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The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

nytimes.com

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Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#281

Post by hansvm »

Aerroon wrote: post #192
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stepped out of a coffee shop, got text from wife, grabbed my phone and got missed by inches by a kid on a scooter easily doing 25mph on the sidewalk. The text possibly saved my ability to walk in future by having me to pause just for a moment.

The problem is with bicycles being relegated to either the sidewalk or the main road with cars. I'm really not a fan of how cities create bikelanes by putting a line through the sidewalk and then nobody respects it. I see the appeal in trying to ride fast, but it gets kind of scary. When I rode a bike I went fast outside the city specifically to avoid pedestrians.

And the main road with cars wouldn't be an issue if people had a little common sense and respect. I was descending down a mountain road on my bicycle once, definitely speeding (enough so that I caught up to the traffic ahead of me -- really just trying to get off the mountain quickly though since I know people like the following exist), and some giant truck decided it was up to them to show me a lesson for riding in the road -- tailgated me the entire way down the bloody mountain, and there was no safe way for me to pull over (no shoulder, trees and steep drop), to speed up (I was already booking it, and there was a car in front of me anyway and no safe way to pass), or slow down (IME, slowing down when in a car sends people like that into a rage, so I wasn't comfortable bleeding off any speed with this guy a few feet behind me). If I had any equipment failures or had to slow down for any reason it would've been a nasty accident.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#282

Post by ambicapter »

echelon wrote: post #186
__float wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commuter rail has 1/200th the economic impact of interstate highways. Ok, and what fraction of investment has it gotten? We've underfunded rail/bike infrastructure for decades, of course money is going to flow on the cheapest route. Roads are cheap because we've subsidized the shit out of them.

Bikes are not going to deliver your packages and food and medical services. They're not going to take you on vacation, haul your gear, or provide shelter. There's a meme that bikes will solve everything and that cars suck, but it's dismissive of the orders of magnitude more value that road infra can and will always provide.

Bike couriers in shambles to discover this.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#283

Post by vkou »

macintux wrote: post #167
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stepped out of a coffee shop, got text from wife, grabbed my phone and got missed by inches by a kid on a scooter easily doing 25mph on the sidewalk. The text possibly saved my ability to walk in future by having me to pause just for a moment.

I was 3-4 feet from a building corner when someone raced around it on a scooter. Amazing to me the complete lack of both self-preservation and respect for others. On the other hand, kids have always been stupid. We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.

> We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.

Automobiles for 16-year olds have been around for a very long time.

Anyways, it's quintessentially American to be talking about oversized landship SUVs and trucks killing people, only to have someone derail it into kvetching about kids and bicycles.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#284

Post by arjie »

saool wrote: post #75
Sayrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then surely Europe shares that trends and shows growth in pedestrian death. But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...

Anecdotally... Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.

One thing I was surprised by when driving in Coquitlam where I have cousins is that drivers there would start moving right after the green. This is strange to me because drivers in San Francisco will frequently be stationary for seconds afterwards. Looking at the rough statistics, it appears the RCMP police for smartphone usage in a stricter manner than SFPD does (or at least they write more citations) which makes me think that drivers in that region have adapted by not using their smartphones as much.

I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#285

Post by jmward01 »

giantg2 wrote: post #194
jmward01 wrote: post #113

I have long held that larger vehicles should have higher licensing requirements purely based on stats. We see it in the stats that large vehicles are disproportionately dangerous to other vehicles and people so licensing should catch up. We have motorcycle licenses, why don't we have SUV licenses? Similarly, the penalties and limits should be higher. BAC should be lower. Fines higher. Etc etc. You want to drive a big…

Licensing is mostly based vehicle operating characteristics. We already have large vehicle licenses like class B and A for heavy vehicles. Motorcycles have a separate license due to different operating concerns. If you're actually following the stats you will see that vehicle size only accounted for 10% of the increase. You would want to focus on the other 90% to make the biggest difference. And using that logic, you…

- Nobody is asking you to pay for others' decisions (unless we want to go down the rabbit hole of insurance, for which sports cars and high priced electrics are costing all drivers more). Nor is a large vehicle an infringement on anyone's right to life (someone's recklessness could be).

Large vehicles increase the risk of death for other people. The article was about pedestrians but the stats are clear about collisions with these vehicles, same size = same death rate. Small vs large = major increased risk. The argument that ownership of these vehicles doesn't infringe on my right to life or have costs to the public as a whole is ridiculous when the stats show clearly the impact. I'll even branch out to true monetary and other costs, if we extend further these vehicles have secondary impacts due to the resources they consume. Parking lots and roads are bigger making cities worse. Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in. And, yes, they kill more people. The decision to own a big vehicle like this and drive it around everywhere has direct and major negative impacts on me at multiple levels. So, yes, I am tired of paying for other peoples decisions and just accepting it.

I will agree that in general professionalism on the road should be higher. In general we need to take driving more seriously. It kills tens of thousands each year and has a tragic impact on younger driver stats. These large vehicles though clearly represent a significant fraction and just because there are other areas that could help it doesn't mean we should ignore this one.

When you look around at people in the US there is a strong chance that most of them know personally someone that has died in a car accident or has a friend that knew someone that died. Almost universally everyone knows multiple others that have been in significant accidents or themselves been in major accidents. Just last week my cousin was struck when crossing a street (luckily just a bit banged up but mostly fine). If we can reduce deaths on the road or pedestrian deaths significantly by licensing, even if it just did it by minimizing the number of these vehicles since the bar was higher, I'd take the win.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#286

Post by warmwaffles »

dlcarrier wrote: post #24
adamsb6 wrote: post #8

No mention of CAFE standards? How can you write this article without mentioning the policy that incentivizes larger vehicles?

I'm excited that EVs get to avoid CAFE standards, so we get to have small vehicles again. Even though legacy domestic car manufacturers aren't going to be involved, as they practically wrote the CAFE standards that eliminated small vehicles, and there's bipartisan support to tariff EV imports out of existence, there's still enough market demand for multiple domestic startups.

CAFE isn't all they have to deal with. NTSB has stricter safety requirements now and we will probably not have small vehicles again. I just want a damn Hilux.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#288

Post by throw4847285 »

macintux wrote: post #214
dualvariable wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, now do the times when some reckless driver nearly got you killed...

I don't disagree cars are more dangerous. But I can manage to be concerned about two things simultaneously.

But this post is about SUVs and somehow the biggest thread is about the danger of ebikes and scooters. It sure does make you think...

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#289

Post by whall6 »

I believe that as self-driving cars become more ubiquitous, these deaths (and other traffic-related deaths) will decrease. I was driving on a 4 lane road at 5 in the morning and all of a sudden my Tesla model 3 slams on its brakes, missing a deer that jumped across the road by ~2 feet. Its path was completely perpendicular to the road and I couldn't see it until a few seconds after my car started braking.

Imagine a future when a much larger proportion of drivers have 360 degree vision with no blind spots, infinitesimally small reaction times and a human failsafe in the driver seat.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#290

Post by wak90 »

simplyluke wrote: post #262

The problem is that other countries have seen nearly identical trends in vehicle market share trending towards larger vehicles and have seen sustained declines in pedestrian fatalities. John Burn-Murdoch went deep on this in the FT a couple of years ago (archive link at bottom). > Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or…

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