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The rise in SUV and “modern truck” sales doesn’t help either. USA transportation infrastructure is fundamentally broken. We spend trillions of dollars (highway

by xyst 3y ago

The rise in SUV and “modern truck” sales doesn’t help either. USA transportation infrastructure is fundamentally broken. We spend trillions of dollars (highway infra, street infra, parking infra, new builds and subsequent maintenance) on this inefficient transportation system and it’s slowly starving us to death. We need to end this car centric transportation hell hole we are in. Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease (ie, make commute times soar, parking fines increased, decreasing available parking, narrowing roads, get rid of archaic “parking minimums” for buildings) The suburban experiment is a tremendous failure supported by endless subsidies (federal, state, local). We need to be more efficient in urban planning. Give back the land stolen for highways, redirect them so they do not run through urban cores. So much we can do. Yet this country continues to throw their hands up in the air and do nothing.

josefresco 3y ago
Anecdotally I regularly run "virtual" marathons (via YouTube) and hiking/biking tracks in Europe. The vehicles that woosh past me are 80% large SUVS. The SUV problem is not just an American one.
- morsch 3y ago
  Around 15% of registered cars in Germany are SUVs, and 40% of the new cars bought in H1/2023. So yeah, the SUV plague is very noticeable here, too, though I don't think SUVs make up 80% anywhere in Europe, yet. And also, SUV in Europe often refers to compact or sub-compact SUVs. Ie. the best selling SUV in H1/2023 in Germany was a VW T-Roc [1]. Ridiculous super-sized cars like the F150 and its ilk are still quite rare, fortunately. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc I was "upgraded" to one when renting, once. The visibility was shit due to its fashionably small windows and the trunk volume was pathetic compared to the hatchback I had ordered. Otherwise, very little difference.
jrsj 3y ago
Big point of resistance here is going to be public safety. I would live in a city alone as a single man. I wouldn’t live in a city with a family. At this point even suburbs are becoming a questionable option as many cities have little to no options that are both safe and affordable, so you have to go out to the exurbs instead.
- tootie 3y ago
  I mean, that's your bias. I'm raising my family in a big city with no car. They're teens now. Spent the whole time in public schools. It's never really been a problem.
  - jrsj 3y ago
    This used to be feasible where I’m at, but housing prices are too high now. Spending $3k a month on a mortgage isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- obelos 3y ago
  What's your threat model? The number one killer of children under 16 is cars.
  - jrsj 3y ago
    And where are they more likely to be hit by one? Probably in a denser populated area with heavier traffic. You can’t just wave a magic wand and make all the cars go away. Regardless, you have to make cities a desirable and affordable place to live for this to work at scale. You can’t just fix it at the transportation infrastructure level. If I’m looking for affordability, low violent crime, and good schools, I am not looking anywhere in the city where I live. It didn’t used to be this way, but post-covid housing costs are so high that I have to go 40+ minutes out of the city to get those things. If you don’t change that, many people with families are just going to deal with traffic being worse rather than moving into the city.
novok 3y ago
That doesnt work in a democracy where the vast majority of people live that way. They will and do vote out people who make their driving life miserable. One mayor in a town i used to live in partly got voted out by adding a protected bike lane that made driving tight in a busy central stroad to give one example
- Etheryte 3y ago
  You say that it doesn't work, yet there's numerous examples across the globe of how it does work. Sounds like another example of "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
  - jrsj 3y ago
    It’s not that you can’t achieve the goal, it’s that you can’t force people into it by making their daily lives worse. Or at least that seems like that would be the least effective political strategy.
    - spankalee 3y ago
      Less car dependency will make lives better, not worse.
      - jrsj 3y ago
        OP suggested intentionally making commutes unbearable as a means of forcing people into cities to achieve this. That’s the wrong order of operations and would backfire politically imo. Personally I work remote, so I would probably just go to the city less if it were made more inconvenient to do so. This has already happened to an extent. No free parking? I’m not going unless I have to. Public transit as it exists isn’t a good alternative either. It’s slow and I don’t want to be harassed by addicts at the bus stop. Any plan that involves coercion isn’t something I’m interested in.
minihat 3y ago
My idea of a hell hole is the neighborhood I would have to live in to afford a home in the city near my office. What if we made cities more affordable, nicer places to live instead of making commuting even more expensive and miserable than it already is?
- Sharlin 3y ago
  False dichotomy. Far from being conflicting, those goals are fundamentally aligned and you can't have one without the other!
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    you can definitely have nice affordable housing near work without making commuting miserable, and that's the only way to get people to not commute
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      Well, yes, if by "not making commuting miserable" you mean "build a lot of transit, convert roads and motorways to streets, and somehow cure people of their car addiction". But yes, you also have to cure people and planners of their single-family house addiction.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        I didn't say that, and it's obviously not what a normal person would take to mean from that sequence of words. The spending needs to be on building more housing, better housing, more affordable housing, housing closer to work. Single family or multi family? Whatever the people need, neither will exclusively work if people want both. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how miserable you make the commute, people will still do it because the alternative for them is not going to their job and becoming destitute.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  What if we had cities, but smaller ones and made sure companies and business opportunities were not concentrated in a few points? We could enjoy the benefits of high demographic density that matters, while having walkability. If we have zoning requirements for building residences, why not quotas for the number of companies allowed in a city, in a county, in a state? Why the fuck everybody needs to live in a ratcage in NYC, because every fucking oligarch feels like he needs to have his bank HQ in Manhattan? Why can't we have a few dozen smaller high density urban centers instead on this day and age? something like "sorry Mega Company, we already have MegaCorp and MegaEnterprise here on this city, the quota is over, have you considered PleasantVille for your new HQ? I hear they have a free quota after MBA Business Machines finally fold down and closed their offices there. "
