Toxic masculinity strikes again!!

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.

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.

It will be interesting to see if EV's, with their extra ~1,500 lbs of batteries, are also causing more damage than similarly sized vehicles. Unfortunately I think we can guess. More weight = longer stopping distances and more damage in the event of a crash. Then throw in their quick acceleration and quicker tire wear. My gut says more accidents and more damage from those accidents. I hope i'm wrong.

We’ve reached an inflection point sometime in the last month on car widths in most New York neighborhoods where smaller two lane streets can only accommodate a single car at a time. Add giant parked cars (with rashed out titanic wheels) constricting the available drivable space, and traffic has started to come to a standstill as one car at a time negotiates the right of way.

Tax car widths!