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Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

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Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#171

Post by pif »

goethes_kind wrote: post #122

Large personal vehicles should just be banned in cities. People abused the system to such an extent that now it is a matter of infringing on other people's right to personal safety not to mention the unnecessary pollution and traffic congestion. I do not want to discuss the specifics but it would be great if for example cities only allowed KEI cars or a similar concept.

> Large personal vehicles should just be banned in cities.

I see your point, but that will only work when small city cars will be cheap enough to let have a "real" car too for non-daily purposes (long journey, huge shopping, out with the family...).

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#172

Post by pif »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #157
jccalhoun wrote: post #140

Last summer someone pulled out in front of me and totaled my Honda Fit. I would have loved to replace it with a new one but they don't sell them in North America any more. In the 90s I had a small Nissan truck (apparently it is called a Hardbody? The manual just said "nissan truck") You can't buy any truck anywhere near as small as that any more. I also had a Dodge Dakota at one point and you can't even really find a…

The thing I’m curious about is, why did sports cars stop being cool? They were everywhere in the eighties, and of course critics would describe their drivers as compensating for a subconscious lacking in masculinity or something… they understandably died off in the nineties… and now we seem to be back to compensating with huge trucks? Sports cars might be dangerous but at least that’s mostly just to the occupiers, wh…

> why did sports cars stop being cool?

They were never cool in my eyes. They offer you no space and no comfort, which everybody likes, and they try to compensate with huge speed, that nobody is allowed to attain.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#173

Post by throwaway0a5e »

pif wrote: post #167
donw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem -- pun intended -- is that vehicles are de facto required by law to be huge. Imagine if we had cars that were built like cars from the 80s -- smaller, lightweight, tons of visibility, minimal equipment -- but with modern engine technology and a few of the electronics that don't add much weight, but add a ton of functionality (like 360-degree cameras). I'll take the road noise, less interior comfort, a…

> Imagine if we had cars that were built like cars from the 80s ... I'd happily but such a car for the city, if it was cheap enough to be able to afford a more serious car for long journeys.

You probably wouldn't know the difference between a 1980s car and a modern car if the modern amount of NVH reduction was thrown at the 1980s car.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#174

Post by enragedcacti »

samatman wrote: post #147
yboris wrote: post #14

Exactly on topic: a philosophy paper " Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? " by Douglas Husak. Author argues that because of the high crash incompatibility with other vehicles (and pedestrians), SUV driving is immoral - imposing an oversized amount of harm to others with no proportional safety for self. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447

I'm willing to go along with this so long as blame is apportioned where it belongs: with the Federal government of the United States. My case is that manufacturing vehicles is a public good. We can talk about restoring city centers to human beings and I'll agree with you all day, but if you want to make the case that motor vehicles, cars included, are themselves immoral, we don't share enough values to have a product…

> So they did the obvious thing: imposed increasing taxes on gasoline.

I would argue that their hands were somewhat tied because raising the federal gas tax during a recession would have been an extremely unpopular thing to do regardless of the reasoning. Maybe we should expect our representatives to make the right choices anyway but we would probably still punish them for it.

The IRA has a similar problem, its all climate change 'carrots' because all the various forms of carbon taxes necessary to go the 'stick' route would be deeply unpopular despite probably being more economically efficient. I'm sure in a decade we will be talking about all the bone-headed perverse incentives that came out of it, but I'd rather that than us talk about how we missed the chance to pass the biggest climate bill in US history.

All that said, they definitely still could have crafted better legislation that had fewer side effects than the footprint system they went with.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#175

Post by silon42 »

nostromo wrote: post #74
asdff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, shape. Go look at the front end of a car like a ford F150. The hood is flat and sits 4 feet high. Now go look at a more compact car like a prius. The hood is low, and is angled like a wedge smooth into the windshield. When a prius hits you, its liable that you will just roll up and off of it and not get much of the force from the impact as a result. When an F150 hits you with its 4 foot tall wall of a grill str…

The Tundra now has a front camera so you can see what’s in front of you.

I've had an idea for a long time that A pillars should have screens that show through them (in addition to reverse cameras above).

