Safety between cars, and within cars, has improved. However, due to the increasing size of the average vehicle on the road, among other factors, car safety for pedestrians/cyclists has decreased.
> car safety for pedestrians/cyclists has decreased
It's also decreased for anyone NOT willing to buy a "light truck" (e.g. a modern SUV). There's a loophole that makes it so that light trucks don't have to be tested against the same safety standards as other vehicles. Basically they just have to prove they're safe to crash into other light trucks but do not have to be tested against regular passenger vehicles. This loophole is credited as one of the main reasons car fatalities have been rapidly growing in the US but falling in most other nations. And also for the massive recent explosion in size (again, mainly observed in the US).
But size is just one factor that's reduced safety. Another one is reduced visibility. One of the contributors to the rise in fatalities has been due to parents literally running over their own children in their driveways. These are low-speed, suburban vehicle fatalities that are not happening in other countries
I agree with what you're saying but as a counterpoint, I was literally run over in my driveway by a guardian and almost died, and he was in a '90s Tacoma.
My saving grace was that the truck was so light that even at age five I managed to survive being crushed under one of the wheels thanks to my aluminum frame bike wrapping around my ribcage. Even a modern-day Tacoma is much larger and probably would have killed me.
They want to add automatic braking laws for that, right? I wonder how statistics will change when there are no longer any cars that can't auto brake sold?
People drive horrible now. Running lights, crazy lane changes, excessive speeding etc. Here in the US is started during the pandemic and hasn’t improved.
My counterpoint to this is there have always been a ton of bad drivers. The most important skill to have is to be a predictable driver. Bad drivers will always exist. You cannot change them, and the great number of them is not likely to drop to 0 overnight.
The best thing you can do is drive in a way that even bad drivers expect. Be a speed-limited, blinker-indicating, cautious log in the river. They will parkour around you and you will be fine. Greatly limit your reactions to things. If you freak out, others around you will freak out. Bad drivers cause okay drivers to perform worse. Herd mentality.
(Obvious disclaimer: The best defensive driving in the world won't prevent all accidents)
Both you and the parent post are correct. There have always been bad drivers, a lot of them, and defensive driving is the best thing for that. But at the same time, I have anecdotally been observing a serious breakdown in people following the rules. All the things the parent mentioned have become more frequent in my experience -- the number of times I see blatant bad and malicious driving behaviours has increased significantly in the last few years, except I drive maybe a 3rd of the miles per year that I used to 5 years ago. The density of terrible/self-absorbed drivers has significantly increased.
It's gotten to the point where even defensive driving doesn't do much. How do you defensively drive against someone just blasting through a red light 15 seconds after it turned red and cross traffic is moving steadily? Or the guy in a lifted truck who decides to force you into the shoulder because he thinks it's funny?
"How do you defensively drive against someone just blasting through a red light 15 seconds after it turned red and cross traffic is moving steadily? Or the guy in a lifted truck who decides to force you into the shoulder because he thinks it's funny?"
Probably upgrading to a tank at some point. Or bringing a gun. Or bribe politicians, that they urge the police to focus on maintaining sanity on the roads and take away the licence(and at some point the cars) from those drivers eagerly.
Honestly, if I can, I drive a bicycle, even now in wintertime. But I often indeed wished for a gun, to bring awareness to my fragile self. To express, that I also have rights on the road, despite being lighter. But I am aware, this might not be the best solution overall.
A gun won't save you from the stupidity of bad drivers. And you understand (in your anger) that it won't solve anything. At best (not really) you shoot and kill (?) one of them. You will then go to prison for many-many-many years, you will lose everything and everyone.
Meanwhile there is a million equally bad drivers out there. We can't be doing "a purge" every weekend. It's either policing, or self-driving cars. I am looking forward to the latter.
Altering the built environment helps too. Narrow the streets, reduce turn radii and sightlines, protect crosswalks and bike lanes, use more "uncontrolled" configurations like 2 way stops rather than full stoplights.
It's counter intuitive on one level, but making the road feel less like a racetrack causes most drivers to slow down and treat it less like one:
I'm uneasy about reducing sightlines. There are drivers that will turn blindly into a corner at excessive speed because they feel lucky or invulnerable except they are not, nor the people on the other side of the turn. Small radii reduces speed no matter what, but keep the line of sight. At least one of the two parties have a chance to prevent a collision.
There are drivers that will turn blindly into a corner at excessive speed because they feel lucky or invulnerable except they are not
Making the corner tighter helps solve this.
I walk to work in the suburbs. I have to cross a 6 lane highway. It's signaled properly. But the one thing that nearly kills me every few months the road has very smooth radius corners. Drivers can easily carry 40mph through the corners. Between red-on-red being legal, right-on-green-even-though-pedestrians-crossing-is-active, and generally driver fuckery, I'm amazed nobody has been killed at this intersection.
