How cities can stem the tide of pedestrian deaths from large cars and SUVs – Ars Technica
All these children are invisible to the driver...
Fuck all those cars!!! Put them away to hell, not to earth. They are too big for all - except for small egos. But for small egos is therapy much better.
Require vehicle safety standards to test for pedestrian and cyclist survivability first and foremost.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles such as pickup trucks. Take it away when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
Require vehicles to provide better visibility through the windshield, like Europe does.
Design street lanes to be narrow and winding, so that drivers intuitively choose to drive at speeds that are safe for people outside the vehicle. Raise pedestrian crossings at the same level as the sidewalk so that drivers habitually slow down when they see a crossing.
In other words, value the safety of the people outside the vehicle above the speed and convenience of the drivers.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles. Take away such commercial license when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
This is my favorite type of suggestion because it puts the responsibility on the person driving and makes it clear that hauling heavy loads or large trailers is a bigger deal than driving a sedan. We have different licenses for motorcycles, the same makes sense for any light truck and above. This would also promote the use of compact sized trucks that are basically cars with beds and minivans instead of people getting full sized vans and massive trucks.
My personal favorite: the fines for moving violations should scale with vehicle size. It's total BS an F150 and a Miata get the same ticket for running a red light.
@blandy @frostbiker
In Victoria (Australia), the fine for using your mobile phone while riding a bicycle is the same as when driving a 2.6 tonne ute.
Maybe make the fines scale with the mass instead of linear size.
Design our streets to be narrow and winding
I drive to several places that have traffic flow designs. The road narrows near crosswalk to just enough for 2 cars to pass, no shoulder. It definitely makes me slow down even when alone. These can do a lot to impact drivers speed and safety.
Design our streets to be narrow and winding
And with separate, protected walking and cycling infrastructure.
and don't take out the bike lane because " no one uses it" and/or "we used to be able to go murder speed along there".
If the street is sufficiently hostile to fast moving cars, at some point dedicated infra space for cyclists becomes unnecessary. As soon as it becomes reasonable for a nutjob to speed past 30 kph though, cycling infra becomes quite necessary.
Require a commercial license to drive large and/or heavy vehicles. Take it away when a driver gets caught driving unsafely.
This is already a thing. In my state anything weighing over 10,000 pounds and used in interstate commerce requires a medical card. 17,000 and used intrastate is the same medical card. Towing anything for commercial reasons above 10,000 pounds requires a special license. Driving a vehicle weighing over 26,000 pounds requires a special license.
i have a truck for towing my travel trailer and doing other truck tasks like hauling stuff around in the bed (we take the small coupe or bikes everywhere else), and i love this idea!
If the children were driving their own SUVs this wouldn't be a problem.
Additionally, give the kids guns.
Give anti tank crew weapons for kids. It saves their lives, also teaches them sharing and cooperation.
Put guns on the SUVs
The children are already driving them.
The other day i saw a pickup truck trying to switch lane, they just put on the signal and attempted to switch, didn't realise there's a sedan just beside them. Dude couldn't even see who's honking them telling them not to switch.
That's called failure to check your blind spot. I've driven a pickup for over a decade and never not been able to see when a vehicle is next to me if I physically turn and check my blind spot. Though we are promoting people becoming more lazy with this as most new cars just do this for you. In my newer work vehicle, the side mirrors have an orange indicator turn on when someone's hanging in your blind spot.
"might makes right" road rules
Prime example. Lifted truck can’t see car next to it.
Front end cameras? Are they serious? That isn't a solution to not being able to see in front of your car. 🤦
Make the darn thing smaller.
For real. Who thinks adding an extra, unnecessary thing to look at/monitor while driving adds safety?
Or make kids wear football gear and helmets. Maybe they can even combine it with body armor for the occasional school shooting.
/s
Back to school kevlar sales! Keep your child safe and fashionable!
But more seriously, it is so past time to actually regulate trucks and SUVs. We are here because congress left a "light truck" loophole in their legislation decades ago and never closed it. No other country in the world uses almost exclusively gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs instead of smaller, more efficient cars to the extreme extent we do.
Give them fluorescent flags to hold while crossing the road for visibility. Wait a minute…
Its been my motorcycle-riding experience that cameras or even designing the trucks better woukdn't help a lot, as the people who drive these things don't care if someone is in their way.
As a cyclist, I can confidently say you probably still get more consideration than myself
Make them even higher so that kids fit below them /s
Or, you know, change emissions regulations so that cars can be made smaller again.
Hate to tell you there's no singular villain trying to kill kids with cars.
Literally the only reason cars got this big is because minimum efficiency is the result of dividing mpg by square footage, and by law the number has to go down every year. I do not blame auto makers for simply making the same popular models a little bigger with each refresh so as not to have to redesign from scratch the things that took 100 years of engineering effort to get to the present level of function.
