6 ms·

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

• bell-cot 2y ago
  Start by putting a heavy-duty "Roadkill Tax" on those vehicles where the driver couldn't possibly see a pedestrian 'till his body showed up in the rear view mirror. It shouldn't be too hard to pack a few congressional committee meetings with families of their victims, to help get that passed.
  • melling 2y ago
    How does that save lives? Think it will change consumer choice? Get lots of victims? That hasn’t worked for gun control.
    • atlasunshrugged 2y ago
      I will say that having worked in Congress (albeit briefly and mostly on tech issues) I have seen the victim family card played and it definitely does have a good amount of weight. Hasn't worked for gun control (yet, although you can see it sometimes partially working after mass shootings like Uvalde which led to Texas Senator Cornyn working on gun control), but there may be less of a constituency on the other side of the debate here (or maybe not, car makes do reap tremendous profits from trucks and SUVs so the pushback on anything that could harm those sales might be tremendous)
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • atlasunshrugged 2y ago
    I wonder if this will end up hurting EVs disproportionately as my understanding is that they're usually a bit heavier than comparable ICE vehicles?
    • philipkglass 2y ago
      Now lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce a bill on Friday that would require federal standards for hood height and visibility to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users. I don't think that hood height and visibility are worse with EVs. EVs are heavier than comparable ICE vehicles because they contain dense batteries but they're not larger.
      • atlasunshrugged 2y ago
        Ah sorry, in OPs comment he says "heavy-duty" which I took to mean as part of the descriptor for what would trigger a fine (as in weight) but on second reading I think he means that the fine itself should be large and is not discussing anything related to the weight of the vehicle.
        • bell-cot 2y ago
          Yep.
    • hibikir 2y ago
      While weight is bad, as far as pedestrian killing goes, height is even worse. A car hitting you in the knees is very different than one hitting you in the liver, in the spine, or straight on the ribcage. The pedestrian can also end up going under, instead of flipped over, and there's a big difference in damage. The issue is that even EVs are being built taller, as we have a race to see over traffic.
      • atlasunshrugged 2y ago
        That makes sense, and I do often wonder at the wisdom of the EV Hummer for road safety (and at who exactly is the person who both wants a hummer and an electric vehicle)
        • Vecr 2y ago
          The kind of person who would have purchased a hydrogen Hummer if the filling infrastructure was in place? It's been a thing for a while.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    The logical thing to do is require drivers of large/high vehicles to have more stringent commercial driver’s licenses as well as liability coverage, just like a dump truck driver or whatever is expected to have. The next thing would be to increase fossil fuel taxes so that fewer people can afford to waste money on vanity and prioritizing their own safety over others’. Side benefit is it helps the environment. Keep increasing the tax until you see non commercial use of large/high vehicles drop to acceptable levels.
  • zardo 2y ago
    Why should having more money to blow allow you to put pedestrians at more risk?
    • bell-cot 2y ago
      Ideally - it shouldn't. Back in the real world - having more money lets you put more innocents at risk in pretty much every area of human life. Doesn't matter whether that's more firefighters at risk in fighting a fire in your big house - vs. a burning tent in a homeless encampment is pretty safe for them - or more passengers at risk when your 184' yacht capsizes and sinks in a storm.
      • zardo 2y ago
        We do have vehicle safety standards in the real world. The government can mandate vehicles meet certain standards, not just levy taxes.
• atlasunshrugged 2y ago
  One thing I'm a little surprised not to see in the article is any discussion of distracted driving. While I think in the EU cars are slightly smaller on average, there are still plenty of larger vehicles on the road but relatively fewer deaths. The only thesis I have as to the potential disconnect is that in the EU there are far more stick shift operated vehicles which demand more attention and limbs to operate as compared to American vehicles which skew heavily automatic, making it much easier to doomscroll twitter or try to respond to a text.
  • anotherhue 2y ago
    The cars are much smaller, trucks are almost unheard-of. I think the less car friendly streets is a bigger contributor, drivers have to pay attention more vs blind driving based solely on a traffic light.
    • HarryHirsch 2y ago
      Try getting a conviction for drunk driving or vehicular manslaughter in US. The case will go to a jury, and the jury members will consider that none of them can drive either. So the perp will be let off. In EU you are looking at 5 - 8 years prison for first-time offenders, that encourages caution.
  • 39896880 2y ago
    The EU takes speed limits more seriously than the US.
