system that fits the conditions of Britain.
- fomine3 3y agoJapan's road too, except that there are narrower width JDMs like K-car, A-seg crossover, and minivan. It's annoying that mid-sized C-seg JDM is no longer a thing and they lacks EV lineup except Nissan Sakura K-car.