Speed bumps are brutally effective, like I just experienced driving through spain and france. I also do not like them too much, as they punish everyone and some of them are kind of hidden (by design) and you do not want to hit them even with just 20 mph. So they do prevent speeding in rural areas. But there should be better solutions ..
Speed limiters in cars is one such solution. It's simple to implement - we just need to make it max 130 (or whatever) km/h on highways, 80km/h on "country" roads outside of population centers and 40km/h (or whatever, even making it 50 would help tremendously) in populated areas. It doesn't need to be smart enough to understand every speed limit out there it just needs to know what zone out of 3 possible ones it's in.
Of course car lobby makes it sound like impossible task because of "think about all the edge cases" while even making the most crude system would save tens of thousands of lives and hundred of thousands of injuries per year.
As it is we can even force car manufacturers to implement max 140km/h speed limit in cars even though driving faster than that is criminal level behavior and illegal about anywhere in the world. Like we can't even force them to make the least controversial safety check imaginable already written into law because "driving a car fast boost my ego and you are not taking away my freedom to do so".
Or instead of doing that, just go to smaller engine sizes that force slower driving due to lower power and adjust thr throttle response. Most cars have engines that are way too damn powerful for what's needed (why does a Hyundai i30 need 249HP?) because marketing beats out other concerns. Pair that with modern throttle mapping being a square curve or close to it that means people will just accelerate because the car's behaviour encourages them to. Electric cars only make this worse with instant torque.
Drive an older car from the '90s with a mechanical throttle adjusting a mechanical throttle body and you'll realize that it barely responds until the pedal's about halfway down. Drive a newer car and you'll realize that it's already putting nearly half throttle through the electronic throttle body when the drive by wire pedal is a tenth of the way down. The brakes react like this too, which is a completely difference annoyance. It's a result of manufacturers gaming for fuel efficiency regulations and it manipulates the way people drive into being more aggressive with their acceleration.
For decades never needed speed limiters aside from the gentleman's agreement of 155MPH over tire safety reasons because most people couldn't get above 90MPH, and most cars didn't want to go above 45MPH without stomping on it. Since the early 1990s as a side effect of emissions regulations making engines much more efficient cars have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled their power output. A 1995 Chevrolet Lumina made 210HP from a 3.8L V6 at the very top of the rev range, meaning for most driving you were at 150HP or less. Right now you can go and buy a low trim Chevrolet Blazer with a 3.6L V6 that makes 305HP about a third of the way up with a flat horsepower curve from there. Just holding speed without accelerating you're at peak horsepower in the Blazer and it feels that way.
Not sure if you're in the US or not, but we have 70MPH interstats crossing over 25mph surface roads and commonly enough my GPS gets confused which one I'm on.
I think every car remembers that spot (or rather the area, which is the intention behind it) and after a learning period, only speedy tourists will hit the road.
Is there a reason small roundabouts are not more popular in the US in residential areas? You probably have noticed them driving through Spain and France as well. Especially in the south of both countries they seem to come very often in small cities. They worked pretty well in my opinion to keep the traffic flowing, but keeping the speeds in check due to merging and turning. Now whether our emergency vehicles could navigate them well is a different story I suppose.
Surrounding my child's school are blind s-curves and streets barely wide enough for 2-way traffic. All densely lined with parked cars. And yet I people speed through these areas on most days during pick-up time, and often they looking at their phones (or whatever else they might be up to behind blackout-tinted windows).
The only thing narrow streets and turns do is make it harder for parents to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. No amount of "traffic calming" will protect us from these rotten drivers. We need at least a modicum of enforcement.
If you get the speed limit wrong with a sign, you can change the sign. If you get it wrong after throwing built obstacles all over it, we are stuck with it. And you're going to get it wrong sometimes, because neighborhoods and safety technology changes (and because safetyism gives low-speed-limit people too much political influence).
"and because safetyism gives low-speed-limit people too much political influence"
Some of us have children, and some of us will hopefully always going to have children, so sorry, but we won't go away with our safety concerns as death on the road is the number one safety issue in everyday life.
There are many readily available technical solutions to limit danger from cars and drivers. The problem is that there is zero political will to do so. I think mainly because of car manufacturers playing this on two fronts: bribing or blackmailing politicians (think what happens to economy if we don't sell faster, bigger, stupider cars!) and influencing pop culture - driving a car in irresponsible manner is still seen as cool and manly thing to do. It's cigarettes all over again and it will take a monumental effort to change it.
"It's either policing, or self-driving cars. I am looking forward to the latter."
But till they are there, policing is the only other option to self justice (aside from changing the road environment like the sibling commentor mentioned). There are drivers who intentionally drive close to cyclists - if one of those will have his tyre shot (without him then crashing into other bystanders, or crashing at all) he likely will have some respect in the future. He also might invest into a bulletproof design, further escalating the whole thing, so like I said, I am not advocating for road warfare. Just expressing my anger.