I mean there's electric trucks and SUVs that are full size so not sure how changing emission regulations would help
Other responder is on the money for established brands.
For new car makes, they are forced to play it safe.
For example Rivian, let's assume there is no technical constraint. They need to decide how much they are willing to risk before introducing a new product. When you invest billions before the first customer buys anything, your investors who are fronting all that capital want you to use the formula that is proven to work in every respect apart from whatever dimension you're innovating on.
Cars going on sale this year were designed multiple years ago. They were tested. Tooling and whole new production facilities needed to be designed and built and supply chain set up for all the new parts. Test batches evaluated. It's not like how you patch shit software almost on the fly in today's beta culture.
If someone like Rivian got the shape wrong because in the meantime everyone decided the porsche 356 was the prettiest car ever made and every new car was round and curvy, they'd lose what's called product market fit, which is the death sentence for every failed company. As a car maker they can recoup some money by slashing prices but this whole product cycle would be a huge cash loss they cannot afford to miss.
So everyone plays it safe. Everyone copies apple. Everyone emulates the design direction of Ford's F150, Toyota's Prius, etc.
Because why would you design it from the ground up? The beauty of buying a Ford etc, is the supply chain. If the bumper on "my" F150 or F150 Lightning breaks. I can get a new one from Ford in no time . I don't agree with it, but that's why electric trucks etc are the same as the ICE versions
Safety standards are also different in the US for "light trucks". So it's probably still cheaper to make pickups because they don't have to design it to not be a death machine.
We definitely should change emissions, yes, but I think a good "foot in the door" tactic would be to lobby your local city to make street parking require a permit that is priced based on the length of your car. It makes ZERO sense that minis and F350s pay the same for parking.
And/or make car registration costs scale reflect the true damage of additional vehicle weight.
But then they also have to add a wiper to those cameras, they will get bloody from all those massacred bodies run over...
Yes... this will certainly stem the number of deaths caused by these rolling aircraft carriers... in the year 2040.
Or we could, you know, follow previously established methods of building vehicles that make pedestrian death and dismemberment less likely.
No, no, no. Americans need them this way apparently for some inexplicable fucking reason.
So instead of just designing them with pedestrian safety in mind to begin with, we are just gonna slap on more fucking band-aids (like cameras) that do fuck-all.
Americans never asked for this, it's the classification system for light trucks implemented following the Yom Kippur War that left too much leeway in the definition for "light trucks" that has been driving auto makers in this direction.
Of course there have been knock-on cultural issues where certain people make it part of their ego and the market effect becomes self reinforcing, but that's how we got into this mess. History is a series of unintended consequences, again.
Agreed. The industry is invested in avoiding regulation that could impede their profits at all costs. This means they will invest in advertising pushing the idea that these vehicles are needed.
I'd argue that they have asked for trucks to get so big because they seemingly sell better that way. It's admittedly an imperfect thing to look at since there's few alternatives and many other factors, but these big trucks didn't immediately take over the market. At some point they were introduced and consumers liked them.
Americans never asked for this? Then who is buying these wanktanks?
I saw a YouTube explaining the giant cars in the US have to do with the government making a big equation that car manufacturers have to follow.
The equation calculated the weight, size, gas mileage, etc, and the only way they can make the cars pass the equation is to make them giant. The equation backfired and now we have giant cars.
It didn't backfire. They designed a law that looks good at first glance but actually makes auto manufacturers richer. This happens all the time and it's on purpose, because they know voters don't have the analysis resources of lobbyists.
Yep, the manufacturers get massive tax breaks on this class of vehicle, which means they can make and sell them at the same or better price than a small, fuel efficient car. If a family with kids has to choose between a mid size crossover or an F150 at similar price points, why would you get the crossover? The USA needs to fix the way it taxes cars to disincentivise these fuel inefficient giant cars. No other country has these problems so it's not a selfish person problem, it's an entirely logical choice to make given the circumstances.
Ban lifted trucks!!
That truck isn't even lifted. Looks like stock.
Band-aids like cameras that do fuck all? Cameras are a very quick, simple, and obvious solution to this specific problem. There's a reason that all new cars have backup cameras nowadays. Perfection is the enemy of good and all that.
Eh. European panel vans can usuallly haul more and have better visibility. Just droop the snoot.
“Ban stuff I don’t like”
Yeah, it's totally just stuff I don't like!
https://www.nbc.com/today/video/inside-the-latest-push-for-front-end-cameras-in-new-cars/NBCN346245869
It's not like there's any evidence whatsoever these giant pieces of shit are more dangerous. The referenced news story definitely doesn't talk about the science behind why they're more dangerous. It's just people don't like it! /s
Could you be any more disingenuous?
Found the emotional support vehicle user
"Interpret everything in bad faith"