judge2020 3y ago
We ended up with this because SUVs and Trucks had reduced fuel efficiency requirements. When we have fuel efficiency requirements (mandated by aerodynamics[0,1]), SUVs bring their fronts down and curve them, improving pedestrian safety since more of the force comes from the hood instead of from hitting the ground. 0: https://airshaper.com/validation/tesla-model-y-wind-tunnel-test#Physical%20Wind%20Tunnel%20Setup%20%E2%9A%99:~:text=The%20Tesla%20Model%20Y%20in%20the%20S2A%20Wind%20Tunnel https://airshaper.com/validation/tesla-model-y-wind-tunnel-t... 1: https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/gallery.exterior https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/gallery.exterior
- nickff 3y ago
  Higher hood-lines are often used to provide crumple zones pedestrian impacts, as required in some jurisdictions.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    On some global-market cars that had previously very low hoods, yes. But it's not why US market SUVs have high hoods.
  - xbar 3y ago
    Ridiculous. No jurisdiction requires > 40 inches (100cm) hoodlines.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    This makes absolutely no sense at all and flies in the face of all the statistics pointed out in the article. Lower hood-lines save lives. You don't need a tall crumple zone.
    - nickff 3y ago
      I agree, but those rules require a crumple zone under the hood (basically between the hood line and top of engine). I didn’t write the rules, and I don’t enforce them.
  - 3y ago
quadrifoliate 3y ago
You are putting together 3 or 4 different things here. > Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease While personally attractive to me, this is a losing proposition. Lots of people have (unfortunately) locked in usage of these vehicles; and will vote out any changes to car-centric infrastructure. In my opinion, a better and more practical way to do it is: First, clamp down on the manufacturers with regulations. Set super low speed limits for these things -- safety and road damage are obvious rationales. No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive. Second, increase registration taxes slowly every year on these large vehicles, to reflect the increasing burden that they pose to society. That will go the rest of the way towards making sure carmakers turn their focus back to smaller, more sustainable cars. A massive rework of our infrastructure is attractive, but not necessary.
- cstrahan 3y ago
  > No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive. So people spend longer getting to their job site? I don’t get it. Sounds like a waste of human potential, keeping people on the highways longer.
  - roughly 3y ago
    > Sounds like a waste of human potential So do pedestrian fatalities.
    - tzs 3y ago
      How many pedestrian fatalities are there due to collisions with trucks going more than 60 mph? I'd guess very few, because nearly all the places with speed limits above 60 mph in the US are also places with few pedestrians. Often they are places were pedestrians are prohibited.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    I'm sure "Truck speed limit 60 [mph]" is fairly common in the USA, so it's easy to see that could be extended to other vehicles larger than cars.
kelnos 3y ago
> Yet this country continues to throw their hands up in the air and do nothing. It's not that. It's that most people in the US like car-centric culture, and like suburbs. They don't want to live in dense spaces and have to rely on transit. I disagree with these people, but politicians are not going to be able to enact the things you've described without getting kicked out of office by the people who don't actually want them to do these things.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  I think some people do like the suburbs (and they're allowed to), but the sky high housing costs in "nice" or "popular" cities indicate that there is unmet demand to live in dense walkable areas. The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people. It should all be priced accordingly, you want to drive your private vehicle into my city? Then be prepared to pay a fair value for parking and road maintenance.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    > The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people. It can't possibly be a "hard conversation to have" because people disagree with you, huh? It has to be that the car companies brainwashed them? I see this everywhere on social media. "I have an opinion, my opinion is the right one, and if you disagree with me, you didn't actually come to an independent conclusion, you were just brainwashed or had an emotional response."
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      Nobody makes ads that make walking look cool or get you to where you’re going in style, because there’s nothing to sell you in that case. They do make ads of cars taking shortcuts, going to nature, driving really fast, looking really cool etc (closed course, professional driver, do not attempt) Demand as seen by prices and lack of affordability in walkable areas in the US is sufficient evidence that it’s an underserved market. BTW You sorta proved my point at how convinced people are, and how it's such a hard conversation to have.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Make the cities safer and cleaner, just like my suburb, and I’ll move back. If I have to step over shit, needles, and bullet casings when I go outside, forget it.
elzbardico 3y ago
The problem is that in the past companies tended to have to flock together. You're a financial conglomerate, you had to be on NYC, you are a OEM manufacturer for the automobile industry, well, the idea is that you sort of had to be on detroit. You're a startup founder? you need to be in the bay area. So, you end up with those giant clusters of activity and people had to somewhere be able to live close to them. As people started making more money, starting families and having kids, they wanted to move into more enjoyable living, not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project like most HN and urbanists seem to love. So, they voted for those freeways, they found the freedom to live in more humane settings in the wheels of a car that allowed them to escape the nightmare of living on Gotham. I believe we can have both things. We can have cities, but we don't need to have only a couple of giant, nightmarish big cities. We just need to spread the business activity.
- spankalee 3y ago