It’s interesting. I finished reading the Amazon PIP thread. There was a comment about the double standard of at-will employment dishing out immediate firings, but employees must give 2 weeks notice; how employees have become accustomed to getting the shorter end of the stick.
At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence? The one real tool we have for making any tangible change, just stripped away from us at some point.
In my experience, that's usually only because the people that inhabit the gang or the mafia are not themselves civilized.
Dueling, boxing, and so on used to be common among the upper crust. I still get into fights with some of my immigrant friends whenever we reach some total impasse on conflict. We're all civilized, educated, and generally good people. But violence always seems to be the quickest way towards a resolution to certain problems, where simple communication will not do.
In my military officer training, routine boxing/wrestling/fighting was included to give people a "taste of getting hit in the mouth". It was also super effective for solving disputes. I remember having some trivial issue with a roommate that eventually turned into wrestling. After it petered out I couldn't tell you what the problem even was. Sometimes wish a manner like this existed in my workplace settings. A guess the caveat is this doesn't work between large spreads of physical abilities (gender, age gaps etc.). Not complaining i cant fight old people but wish conflict resolution existed in such an immediate and effective manner.
> At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence?
Judging by reports of violent crime, it would be a stretch to say that the “right” to exercise violence when your individual will is otherwise thwarted is very much still possible. I mean if someone wants to gun down their Amazon HR person or manager, there is little to stop them. It won’t end well for anyone though.
I always thought it was a good idea to assume all the other drivers around me were likely to be incompetent idiots. Obviously not the case, but it means when you do encounter one you will be ready.
Replacing old style headlight bulbs with LEDs in housings not designed for them is an increasing problem too, making driving at night often something that is best done with a pair of sunglasses.
> Complete failure of government to regulate and enforce headlight position and brightness.
In my state the only thing they check is the diagnostics to make sure your car isn’t polluting too much otherwise you can drive around just about anything that starts…
I flash my headlights at cars whose lights are too blinding, under the assumption that the driver accidentally left their brights on.
If I’m wrong and their lights are always like that, my assumption is that they would appreciate someone letting them know anyway. If it happens a lot, maybe they’ll figure it out and correct their embarrassing problem.
And if they’ve jerks who know they’re blinding others but just don’t care (or savor it) oh well they should still hear about it.
Someone flashed their lights at me this very morning at around 5:00 am. At first I thought it was because my lights were off, then realized they thought my brights were on. They weren't, it's just that my new car has LEDs that are - apparently - quite bright.
The way I do it is not flashing, which can be misinterpreted as police ahead or something else. I just turn on my high beams until they lower theirs and it works most of the time.
Also headlights are simply higher on average than they used to be (larger vehicles). Very noticeable if you drive a low car. Yet another "arms race" dynamic.
99% of it is people not adjusting the pitch of their headlights or turning on their brights and leaving them on. I had a truck and it was fine, because I cared enough to watch a 5 minute video on how to adjust the angle after a new install of bulbs
We have a newer Subaru and were getting flashed like it was Mardi Gras. I started looking into adjusting the lights and found several places talking about how the Subarus are to high right from the dealer and their service department. That was enough to convince me to just do it.
I don't have a level spot with the recommended distance so we went with some tape on the garage door as a reference. We got them a tad low the first time and raised them up a bit. I can still see and apparently everyone else can too because nobody is flashing their lights at us.
Our other vehicle is a 2014 3/4 ton Ram pickup. Nobody ever flashes me in it.
Not sure if it’s still a thing, but the STI in the mid-00s had a physical slider wheel on the driver side console that changed the pitch of headlights. It was probably a geeky race thing, adjust the pitch when you add weight to the rear maybe?
Either way, it’s genius. I don’t know why that isn’t offered in more vehicles.
> adjust the pitch when you add weight to the rear maybe?
That is exactly the purpose and required (or via dashboard electronics) in most vehicles in the EU after a certain date (don't know which exactly and also I do not know the exact rules but every car i've ever owned had those). Automatic is also fine. They are not meant for "Alternative High beam" as what some people use them for.
The "clip" on the rear view mirror is also not meant for looking at your kids in the rear. It's meant to flip the mirror up so the reflection is not by the mirror but by the refractive index of the glass any you see a "dimmed" image of the high beams behind you.
Yeah they’re all automatic over here. I’ve just never seen a physical, mechanical wheel that controls it. And I’ve never met anyone that dimmed their rear view mirror for the purpose of child monitoring. That’s.. odd.
It is not a race or geeky thing. It's there so that when you are towing a trailer you can lower the headlights.
Usually it is supposed to be calibrated so that the highest position is the default no load in the back position, but you can recalibrate so that it is in the middle if you want.
