Huge study from The Economist about car bloat in the US. “For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.” ‘Safety for me, danger for you’ is an American motto at this point.
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Discussion 8 comments
Toxic masculinity strikes again!!
I am figuring this is a little tongue in cheek, but while lots of guys drive trucks to their office, we have a ton of moms driving massive vehicles. my wife had to be talked down from a suburban assault vehicle to a small SUV with a more pedestrian friendly grill height. I had a great trip to Italy this summer where I rented a car considered large that I considered quite small by our standards. I enjoyed driving for the first time in years. The roads were well designed. People followed rules. Pedestrians had the right of way and were not considered an afterthought. I explained how I marveled at this to a driver we had at one point in Rome. I had been there for 10 days and yet to see an accident. He agreed than told me how he could not wait to visit America so he could drive a Ford F-150...
This is all too timely. One of my spouse's good friends in high school was just killed (along with his nephew) by an 81-year-old man in a Cadillac Escalade while they were off to the side of the street trying to fix a trailer issue. An 81-year-old should not still be on the road, and definitely not in a 6,000 lb. vehicle that provides him a false sense of safety. Yet there he was, and he killed two people.
But I think this gets back to the overall problem in the U.S. -- the problem of the commons / the problem of community vs the individual. My car is safer for ME -- who cares about what it'll do to anyone else, that's their problem. As an American who's lived for long periods in Canada and Europe, my observation is that Americans have a hard time understanding that there can be any greater good than whatever is best for them individually at that moment, and that's not the same elsewhere.
I wholly agree with your overall point, but the generalization that a 81-yr-old should not be driving...not so much.
I'll take my 86yr-old father driving his 2002 Golf (which he bought a year ago because he wanted something "fun to drive") over some millennial playing CandyCrush (couldn't see the exact game as the car was drifting towards me in the cycling lane, but you get the idea).
And to that point, the CandyCrush-er was thankfully in a early 2010s sedan so (a) I could actually see that they were on a phone; but more importantly (b) I could yell to get their attention and they could see that they were about 8" from running me off the road.
If they'd been in a massive pickup, they probably would've scrubbed me off into the sidewalk and been completely oblivious to having done so.
I think the issue is more the combination of 81-year-old and 6000 lbs. of metal, making him feel safe and making him a menace to everyone else on the road, especially given that his reflexes aren't what they likely once were. That said, we also let people drive way too long here in North America, probably because many of us have moved away from our relatives and they *have* to drive to get their groceries, etc. if they want to remain independent, which pretty much everyone does. (I say this having just found out that my 94-year-old grandma and her small sedan she drove to the supermarket have just been taken off the road because she failed the eye test...and, yeah, that probably should have happened a long time ago. So I'm complicit in that, too. It's hard. But seniors should not be piloting 3 tons of metal.)
My husband and I recently moved to a new town and one of this first things we noticed was how big all the cars are here; the BIGGEST SUVs, the BIGGEST trucks (and always with an empty flatbed). So when we each saw this post yesterday, it was basically a race to send it to each other first. "Yes big car safe"
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_3tdzjyj1W/?igsh=Y2NwazM5Yzd5cnc=
As a resident of a big city and an avid motorcyclist, this is incredibly scary. Trucks and SUVs have become so unnecessarily large that a pedestrian in a crosswalk is oftentimes the same height as the grill, while a child (or someone of shorter stature) is completely dwarfed, and therefore invisible, from the driver's perspective. Plus, the mammoth proportions of the vehicles seem to grant drivers permission to be even more aggressive drivers. Why kei trucks aren't more popular in cities is beyond me...
There’s a national effort in cities to modify street design to eliminate injuries and fatalities called Vision Zero. I hope Vision Zero advocates also push for state for federal limitations of the weight of cars.
We’ve done it for tailpipe emissions, seat belts, and air bags. We can do it for overall mass too.
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