  "a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities" Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history. The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.
  - RHSeeger 3y ago
    >> "a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities" > Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history. So did the ones that they were replying to, making it clear that they believed everything about suburbs is bad. > The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs. There are a LOT of people that have no urge to live in a city. And, in fact, there's a lot of people that live in cities because that's where the jobs they want are (I doubt the same is true of people living in the suburbs).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dzhiurgis 3y ago
> Make our infra as difficult as possible And make sure you offer no alternative public transport options.
oooyay 3y ago
If this is what you want then you should look at cities that developed pre-World War II or look at creating your own. Cities that are "car centric" are less about some obsession with cars and more that people buying a place to live didn't want to live in dense urban areas: https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core-cities-and-principal-cities https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core... One comment that stuck out to me on this page was: > The central cities with the largest functional urban core percentages have overwhelmingly suffered large population losses. Among the 25 with the largest urban core shares, only seven were at their peak populations at the 2010 census, and only two of the top 18 (New York and San Francisco). Overall the cities with large functional cores lost more than 35 percent of their population and 8 million residents. Given this stark difference in preferences, why can we not have cities designed to be carless and cities that are designed to include cars as well as other modes of transportation? I live in Portland where I'm walking distance from the train station, have multiple bus stops around my house, and the average street speed is 30 mph. I can drive ten minutes down the road to get lumber, feed, etc and avoid paying an $80 delivery fee which probably doesn't sound like much until you need to reorder a single board and pay $86 for a $6 2x4. Takes like this don't help, imo: > Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease This kind of message, intended or not, is hostile, divisive, and non-inclusive.
- reportingsjr 3y ago
  I find it hard to take any mention of "preference" at face value in these sort of conversation. People arguing for suburbs never, ever, ever acknowledge that the only reason that costs are cheaper outside of cities is because huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs. Much of this money shifting is done at the federal level (subsidized HUD/USDA loans, huge grants, regulations that massively favor cars) so there is no escaping it by moving around in the US. Some states are better about the balance, but there is no getting away from it.
  - oooyay 3y ago
    > huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs. Isn't this just a more crude representation of "we live in a society"? In my city I pay a tax that allows people to have child day care despite being childless. I pay a tax that funds local schools despite not attending one and not having a kid. I pay a tax that goes to make agricultural products cheaper. I pay a tax that subsidizes medical care. Would you object to those as well, or are those okay? Additionally, many of the things you've described as subsidizing suburbs also subsidize cities. HUD would need to exist even if we lived in dense urban areas. USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, would still need to issue loans to farmers unless you believe that only massive farm operations should exist, and grants still fuel much of city development: https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_22_097 https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hu.... In my view cities, suburbs, and rural areas are an intertwined ecosystem that cannot exist without each other. Try to remove one or expand one too much without the other and bad things happen. This argument that cities subsidize everybody else ignores that cities are largely reliant on goods, services, and workers from outside of said city.
Dalewyn 3y ago
What we pay in efficiency we gain in freedom: I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want. Do I want to drive to Yosemite on a Wednesday afternoon in my F-350? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies? Yeah. Do I need to drive down to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions? Yeah. Do I want to drive across the country in my motorhome over the course of a month? Yeah. Being tied to public transport means you are beholden to them with regards to when, where, and how you travel. That ain't fun in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course, that's just why we all drive our own cars. I haven't touched on why trucks and SUVs in particular are also seeing higher popularity. The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen and can transport lots of cargo, and being higher up means we have better line of sight and thus awareness of our surroundings. The bigger engines usually found in SUVs and trucks also means the car handles more swiftly, which is indispensible for hopefully avoiding dangerous situations should they occur.
- njoshi023 3y ago
  > I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want. Except of course if you like walking and caring about all the health benefits that come from not needing a 5,000 pound vehicle to do the most basic elements of life like going to a coffee shop, a local diner etc. > Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies By simply from the brands referenced above, you seem to live in a very templated suburb that has been copied and pasted verbatim across the country. Being around nothing but epitomes of generic large-scale cookie-cutter grocery stores, where each location is indistinguishable to each other, fast food restaurants serving factory-made food, retailers at strip malls lacking any character etc. is the exact opposite of "freedom" to me. It's dystopian and conforming at its very core. > The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen. Except unless you are on the receiving end of these monstrosities, or worse yet, you happen to be a pedestrian. This argument that bigger/heavier cars are safer is incorrect even at the most fundamental level for drivers, because taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone drove bigger/heavier cars for safety as a reason, the net effect would lead to everyone being worse off and unsafe, as two large cars colliding are far more dangerous to both parties than otherwise.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
We are stuck with it due to the labor shortage providing no route for the massive infrastructure work required to change. A slow fix over the next century is the goal.

