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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

#141

Post by trollbridge »

swarnie wrote: post #120
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...

Our cars are getting pretty big too. A BMW X5 is only slightly narrower than an F150, a range rover vogue only another inch off that. All fun and games with road infrastructure built for 108s and clios.....

My 08 X5 is bigger than my 01 F150. Heavier, too. Also requires premium fuel.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#142

Post by cucumber3732842 »

epistasis wrote: post #96
TulliusCicero wrote: post #59

WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly). The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those ride…

I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable. I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell. Same thing happens on NextDoor, a few kids hangi…

>I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.

It's kind of a hilarious yardstick for societal decline if you think about it.

70yr ago the boomers were drunk crashing sports cars so frequently that laws got passed.

Now late teenagers can barely afford an e-bike and mostly aren't causing problem, but laws still get passed, by the literal same cohort who were drunk crashing muscle cars back in the day.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#143

Post by giantg2 »

epistasis wrote: post #100
unixuser7104 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you react if told you could no longer drive your primary mode of transportation?

How would you react if told that your primary mode of transportation is causing a big increase in deaths? Isn't that a more relevant question?

"How would you react if told that your primary mode of transportation is causing a big increase in deaths?"

I'd ask to see the data since TFA shows only a 7.5% increase due to size. The rest of the 75% increase is due to other factors.

Edit: why disagee, is my data wrong?

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#144

Post by wat10000 »

drnick1 wrote: post #106
californical wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years. So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design. Building society in a way t…

> Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people It's not poor planning, it's what Americans want. Americans, by and large, do not want to live in dense neighborhoods or tiny homes like in many parts of Europe. You get that in places like NYC and quality of life in those places is atrocious.

Yes, that's why people pay the ridiculous cost of living to live in NYC, because the quality of life is atrocious.

At least around where I live (DC suburbs), every dense neighborhood becomes tremendously popular. The limit is that planners are very reluctant to allow them to be built. No problem getting permission to build an 8,000sqft house on a 1/4th acre lot though.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#145

Post by lowbloodsugar »

epistasis wrote: post #96
TulliusCicero wrote: post #59

WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly). The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those ride…

I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable. I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell. Same thing happens on NextDoor, a few kids hangi…

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.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#146

Post by sottol »

mc32 wrote: post #52

At the same time avoidance systems have become much better on those large new cars… so would it have even worse had collision avoidance not come into being? Also interesting that often people tend to imagine F-150s, Silverados ,etc., but if you see what people drive they are large Bentzs, Toyotas and of course Suburbans and F-150s. But everyone is building them not just American manufacturers.

Hard to find reliable data, but could only find (shared) data for 2022 for large SUVs - whatabout doesn't quite cut it imo, feel free to look into midsize SUVs but imo the really large ones are more problematic:

Ford Expedetion: 81,988 in 2021, 71,648 in 2022

Mercedes GLS: 24,482 in 2021, 12,395 in 2022

Chevy Tahoe: 106,030 2021, 109,032 2022

Chevy Suburban: 48,214 2021, 52,459 2022

Dodge Durango: 65,935 2021, 58,627 2022

GMC Yukon: 84,242 2021, 80,731 2022

Nissan Armada: 22,814 2021, 17,551 2022

Toyota Sequoia: 8,070 2021, 7,066 2022 (but about 25,000 after refresh in 2023)

* Ford F-150 [2] *: 726,004 2021, 683,633 in 2022.

The Large SUVs are all linked here: https://carfigures.com/us-market-segment/large-suvs

I'm sure the mix is different and skews a lot more Japanese for mid-size (which are probably also dangerous), but these large SUVs and trucks with huge hoods and no rear visibility are getting quite problematic [1]. The front blind zones are pretty ridiculous, to the point that people advocate for front cameras: https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0?si=o0uvSEmKZrn2gHSN&t=205 (with timestamp).

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar... [2] https://carfigures.com/us-market-brand/ford/f-series

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#147

Post by dylan604 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #59

WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly). The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those ride…

SUVs have the power of bigAuto behind them to ensure no "undue" legislation is made against them. There is no bigEbike, so legislation is free to be made so that those legislators can then pat themselves on their back and have action they can point to being pro-safety.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#149

Post by rayiner »

Data shows that introduction of iPhones in 2007 is a better explanation for the increase in pedestrian deaths than heavier trucks and SUVs: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ubbfrv/oc... (All the credit for this analysis goes to the reddit user, I’m just summarizing.)

Trucks and SUVs have been getting heavier consistently since 1980 while pedestrian deaths consistently decreased from 1980 to 2009. Truck sizes went up much more from 1980 to 2009 than from 2009 to present. But pedestrian deaths dropped almost in half from 1980 to 2009.

The NYT study on which this article is based acknowledges that pedestrian deaths dropped in half from 1980 to 2009, but then does nothing with this information.

Re: The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

#150

Post by kev009 »

To make a stronger case of their graphic "you go under vs over" you'd only need to sample coroner reports and find evidence of crushing, which shouldn't be that hard given the sample size. This seems a bit correlation != causation pushing hard into p-hacking given the bounds from the 1980 data long before the hood-height hypothesis could carry and other obvious hypothesis like smart phone adoption curve.
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