Interesting, every single car I've ever driven over here (Europe) has had that slider/knob, I'm pretty sure it's required by law. Newer cars with xenon headlights above a certain wattage must have self-leveling + headlight washers to be road legal.
I have family in Europe and visit quite often, never noticed that. Most of the time I get stuck with a Renault even when I try to reserve a nicer rental. I don’t know how those cars are legal. It’s like someone put a car engine in a broken shopping cart.
This is indeed a regulation failure. Vehicle lights should have a height limit, but instead, their placement is dictated by aesthetics. SUVs and pickups should have their front lights placed at the bottom front corners, but instead, it's the top front corners.
Often times I think it's just me and my eyesight getting older, which is certainly the case, but it kind of reassures me to see that there are other people noticing this insane phenomenon, too.
And I say it is insane because in many, many cases I just have to slow down when encountering those lights coming from the opposite direction, for the sole reason that I get blinded by them and I can't see the road for one, two, God knows how many seconds. It's insane, from a safety perspective, that we're allowing blinding devices out there on the road.
Some new vehicles come way to bright too, the absolute worst for this seem to be teslas and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was poor qa on bulb alignment
Hmmm, the worst I've seen are german cars with laser and matrix LED lights. Followed by cars fitted with chinese lights off ebay, whose manufacturers don't care about any local regulations.
Subaru has theirs adjusted too high from the factory. They are nice, bright lights, but now that I adjusted them down nobody flashes their brights at me.
I cannot upvote this comment enough. I can't stand these blue/white LED headlights. What an abomination in the night. To top this, in India highways are littered with white LED street lights. I really miss cruising at 65-70 mph on a dark highway, with just the reflectors to guide my path, lit by the the pleasant yellow headlights.
This has also become a problem as a cyclist. I live in a bicycles-first city, commute that way almost every day, and over the past decade when LED lights became the norm, almost every day during this time of the year there's at least one person that just mindlessly snapped their headlight onto the handlebar. It might just fully shine into your face. Back in the days of those dim incandescent bulbs powered by whimsy generators, it basically didn't matter which direction the light pointed, but with super efficient battery-powered lights, this is annoying. And if both of you are traveling at even just moderate speeds, you don't even have time to communicate the issue in a proper way, except for maybe shouting "it's blinding" and hoping the other person can put two and two together.
I would pay for some moon glasses just for this, don't need to be as dark as sun glasses but something you can grab in an emergency with the super brights where the owner didn't know (or didn't care) to adjust the angle of the headlights to something sane. I'ver had to literally grab my rearview at times and angle it completely and the shit was still reflecting partially on the window and chrome components in my car annoyingly
I noticed that too, but I am questioning myself. I’m wondering how much other people’s driving has gotten worse, vs me getting older, more defensive and risk averse, and noticing such driving. If I look back to my 20s, I was not an exemplary driver.
Cell phones were a huge mistake. I was walking my dog and saw someone eyes fully down doing 20 in the street. It was late and empty but if anyone had been in the street, they’d have been dead.
That distraction didn’t exist 25 years ago on the scale it does today. I wish cell phone use penalties would be promoted closer to those of alcohol use while driving.
Mobile phone use is just a symptom. Everyone fiddling with their fancy in-car radio with distracting bright flashing display in the 90s was just a symptom. People fixing their hair in the mirror in the 70s while driving was just a symptom.
It doesn’t matter what distractions you remove - ban eating and drinking (even water) while driving, impose ruinous fines for those caught… none of it will work.
You need to address the root cause, not the symptom.
The root cause is unspeakable. You will face extreme repulsion if you choose to openly discuss the root cause in this society because it would mean tough questions for our cultural identity.
I was driving in the 90s and mucking around with the radio was quite different to using a smartphone these days. You'd maybe flip stations every 20 mins when one got annoying and it didn't even need taking your eyes off the road generally.
The root cause is human nature, which has been warped by various environmental factors: cell phones, traffic density, lack of experience being the pedestrian, etc.
The human nature isn’t going away, and although the environmental factors are technically under our control, they’re just getting worse.
The fact that technology only made a pre-existing issue worse does not mean that technology is not the problem.
Unspeakable, unimaginable, impossible to write in a sentence on HN?
To me the root cause is that 2-ton metal bricks shouldn’t be propelled at 50 kph, much less 140 kph, by tired hairless apes with tired ape reflexes, ape kids in the backseat, listening to other apes on podcasts, or talking even hands free with ape friends or ape spouses.
We were never designed for this. It’s guaranteed to be a leading cause of death and life-changing injury, so long as we keep it up.
Is that unthinkable or unspeakable? I say it on HN all the time.
We've built an environment (in the US, at least) where driving a car is basically a requirement to participate in society. So, people drive, whether they want to or not. And they drive whether they're physically or mentally capable of doing so successfully.