    • prepend 2y ago
      I drove 1700 miles on French interstate highways. I think the posted limit was like 120 or 130 kph. I went 10 over and cars were flying past me. I never saw a cop over that week. And cars had great manners with everyone in the right lane except when passing. But at least in France I get the sense that the speed limit isn’t followed closely.
      • 2y ago
• anotherhue 2y ago
  So nice to be considered. Glad that our children will be considered minority stakeholders in this.
  • sottol 2y ago
    Probably because their well-being is already being oh-so seriously considered in areas of online safety and communication/surveillance - you _have_ to choose your battles, you know. There's only so much lawmakers can do to "think of the children". </s>
• groestl 2y ago
  Sometimes, just for fun, I entertain the thought that speed limits in cities could be based on a vehicle's impulse.
  • diego_sandoval 2y ago
    Something a little bit more realistic would be speed limits based on vehicle weight. In highways, at least in my country, buses and cargo trucks have a different speed limit compared to other vehicles. It wouldn't be fundamentally different for SUVs to have a lower speed limit compared to sedans when driving in urban areas.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
      > SUVs to have a lower speed limit compared to sedans when driving in urban areas Still a career-death sentence for the politician who wants to push it, unfortunately.
    • lunchmeat317 2y ago
      This actually makes a lot of sense, especially in heavily populated areas. You could establish limits based on inertial mass and braking distance.
• mtalantikite 2y ago
  > Over the past three decades, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier, according to IIHS. As a New Yorker I'm not often in a car, but whenever I'm stuck in traffic I think about this. If all the cars are 10 inches longer, that adds up over the course of all the cars I'm stuck behind and has a real impact on the carrying capacity of the road. To another point of the article, I walked by an SUV the other day where the front hood was up to my shoulders. I'm pretty regular height at 6' and just thought how getting hit by that thing would probably kill me. It's like all the cars on the road are in an arms race with each other.
  • techjamie 2y ago
    I think about it a lot as a motorcyclist. If you get hit by a big truck or SUV like that, not only are you taking the full force at center mass, you're also getting thrown underneath and possibly injured more. With shorter vehicles, your legs will take the hit instead and you'll get thrown on top of the hood, and slide off depending on momentum. Which is much better than going underneath.
    • HarryHirsch 2y ago
      Nevermind the antisocial types with their tinted windows - it used to be that as a motorcyclist you could look over passenger cars and see what it happening ahead. Nowadays every other vehicle is a truck or SUV, and the behemoth has windows tinted too dark to see through. It does not increase road safety.
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    > It's like all the cars on the road are in an arms race with each other. My wife is trying to participate in the arms race unfortunately. She was rear ended while waiting to make a left turn and pushed into oncoming traffic. Her solution is to get a much bigger vehicle so people behind her will see the vehicle sitting at a stop with its turn signals on. At some level I can’t fault her. Though I know she’s likely to have the same or a very close likelihood to be rear ended or in other sorts of accidents as in a smaller car. I can’t blame her for feeling like she’d be safer in a massive SUV and then we’re just contributing to the problem.
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  "roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade" If that's true, it doesn't say much good about the effectiveness of all the safety regulations over the years that have added thousands of dollars to the price of a car.
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    It doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of safety regulations. I hope you're not suggesting that improved safety features are the cause of increased fatalities. Cell phone use while driving is also sharply up in the past decade. Two decades ago almost nobody had a smartphone. Now I can't drive 5 minutes to the store without seeing someone texting or using their phone.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      So maybe we should spend the money on preventing distracted driving rather than requiring expensive automobile features to try to compensate for it?
      • coldpie 2y ago
        Sounds good. How?
        • SoftTalker 2y ago
          Good question. DUI used to be thought of as sort of a funny thing. People would laugh about the drunk weaving around on the road. And the penalties (if nobody was hurt) weren't very severe. The limits were pretty high (as high as 0.15 BAC). Then we changed the messaging and the consequences and lowered the limits and most people today think it's a very uncool and stupid thing to do. I'm not at all suggesting it's an easy problem to solve, but if that is the cause of the increase in fatalities, that is the problem we should be attacking.
    • maxwell 2y ago
      Increased deaths of people walking getting hit by cars says everything about the effectiveness of recent safety regulations. They clearly are not working and we need to take a new approach beyond more surveillance and beeping. This isn't rocket science. We could just, you know, do what the Netherlands does.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Self notifying technology and all around cameras and alerts can help.