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#176

Post by DawnQFunk3 »

xyst wrote: post #169

As an American, we need to rethink how the cities are designed. Way too much emphasis on car centric design. An emphasis on car centric transportation means fed government and people want cars to be safer. Larger A-pillars which decrease line of sight. Larger vehicles give people a higher sense of security and safety. These 2 points make it very safe for the driver and occupants but disregard any safety for pedestria…

[dead]

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#177

Post by hunter2_ »

austinjp wrote: post #114
astrobe_ wrote: post #104

Bigger vehicles are heavier; at the same speed as a passenger car, they have more kinetic energy. It is even worse when the victim is lighter, as per the momentum conservation principle. The study confirms the physics. What's unexpected is the last line of the abstract.

The line in question: "By race, Blacks are also found to be overrepresented as pedestrian and pedalcyclist crash victims."

I'm trying to figure out if this is due to pedestrian density in urban areas, hate crimes, insurance/injury fraud, less reflected light at night, ...

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#178

Post by choeger »

globular-toast wrote: post #125
choeger wrote: post #117

The sad thing is that at least some part of the growth of vehicles on the road is because few people can afford to own (and park) multiple cars or other vehicles larger than a bike. I have to move 3 kids and 2 adults regularly over longer distances, so I am pretty much constrained to a van (say a VW T7). But unfortunately, I cannot afford to accompany this expensive car with a smaller, preferrably electric, vehicle.…

A VW Golf from the 70s could fit two adults and three children. Or you could rent the van when you really need it. The trouble is when a society accepts non-sustainable solutions it's very difficult to go back to anything remotely sustainable as any technological progress is always expected to deliver "more". It also leads to people thinking their ridiculous lifestyles are baseline necessity when, in fact, they could…

A VW Golf from the 2020s could not cover that use case legally or practically.

First of all, kids need safety seats nowadays and these seats are to be mounted via ISOFIX. And guess how many such seats you can mount in a Golf? Right. Two. When the kids grow older, they don't need such seats but need to be belted properly, potentially including another form of a cheaper safety seat or a particular kind of belt, depending on the jurisdiction. You might consider this some kind of circus or greed, but when it's about safety of my children, I don't go back 50 years just because we all need to be more sustainable while some people (cough, US, cough) seem to think it's a great idea to live in uninsulated homes running their AC on fossile fuel.

Besides that, small children need strollers and more children generally means more luggage. You could get away with a Passat or a Golf Variant, but you'd face a challenge for longer trips. A family car exists to solve a problem and not to cause trouble.

And regarding renting a van: This would easily cost more than ownership (weekend trips are horribly expensive) and be less comfortable (fetching and returning the car).

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#179

Post by samatman »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #153
samatman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to go along with this so long as blame is apportioned where it belongs: with the Federal government of the United States. My case is that manufacturing vehicles is a public good. We can talk about restoring city centers to human beings and I'll agree with you all day, but if you want to make the case that motor vehicles, cars included, are themselves immoral, we don't share enough values to have a product…

I don't agree that consumers are strictly limited by price. It's been the norm to finance vehicles with loans for a while now. So much that dealerships make more on financing than they do on selling cars in some cases. As profit in the industry has grown, so too has the amount of available credit. We now see 7 year loans on vehicles becoming more common.

The price of anything expensive includes the cost to obtain enough money to buy it.

When I said "price" that recognizes the fact that cars are financed. It's like the price of a home that way, you're not disagreeing with anything, you just didn't know what that word meant in this context, for some odd reason.

Re: Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

#180

Post by DoughnutHole »

johnwalkr wrote: post #123
Gibbon1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A complaint I have and I've heard from others is the airbags in the A pillars are a menace to pedestrians because they block the drivers view.

Yes, cyclists too. When approaching an intersection which is not at right angles, it can be especially dangerous for cyclists when the speed of the car and cyclist is just right for the cyclist to be obscured for a long period of time. [1] I also noticed when driving a certain Kei car in Japan with no a-pillar airbags and a so-called “split” or “double” a-pillar with a window between 2 skinny pillars, that the visibi…

Tom Scott has a good video for anyone looking for a visual of this phenomenon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU

He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit.

Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.

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