And we're so entrenched in this design that discussion of a change is met with derision and scorn.
We weren't designed for anything. We take metal from ore and make metals which we shape and make thin to cut other apes in some cases to make them better even.
If you were to have 80% of adults performing surgery every morning and every evening, tired and distracted, you wouldn’t be surprised when surgical accidents become the #3 cause of death.
You can say that fine. It's a reason I'm keen on self driving tech. Which usually on HN leads to a conversation along the lines of it'll never work, Musk is a fraud... but Waymo actually works... and round in circles.
On a more immediate time frame, road engineering can work really well which is why deaths are like 5x lower in places like Holland. Put bends and obstacles in the road and drivers will either have to pay attention or hit them.
We are not apes. Apes can't design, manufacture, distribute, and buy automobiles. Apes can't drive. At all. Thank God we are not apes nor live, nor travel like them. We are able and should create technology that betters our lives. We can and have made reasonable cost/benefit decisions on risks required for these technologies.
This kind of exaggeration undermines any point. An invention as useful as the cell phone was a mistake because people (ab)use it while driving? Any invention is used and abused but the benefits of this invention far outweigh the drawbacks. I'm sure more lives were saved by the mobile phone, and even more were made better, than were taken.
Cell phones were a mistake in the sense that all organization-dependent technology was a mistake. People of the past lived more happy and in-peace years of life despite child mortality, diseases, manual labor, wars, violence, inequality etc. Reason is that no matter how you look at it, either from a evolutionary or a creationist standpoint, human mind-body is literally not designed to live in this world of convenience and ease. There is friction, a lot, which we try to adapt to and fail, and will continue to fail. Nor do we evolve in timescales of 300 years.
No unga-bunga is speaking here. NixOS-loving Rust-writing software dev. Read some Ted Kaczynski folks.
Where I live(not US) I need to constantly use the horn in a gentle manner to get people out of whatsapp after 2~5 seconds of green light. Specially when red lights are longer than 40 secs.
Interestingly is to see police officers and transit officers also distracted inside their cars doing the same.
Another anecdote, but the number of times I think "wow, that guy ran that yellow really late!!!" increased massively over the last four years.
The number of drivers using the bike lane outside my house to make illegal passes has also increased. As has the amount of tailgating and excessive use of horns on the same road.
Same boat here although I can say that in my younger days I was always a “civilized” driver on city streets but was also into street racing and bike speeding which was done in isolated areas or late at night. Nowadays I see more “1 block drags” to show the pop-bang of a shitty modded 3-series than anything else. That and the “Coupé-SUV” owners who think they’re driving an MRAP on an assault.
I suspect vision zero policy and phones are also major contributors. Traffic Engineers across the country are setting traffic lights to reduce the flow of traffic to 20mph without changing the actual speed limit. It’s making people crazy.
Strange! Where I live traffic lights are used for the opposite purpose: they are set up to improve flow by creating green waves that mean ypu don't have to care about orthogonal traffic.
If the point was the reduce the flow, why wouldn't you make a roundabout?
> Strange! Where I live traffic lights are used for the opposite purpose: they are set up to improve flow by creating green waves that mean ypu don't have to care about orthogonal traffic.
story: An out of state tech visiting our job site greeted us with "What the hell is wrong with the traffic lights in Florida!?" This was SW FL and I was a little confused because he had driven thru one of the most benign counties. I might be conditioned though.
Just north of Tampa is a county where most traffic lights are timed to insure you reach the next one on the yellow. I've traveled thru it regularly for 30 years. Between 20 and 15 years ago it reached ~as bad as possible status and there it remains.
Adding awful to bad are the drivers who've realized they can defeat much of this timing with sufficient speed.
That is what should be done, but it’s becoming rare. Bangerter Highway in Utah comes to mind as a good one. I know Colorado is a state big on vision zero policy, where if you go the posted speed you will hit every single light.
The lockdowns brought about a pandemic of selfishness. If x% of the people didn't like lockdown rules and they broke them and they were fine, y% of those probably absorbed the lesson that some other rules are useless.
It didn't help that most, maybe all, governmental authorities were improvising their COVID response, some other percentage of people lost their fear/trust in authorities that way.
Here in Ireland, this is visible in road deaths, which have risen significantly this year, reversing a trend of low road deaths as a result of an enormously successful road safety campaign over the previous 30 years.
There's noticeably more serious accidents too, although the data won't be available until mid-2024 to confirm.
Notably, Ireland achieved a lot of their reductions in road deaths by taking all the people walking and biking and putting them in a car instead. For instance, compared to the mid-80's about 250% as many kids are driven to school, half as many take public transport, and half as many walk or bike.
Certainly, when I lived there Ireland was a terrible place to bike or walk.