by xyst 3y ago

josefresco 3y ago

Anecdotally I regularly run "virtual" marathons (via YouTube) and hiking/biking tracks in Europe. The vehicles that woosh past me are 80% large SUVS. The SUV problem is not just an American one.

morsch 3y ago
Around 15% of registered cars in Germany are SUVs, and 40% of the new cars bought in H1/2023. So yeah, the SUV plague is very noticeable here, too, though I don't think SUVs make up 80% anywhere in Europe, yet. And also, SUV in Europe often refers to compact or sub-compact SUVs. Ie. the best selling SUV in H1/2023 in Germany was a VW T-Roc [1]. Ridiculous super-sized cars like the F150 and its ilk are still quite rare, fortunately. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc I was "upgraded" to one when renting, once. The visibility was shit due to its fashionably small windows and the trunk volume was pathetic compared to the hatchback I had ordered. Otherwise, very little difference.

jrsj 3y ago

Big point of resistance here is going to be public safety. I would live in a city alone as a single man. I wouldn’t live in a city with a family. At this point even suburbs are becoming a questionable option as many cities have little to no options that are both safe and affordable, so you have to go out to the exurbs instead.

tootie 3y ago
I mean, that's your bias. I'm raising my family in a big city with no car. They're teens now. Spent the whole time in public schools. It's never really been a problem.
- jrsj 3y ago
  This used to be feasible where I’m at, but housing prices are too high now. Spending $3k a month on a mortgage isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
obelos 3y ago
What's your threat model? The number one killer of children under 16 is cars.
- jrsj 3y ago
  And where are they more likely to be hit by one? Probably in a denser populated area with heavier traffic. You can’t just wave a magic wand and make all the cars go away. Regardless, you have to make cities a desirable and affordable place to live for this to work at scale. You can’t just fix it at the transportation infrastructure level. If I’m looking for affordability, low violent crime, and good schools, I am not looking anywhere in the city where I live. It didn’t used to be this way, but post-covid housing costs are so high that I have to go 40+ minutes out of the city to get those things. If you don’t change that, many people with families are just going to deal with traffic being worse rather than moving into the city.