  • booleandilemma 2y ago
    Or we can just make cars smaller.
    • beej71 2y ago
      I hope so. I like small cars. Our last small car was destroyed by a big truck, and that was no fun.
  • maxwell 2y ago
    We've added a bunch of that crap since 2009, when pedestrian fatalities were at their lowest, why hasn't it worked? It seems like the problem is vehicle size and distractions: why would more surveillance help?
• carabiner 2y ago
  This was all caused by the CAFE emissions standards that allow cars with bigger footprints to emit more. Nobody wants bigger fucking trucks and in the Tacoma community it's a standard refrain to bemoan just how fucking big they've gotten. They aren't compact trucks anymore. They're midsize today. Compact trucks do not exist.
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    > Nobody wants bigger fucking trucks The F-150 is the best selling truck in America, even though Ford produces a smaller pickup truck that is cheaper. We can blame CAFE standards and automakers all day long, but at the end of the day many people do appear to want the bigger trucks.
    • BadHumans 2y ago
      People want bigger trucks because streets are unsafe and no one wants to be the small car in a collision vs a truck.
    • maxwell 2y ago
      States should just mandate CDLs for them.
    • Ekaros 2y ago
      What I have heard from some youtubers is that those smaller trucks were lot less available. As Ford pushed bigger ones due to higher margins. So supply was limited moving people to bigger vehicles.
• snitzr 2y ago
  When I was kid my dad had a Dodge Ram 50 which was about the size of a car and it had a four-cylinder engine with a manual transmission and no 4WD. Never had any issues hauling anything. We put a pallet of bricks in the bed and it wasn't a problem. Modern trucks are too expensive and big for no real reason other than ego and insecurity. It's blue-collar cosplay. Maybe a few people need a huge truck, but for most people a smaller truck or a van would work better.
• swozey 2y ago
  I've seen one explode and melt to nothing but I'm surprised there hasn't been a report of a Cybertruck slicing someone (beyond fingers) in half yet.
  • mlavrent 2y ago
    To be honest, while I’m not a Tesla fanboy, I don’t think the Cybertruck deserves this hate- as a cyclist I feel worlds safer near a Cybertruck than eg an F150 (though it of course weighs a lot) because of the sloped hood design. Do I prefer to cycle next to Honda Fits? Of course, but the cybertruck is better than a lot of other truck alternatives
• vlovich123 2y ago
  Two possible paths forward: Separate streets and roads so that roads don’t have people and people and bicycles cross across roads through skywalks or tunnels. Wait for the cars to get bigger and taller enough that they become planes and the humans cross under that way.
  • timeon 2y ago
    > Separate streets and roads so that roads don’t have people This is sounds like urban design from 60s.
    • vlovich123 2y ago
      Separating fully would be nice and the most safe. Intersections are probably a good balance of safe vs associated capital & maintenance costs. American "stroad" design definitely results in a lot of well-documented unsafety. This is because speed differences are a huge contributor of accidents and humans are basically stationary. That's why a separate bike lane is needed when bikes are going full speed and why many civilized countries have separate passing and flow of traffic lanes and why "driving too slow" is as much of a ticket as "driving too fast". > After several stroads were replaced by more efficient roadways in Boston, vehicular fatalities fell from 21 in 2016 to 10 in 2018; simultaneously, pedestrian fatalities halved from 14 to 7.[41] This partial success motivated Bostonian locals to demand the complete elimination of the remaining stroads by implementing better road design.[41]
• russellbeattie 2y ago
  It's not just pedestrians, driving a small, low car like a Miata is becoming nearly as dangerous as riding a motorcycle. Bigger vehicles simply don't see you. The only thing saving the little cars is that they're also more nimble, so when a giant truck starts moving into your lane - despite the fact that you're currently occupying it - you can maneuver quickly and stay alive. You'd be amazed at how common this experience is.
• freeduhm 2y ago
  I think it is important to also note the increase in pedestrians in general. Assuming bicycalists and scooterists (?) are considered pedestrians, there has been a big increase in there usage primarily due to lithium batteries becoming more efficient. It is understandable that there will be an increase in events involving pedestrians. Have not saying I know the answer to reducing pedestrian fatalities but the article I think failed to place the fatalities in context of the increase in scooters and bikes by people.