With police resources constrained, everyone started driving like insane assholes around here, and it hasn't gone back. I noticed significantly more people cheating the carpool lane, no longer using turn signals, intentionally blowing red lights and stop signs, etc.
Driving culture has changed, at least in this area.
That can't be causuality? Probably people that don't take vaccines are more reckless overall.
'Of course, skipping a COVID vaccine does not mean that someone will get into a car crash. Instead, the authors theorize that people who resist public health recommendations might also “neglect basic road safety guidelines.”'
I am not American but I read this again and again. The most correlated reason, I have read, is that the police explicitly stopped enforcing laws in many places, in reaction to some larger political event. I forgot which.
Oh yes. I live in one of those places. It was when a new sheriff was elected who wasn't driven by ever-fattening budgets. The first thing he did - stop allowing fine revenue to influence enforcement.
Ticketing dropped. Also the quality of policing in general (and officers specifically) improved dramatically. We had way better cops than under the previous sheriff.
> People drive horrible now. Running lights, crazy lane changes, excessive speeding etc.
No longer bothering to turn off long beam headlights, when there is oncoming traffic. And with the new bright led lights, the long beams are really bright.
Sometimes even the low beam lights feel too bright, especially if the oncoming car is big, and thus has its headlights sitting higher up.
Most of the US, AFAIK, doesn't have a mandatory yearly vehicle inspection like Germany (and other countries). Mix that with massive trucks with massive lift kits and you get these fun road behemoths that blind you, even with low beams. It's infuriating. I walked past a lifted truck yesterday in a parking lot and it's hood was level with the top of my head. I'm 6ft tall. It was comically large. How can you drive something like that around? You could hide an entire family in the front blind spot!
I've been driving a drinking-age Jeep Cherokee and the acceleration and top speed make me remember how it felt to drive 20 years ago. The street and road design makes a lot more sense at those speeds. We've gotten used to faster and peppier cars over the years but meanwhile the roads haven't changed to accommodate that.
I drive what is basically the slowest new car you can currently buy in North America (0-100 kph in 11 seconds, vroooom). I just have to floor it on highway ramps. Most cars accelerate much quicker, so people get used to never depressing the pedal more than like 1/3 and end up doing 0-100 kph in more than 10 seconds anyway.
IMO the faster acceleration and heavier weight of electric cars will just lead to much more disastrous accident when people (for example) press on the wrong pedal. Long term the extra deaths are probably balanced out if the more dangerous cars displace enough fuel cars and lower carbon emissions and air pollution... but I wish we regulated acceleration (maybe with a different license category, like we do with trucks?)
It shouldn't be possible to kill someone 10 m in front of your car when leaving from a stop because the manufacturer wants to impress professional car reviewers.
People always drive, not to within certain parameters of the law, but to within their risk tolerance. As cars become more safe, the risk factor reduces which allow people to increase risky behavior.
If you want people to drive better, don't put airbags in their steering wheel, put a 6" metal spike pointed at their chest.
Of course, no one will be making cars intentionally unsafe, but the law is also a risk factor, the risks of getting fined, jail time or licence revocation count too, and these risks can be made higher.
> If you want people to drive better, don't put airbags in their steering wheel, put a 6" metal spike pointed at their chest.
Cars without breakable steering column were pretty much this, so everyone had this before ~1990. Yet, deaths in traffic have steadily decreased since then.
Yep. Studies on helmet usage in skiing and snowboarding showed that as helmet usage became more common, brain injuries increased. People felt more protected and thus took more risks.
* The use of safety helmets clearly decreases the risk and severity of head injuries as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* The beneficial effects of helmets are not negated by unintended risks as their use does not appear to increase the risk of neck or cervical spine injury as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* The use of safety helmets also does not appear to increase the risk of compensation behavior as compared to non-helmeted participants in skiing and snowboarding.
* Therefore, helmets are strongly recommended during recreational skiing and snowboarding.
I mean, sure, there are BMJ Sports Medicine Opinion Pieces by Dr Paul McCrory who was prolific with his thoughts on the matter but short on evidence, not to mention that whole, ummm, thing:
> Helmets do not appear to increase the risk compensation behavior among skiers and snowboarders.
Nor has it been proven with a bunch of other activities
> Convincing evidence in support of the risk compensation hypothesis has not been seen with the use of the face-shield in ice-hockey, motor vehicle seat belt use and motorcycle helmet use.
Though the data isn’t the best but what we do have does not seem to support that hypothesis.
The head first tackle is illegal anyhow in American football, but they tackle differently to begin with because you want to down the runner as soon as you can and stop the play more than anything.
This feels like you are arguing a point that is irrelevant.
Are you saying that in Grid Iron there are no concussions? Hate to break it to you, but they are fairly common even before they broadened the definition last year.
Or are you saying that no player ever does a foul, or an illegal tackle?