novok 3y ago

That doesnt work in a democracy where the vast majority of people live that way. They will and do vote out people who make their driving life miserable. One mayor in a town i used to live in partly got voted out by adding a protected bike lane that made driving tight in a busy central stroad to give one example

Etheryte 3y ago
You say that it doesn't work, yet there's numerous examples across the globe of how it does work. Sounds like another example of "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
- jrsj 3y ago
  It’s not that you can’t achieve the goal, it’s that you can’t force people into it by making their daily lives worse. Or at least that seems like that would be the least effective political strategy.
  - spankalee 3y ago
    Less car dependency will make lives better, not worse.
    - jrsj 3y ago
      OP suggested intentionally making commutes unbearable as a means of forcing people into cities to achieve this. That’s the wrong order of operations and would backfire politically imo. Personally I work remote, so I would probably just go to the city less if it were made more inconvenient to do so. This has already happened to an extent. No free parking? I’m not going unless I have to. Public transit as it exists isn’t a good alternative either. It’s slow and I don’t want to be harassed by addicts at the bus stop. Any plan that involves coercion isn’t something I’m interested in.

minihat 3y ago

My idea of a hell hole is the neighborhood I would have to live in to afford a home in the city near my office. What if we made cities more affordable, nicer places to live instead of making commuting even more expensive and miserable than it already is?

Sharlin 3y ago
False dichotomy. Far from being conflicting, those goals are fundamentally aligned and you can't have one without the other!
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  you can definitely have nice affordable housing near work without making commuting miserable, and that's the only way to get people to not commute
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Well, yes, if by "not making commuting miserable" you mean "build a lot of transit, convert roads and motorways to streets, and somehow cure people of their car addiction". But yes, you also have to cure people and planners of their single-family house addiction.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      I didn't say that, and it's obviously not what a normal person would take to mean from that sequence of words. The spending needs to be on building more housing, better housing, more affordable housing, housing closer to work. Single family or multi family? Whatever the people need, neither will exclusively work if people want both. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how miserable you make the commute, people will still do it because the alternative for them is not going to their job and becoming destitute.
elzbardico 3y ago
What if we had cities, but smaller ones and made sure companies and business opportunities were not concentrated in a few points? We could enjoy the benefits of high demographic density that matters, while having walkability. If we have zoning requirements for building residences, why not quotas for the number of companies allowed in a city, in a county, in a state? Why the fuck everybody needs to live in a ratcage in NYC, because every fucking oligarch feels like he needs to have his bank HQ in Manhattan? Why can't we have a few dozen smaller high density urban centers instead on this day and age? something like "sorry Mega Company, we already have MegaCorp and MegaEnterprise here on this city, the quota is over, have you considered PleasantVille for your new HQ? I hear they have a free quota after MBA Business Machines finally fold down and closed their offices there. "

judge2020 3y ago

We ended up with this because SUVs and Trucks had reduced fuel efficiency requirements. When we have fuel efficiency requirements (mandated by aerodynamics[0,1]), SUVs bring their fronts down and curve them, improving pedestrian safety since more of the force comes from the hood instead of from hitting the ground. 0: https://airshaper.com/validation/tesla-model-y-wind-tunnel-test#Physical%20Wind%20Tunnel%20Setup%20%E2%9A%99:~:text=The%20Tesla%20Model%20Y%20in%20the%20S2A%20Wind%20Tunnel https://airshaper.com/validation/tesla-model-y-wind-tunnel-t... 1: https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/gallery.exterior https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/gallery.exterior

nickff 3y ago
Higher hood-lines are often used to provide crumple zones pedestrian impacts, as required in some jurisdictions.
- kube-system 3y ago
  On some global-market cars that had previously very low hoods, yes. But it's not why US market SUVs have high hoods.
- xbar 3y ago
  Ridiculous. No jurisdiction requires > 40 inches (100cm) hoodlines.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  This makes absolutely no sense at all and flies in the face of all the statistics pointed out in the article. Lower hood-lines save lives. You don't need a tall crumple zone.
  - nickff 3y ago
    I agree, but those rules require a crumple zone under the hood (basically between the hood line and top of engine). I didn’t write the rules, and I don’t enforce them.
- 3y ago