If so, I'll link you to YouTube clips that disagrees with you.
They are constantly researching helmets and trying to reduce the chances of concussion, but ultimately wearing of a helmet introduces a risk factor, in the same way that that bigger cars make people feel safer so drive more dangerously.
if that were the case it would be a purely US phenomenon. Whereas increasing car size is global (relative to the initial size in each region of course)
I personally find it sad to say but the US has a strong cultural dominance especially in the western world but also beyond that.
From car sizes to architecture styles.
Which is a tragedy, it's the reason why city cars like Puegeot 107/Citroen C1/Toyota Aygo (basically the same car, different brands) are not produced anymore.
If consumers wanted smaller cars, they would buy more of them. A car is still much less expensive than a larger vehicle. The data clearly indicates people want bigger vehicles.
Anecdotally, I have personally heard many people say they want to sit up higher, or have a bigger vehicle because it is safer for them.
> If consumers wanted smaller cars, they would buy more of them. A car is still much less expensive than a larger vehicle. The data clearly indicates people want bigger vehicles.
That's true to a point. In the US there are regulatory loopholes for SUVs, so that's impacting what vehicles people choose.
I agree that fuel efficiency standards are pretty silly. Especially CAFE standards. They should just tax CO2 emissions (or fuel) directly, and let the market sort it out.
Perhaps also have a tax on the weight of the vehicle, because that's a negative externality: heavier cars are worse for other people in a crash.
The cheapest car to buy and insure from any manufacturer is going to be their subcompact hatch or sedan. No, people don’t care about price now that I see a bright yellow Urus doing 70 down a local road once a week.
I think you miss my point. When CAFE standards drastically increase the price of small cars, it impacts choice.
It's similar to house prices. The more regulations you pile on, the more things cost. While those things are seen as "good", it removes choice and increases cost.
When CAFE standards specifically carve out an exception for larger vehicles (pickups and SUVs), thus forcing only compacts and sedans and station wagons to be subject to the new standards, of course there's some price pressure that nudges people into bigger cars.
If CAFE was applied across the board, there'd be no impact on choice at all. But it's not.
Sorry, I don’t buy it at all. People are not rolling up to my kids’ daycare in F150/XC-90/Suburban/4Runner because of CAFE making smaller cars more expensive.
They are buying it because they like bigger cars, and the people that can’t afford bigger cars still want to sit up higher, hence the popularity of CRV/Rav4 type vehicles.
If you don't buy it, I assume that you have solid alternate explanations of why the trends in vehicle size/power/design seem to closely track the preferences expressed by federal policy (intentionally or not) along with fuel costs.
Yes, there are (largely misguided but in some senses game-theory justified) preferences for higher/larger/heavier vehicles. But from what I've read, these don't provide much (statistical) explanatory power for the actual numbers.
I understand what you are saying, but I predict removing or fixing those regulations will not change anything (other than increased fuel or weight taxes), because the underlying reason remains the same. People (in general) prefer sitting higher up and being in bigger vehicles.
I don’t. I would gladly purchase a small practical brand new kei car if I could.
Given the choice between a $35k sedan and a $40k SUV the choice is going to be SUV for most people.
Given the choice between a $15k sedan and a $40k SUV, it gets a lot more interesting.
The US car market is incredibly restricted. You can buy a 300 mile range electric sedan for $25k in China. Why the fuck can’t we get that in North America?
- 2016 Toyota Tacoma TRD OR (4WD + extra features)
The Tacoma is Toyota's smallest North American truck and is dramatically larger than the Ranger. The Ranger suited my needs perfectly except that it wasn't 4WD and would frequently get stuck in Canadian winter. I couldn't even buy good snow tires for it anymore because the rims were too small.
If there were a recently built 4WD truck available in the North American market that was the size of the 91 Ranger, I would have bought it in a heartbeat. It does not exist.
My dad recently totaled his old Mazda pickup. Insurance gave him about three times as much for it as I expected. Turns out the value of used small pickups is through the roof, because there are no new small pickups and used ones are getting harder to find.
They do, just not for the US market. Both ford and Toyota make excellent mid-small-size trucks (Ranger and Hilux). In South Africa we have similar sized trucks from Nissan, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Colt, a bunch of Chinese brands.
Lol up, 90s Tacomas and 90s Rangers are the about same size. 2023 Tacomas and Rangers are the about same size. But wow is there a delta over that time frame.
Looks like it’s 8” wider and 24” longer, with a box that’s 6” shorter. To be fair on the length/box size, mine was one of the “club cab” ones with the two sideways-facing backseats and no rear doors. Great for throwing the dogs in the back seat but not so good for passengers. It would probably have been an option but I bought the Tacoma a year before the Maverick was released.
> People (in general) prefer sitting higher up and being in bigger vehicles
I don't think that in isolation people broadly prefer bigger vehicles, but in the context of other people having bigger vehicles, a circular problem exists, with people feeling like they're in ever increasing danger behind the wheel if they have a small car but are surrounded by behemoths. If it weren't contextually dependent, I don't think it would be a relatively recent phenomenon, since big vehicles have always been available, and I think you'd see people getting large vehicles despite what's common around them, in terms of both geography and what's on the road. I'd prefer a larger vehicle if I was driving around polar bear country, and I think every other car on the road in North America is a metaphorical polar bear.
don't apologise. this thread is filled with urbanists that aren't "debating" in good faith. Do not give an inch on the car debate because that won't be all they will take.
It's a US thing, pedestrian safety continued to improve in France (mainly caused by infrastructure improvements), but we are starting to have the same sized cars, with the same issues)
in parts of Europe, vigilante groups are deflating tires of SUVs to discourage people from contributing to this trend. Not that I endorse the practice but it's interesting to consider how unimaginable something like this would be to Americans. Whereas in Europe people can probably at least understand why they're doing what they're doing
Those vigilante groups do it largely when a large SUV is parked illegally, such as on a sidewalk. You don't have as much of a chance to park like that in the US.
I've always understood the US's giant car problem was an unintended consequence of the CAFE fuel efficiency legislation, why is Europe getting caught up in the giant car fad? I'd imagine that'd be much more obvious of a terrible idea when the streets are half the size.
It's a result of cultural imperialism and basic psychology.
Many Europeans are bathed in US media. They see the huge cars constantly on US footage, and some are inclined to purchase these even if they are impractical in EU towns and cities. As these behemoths are introduced in the traffic mix, others in classic smaller cars feel threathened, and their next purchase will be a big tanky SUV to feel less vulnerable.
While SUVs are on the rise in Europe, there's still a large gap between what Europeans consider a large SUV and what Americans consider a large SUV. I'm European and I drive what I consider to be a large car: A 2014 Nissan Qashqai. I'm sure it is considered a small can by Americans. There are bigger SUVs on European roads (like the Volvo XC90) but the true American behemoths are rare here. It's usually Americanophiles driving tricked out RAMs.
Europe also has pedestrian crash safety standards as well. US crash safety standards deal exclusively with the occupants of the vehicle, and not at all with the lives of whatever was smashed into.
Even if local roads aren't getting bigger, cars getting bigger due to it's international product. Here in Japan, thankfully there are narrower JDMs available on some category, but for who want a modern expensive SUV, there are only international big SUVs.
Yep, that's the legislation I was referring to that's the cause of the massive rise of gigantic trucks in the past decade.
There's some formula between overall car area (the literal length x width of the vehicle) and the allowed mpg for the automaker's corporate fuel economy. Yay for second order effects...
> There's some formula between overall car area (the literal length x width of the vehicle) and the allowed mpg for the automaker's corporate fuel economy. Yay for second order effects...
Well, every economist (or anyone with half-a-brain) could have predicted these effects.
This wanker (Been driving a Land Cruiser 95 since 2001) feels positively out-wanked when driving in the US; my 4x4 is considered large-ish at home, but is dwarfed by what appears to be common fare in at least parts of the US; I was in Port Fourchon, LA last week, driving a Corolla - the Silverados, RAMs, F350s and whatnot surrounding me could almost fit my Land Cruiser in the glove box!
The Corolla? I don't think half of them would even have noticed if they ran it over.
Anyway - point being, I don't think we are anywhere near getting caught up in the giant car fad. Not yet, anyway.
> Anyway - point being, I don't think we are anywhere near getting caught up in the giant car fad. Not yet, anyway.
Oh we definitely are, it’s nowhere near as bad as in the US yet because they are decades ahead in that mess, but around here mid-size and light-duty full-size are becoming more and more common.
They functionally didn’t exist a few years ago, nowadays it’s a good days when I don’t see one. And that’s not including the few I know of parked in driveways on the drive to work.
Because pickups were not generally available in europe so you wouldn’t bother unless you really actually genuinely needed one (e.g. forestry services), and many countries had automobile taxes which approximated power via displacement, so huge american-style engines led to absolutely prohibitive car tax rates (that’s why euro engines have historically been pretty small, and even completely weird e.g. the UK’s RAC horsepower didn’t even use displacement at all it only used bore, so a small-bore long-stroke piston was taxed significantly less than a large-bore short-stroke one, for the same displacement).
It's also becoming an European thing, I've left a separate comment for it but the latest environment-related regulations are the reason why very small cars like Peugeot 107/Citroen C1/Toyota Aygo and the Renault Twingo (the recently announced EV version is a very expensive marketing gimmick) are not produced anymore.
Safety between cars, and within cars, has improved. However, due to the increasing size of the average vehicle on the road, among other factors, car safety for pedestrians/cyclists has decreased.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...