quadrifoliate 3y ago

You are putting together 3 or 4 different things here. > Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease While personally attractive to me, this is a losing proposition. Lots of people have (unfortunately) locked in usage of these vehicles; and will vote out any changes to car-centric infrastructure. In my opinion, a better and more practical way to do it is: First, clamp down on the manufacturers with regulations. Set super low speed limits for these things -- safety and road damage are obvious rationales. No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive. Second, increase registration taxes slowly every year on these large vehicles, to reflect the increasing burden that they pose to society. That will go the rest of the way towards making sure carmakers turn their focus back to smaller, more sustainable cars. A massive rework of our infrastructure is attractive, but not necessary.

cstrahan 3y ago
> No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive. So people spend longer getting to their job site? I don’t get it. Sounds like a waste of human potential, keeping people on the highways longer.
- roughly 3y ago
  > Sounds like a waste of human potential So do pedestrian fatalities.
  - tzs 3y ago
    How many pedestrian fatalities are there due to collisions with trucks going more than 60 mph? I'd guess very few, because nearly all the places with speed limits above 60 mph in the US are also places with few pedestrians. Often they are places were pedestrians are prohibited.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  I'm sure "Truck speed limit 60 [mph]" is fairly common in the USA, so it's easy to see that could be extended to other vehicles larger than cars.

kelnos 3y ago

> Yet this country continues to throw their hands up in the air and do nothing. It's not that. It's that most people in the US like car-centric culture, and like suburbs. They don't want to live in dense spaces and have to rely on transit. I disagree with these people, but politicians are not going to be able to enact the things you've described without getting kicked out of office by the people who don't actually want them to do these things.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
I think some people do like the suburbs (and they're allowed to), but the sky high housing costs in "nice" or "popular" cities indicate that there is unmet demand to live in dense walkable areas. The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people. It should all be priced accordingly, you want to drive your private vehicle into my city? Then be prepared to pay a fair value for parking and road maintenance.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  > The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people. It can't possibly be a "hard conversation to have" because people disagree with you, huh? It has to be that the car companies brainwashed them? I see this everywhere on social media. "I have an opinion, my opinion is the right one, and if you disagree with me, you didn't actually come to an independent conclusion, you were just brainwashed or had an emotional response."
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Nobody makes ads that make walking look cool or get you to where you’re going in style, because there’s nothing to sell you in that case. They do make ads of cars taking shortcuts, going to nature, driving really fast, looking really cool etc (closed course, professional driver, do not attempt) Demand as seen by prices and lack of affordability in walkable areas in the US is sufficient evidence that it’s an underserved market. BTW You sorta proved my point at how convinced people are, and how it's such a hard conversation to have.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago

Make the cities safer and cleaner, just like my suburb, and I’ll move back. If I have to step over shit, needles, and bullet casings when I go outside, forget it.

elzbardico 3y ago

The problem is that in the past companies tended to have to flock together. You're a financial conglomerate, you had to be on NYC, you are a OEM manufacturer for the automobile industry, well, the idea is that you sort of had to be on detroit. You're a startup founder? you need to be in the bay area. So, you end up with those giant clusters of activity and people had to somewhere be able to live close to them. As people started making more money, starting families and having kids, they wanted to move into more enjoyable living, not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project like most HN and urbanists seem to love. So, they voted for those freeways, they found the freedom to live in more humane settings in the wheels of a car that allowed them to escape the nightmare of living on Gotham. I believe we can have both things. We can have cities, but we don't need to have only a couple of giant, nightmarish big cities. We just need to spread the business activity.

spankalee 3y ago
"a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities" Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history. The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  >> "a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities" > Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history. So did the ones that they were replying to, making it clear that they believed everything about suburbs is bad. > The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs. There are a LOT of people that have no urge to live in a city. And, in fact, there's a lot of people that live in cities because that's where the jobs they want are (I doubt the same is true of people living in the suburbs).
- deleted 3y ago
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dzhiurgis 3y ago

> Make our infra as difficult as possible And make sure you offer no alternative public transport options.

oooyay 3y ago

If this is what you want then you should look at cities that developed pre-World War II or look at creating your own. Cities that are "car centric" are less about some obsession with cars and more that people buying a place to live didn't want to live in dense urban areas: https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core-cities-and-principal-cities https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core... One comment that stuck out to me on this page was: > The central cities with the largest functional urban core percentages have overwhelmingly suffered large population losses. Among the 25 with the largest urban core shares, only seven were at their peak populations at the 2010 census, and only two of the top 18 (New York and San Francisco). Overall the cities with large functional cores lost more than 35 percent of their population and 8 million residents. Given this stark difference in preferences, why can we not have cities designed to be carless and cities that are designed to include cars as well as other modes of transportation? I live in Portland where I'm walking distance from the train station, have multiple bus stops around my house, and the average street speed is 30 mph. I can drive ten minutes down the road to get lumber, feed, etc and avoid paying an $80 delivery fee which probably doesn't sound like much until you need to reorder a single board and pay $86 for a $6 2x4. Takes like this don't help, imo: > Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease This kind of message, intended or not, is hostile, divisive, and non-inclusive.

reportingsjr 3y ago
I find it hard to take any mention of "preference" at face value in these sort of conversation. People arguing for suburbs never, ever, ever acknowledge that the only reason that costs are cheaper outside of cities is because huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs. Much of this money shifting is done at the federal level (subsidized HUD/USDA loans, huge grants, regulations that massively favor cars) so there is no escaping it by moving around in the US. Some states are better about the balance, but there is no getting away from it.
- oooyay 3y ago
  > huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs. Isn't this just a more crude representation of "we live in a society"? In my city I pay a tax that allows people to have child day care despite being childless. I pay a tax that funds local schools despite not attending one and not having a kid. I pay a tax that goes to make agricultural products cheaper. I pay a tax that subsidizes medical care. Would you object to those as well, or are those okay? Additionally, many of the things you've described as subsidizing suburbs also subsidize cities. HUD would need to exist even if we lived in dense urban areas. USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, would still need to issue loans to farmers unless you believe that only massive farm operations should exist, and grants still fuel much of city development: https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_22_097 https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hu.... In my view cities, suburbs, and rural areas are an intertwined ecosystem that cannot exist without each other. Try to remove one or expand one too much without the other and bad things happen. This argument that cities subsidize everybody else ignores that cities are largely reliant on goods, services, and workers from outside of said city.

Dalewyn 3y ago

What we pay in efficiency we gain in freedom: I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want. Do I want to drive to Yosemite on a Wednesday afternoon in my F-350? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies? Yeah. Do I need to drive down to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions? Yeah. Do I want to drive across the country in my motorhome over the course of a month? Yeah. Being tied to public transport means you are beholden to them with regards to when, where, and how you travel. That ain't fun in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course, that's just why we all drive our own cars. I haven't touched on why trucks and SUVs in particular are also seeing higher popularity. The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen and can transport lots of cargo, and being higher up means we have better line of sight and thus awareness of our surroundings. The bigger engines usually found in SUVs and trucks also means the car handles more swiftly, which is indispensible for hopefully avoiding dangerous situations should they occur.

njoshi023 3y ago
> I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want. Except of course if you like walking and caring about all the health benefits that come from not needing a 5,000 pound vehicle to do the most basic elements of life like going to a coffee shop, a local diner etc. > Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies By simply from the brands referenced above, you seem to live in a very templated suburb that has been copied and pasted verbatim across the country. Being around nothing but epitomes of generic large-scale cookie-cutter grocery stores, where each location is indistinguishable to each other, fast food restaurants serving factory-made food, retailers at strip malls lacking any character etc. is the exact opposite of "freedom" to me. It's dystopian and conforming at its very core. > The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen. Except unless you are on the receiving end of these monstrosities, or worse yet, you happen to be a pedestrian. This argument that bigger/heavier cars are safer is incorrect even at the most fundamental level for drivers, because taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone drove bigger/heavier cars for safety as a reason, the net effect would lead to everyone being worse off and unsafe, as two large cars colliding are far more dangerous to both parties than otherwise.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

We are stuck with it due to the labor shortage providing no route for the massive infrastructure work required to change. A slow fix over the next century is the goal.