In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they’ve considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We’re so used to ICE cars that they’ve contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common. Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
Have you ever towed anything? Towing a trailer of that size and weight with a car like that, even if legal, is sketchy as fuck. Especially on hills or mountains. Where I am from its legal to take that picture, it’s not legal to get on the road. For good reason. A capable truck is much safer for that purpose, for everyone.
Doing that in the states would be illegal. Our payload and towing capacity are calculated differently which vastly drops the ammount you are legally allowed to carry. For example a jeep wrangler in Europe has a towing capacity of 5000Lb (2300Kg) but the same exact jeep in the states can only tow 3500Lb (1600kg)
Speeds are a per state basis however a good chunk of them do in fact have separate speed limits for vehicles with trailers. For example, California limits vehicles with three or more axles to 55 MPH (88kph).
Well some people do. I did for about 3 years, 4+ times a week (work and hobbies) but those are all gone now so looking to trade it in.
Not defending the absurd legislation that makes these keep getting bigger but there are a legit few people who actually regularly make full use of everything a full size offers.
I had a 2015 Nissan Frontier a with a tow capacity of about 6500 lbs. Bought a hitch receiver and towing wiring…and never installed it. Never towed a damned thing with that truck, even though I had it in my brain that surely I would at some point.
I like the motto of optimizing for the things I do more frequently, not for the edge cases. It’s up to you to decide where that line is. But maybe if the need for something larger is rare enough, you can find another option like renting something. I know renting is a pain, but if it’s rare you don’t have to do it all that much.
I live in a blue collar neighborhood. Big trucks owned by tradesmen/women everywhere. They absolutely use them frequently for what they’re capable of. Some of them have a second cars for groceries etc. but I’m glad there are not two cars for every truck because parking would be a bitch, and wouldn’t save much gas. If they were to rent for the “rare trip,” it would be the grocery store. No one is gonna rent for a grocery store trip when they can just happily drive their truck. The store is closer than the rental agency.
My dad’s VW Touareg could tow like 7700 lbs, which is more than a lot of trucks and easily enough to pull plenty of boats and campers. Even a compact SUV that can tow 3500 lbs can pull some boats and campers as long as people don’t buy giant oversized versions of those, too.
Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians
I think that’s more accurate. Vehicles big, small, tall, short, electric, or gas powered… makes no difference. There’s no greater risk to pedestrians than multi-ton moving vehicles.
EDIT: Guys, I didn’t mean one size car vs another doesn’t make a difference to the safety risk of pedestrians. It absolutely does. I mean that vehicles around pedestrians are a risk to pedestrians, regardless. This is #fuckcars, right? Stop all the down voting.
That’s actually surprising. I would think damage to lower extremities (delicate knee joints) would be far more severe from a concentrated impact area than a large area impact distributed over the entire body - when it occurs with a low speed impact.
Lower-fronted cars may cause more severe lower body injuries, but likely cause less severe injuries overall because the point of impact isn’t the torso (which is where humans keep a lot of their important bits and bobs).
I guess that’s the question. For low speed impacts the body is pretty well protected compared to the lower extremities because the energy of impact is more readily absorbed without serious damage.
There’s nuances here, but in principle you are incorrect. A car can be assumed to be infinitely heavier than a pedestrian. That means that every part of their body that’s in contact with the car will be accelerated to car speed. So it’s not that with a larger area the force is spread out, there’s actually just more places that have force applied. In other words, a low car will break your legs, a high car will break your legs and torso.
I tend to agree with you, of course, but I wonder if the large study were re-run with mass as the cause it would show similar distribution against the 6000lb+ vehicles. Mass tends to reduce braking deceleration and I didn’t see that as an explicit parameter. The “cause” is more salient to the second, smaller study which shows the “kneecap and hood carry” physics reduced hip and head injuries compated to the “body block and throw” mechanics of the flat- fronted cars.
Not to defend the Mack-Truck styling - I don’t disagree at all with the smaller impact study - I question the original implied hypothesis that the prevalence of large flat fronts as the cause of increase in deaths following the nadir in 2009. Of course anecdotes are not evidence, but I live in a college town and have since 2000 and the actions of pedestrians have changed substantially over the years. Specifically, the advent of smartphones has resulted in risky behavior both in pedestrians and behind the wheel. In 2009 less than 20% of phones were “smart.” Few of those were connected to the internet and fewer still to social media and entertainment services. Since then, the prevalence has increased to 80% and the consumption of media by orders of magnitude (measured by data usage and hours engaged). The original study implies the increase in pedestrian death solely due to nose geometry, but the quantity of impacts and conditions may not be as causative as the article seems to claim.
Not true, there’s a lot of differences between a car and a ute/suv. The high, square bonnet of a ute both makes it harder to see pedestrians and makes it much worse when they do hit. Cars are designed to hit people on the lower legs and toss them onto the bonnet, while utes hit people on the upper body and knock them over so they end up underneath a moving vehicle.
Cars aren’t great, but they’re so much better than utes and suvs.
You are correct, and I agree with you, but it’s still incorrect to say there is no difference when research shows there is. I understand what you’re trying to go for, but stating false information won’t help to convince people.
Even if the number of cars on the road remains the same, but utes and SUVs were swapped to lower vehicles (when possible), then there would still be positive outcomes of fewer pedestrian fatalities (even if the number of accidents remains the same) and reduced carbon emissions.
Removing most cars would reduce these even more, which I assume is your desired outcome, but even just reducing the proportion of utes and SUVs would have positive effects
but it’s still incorrect to say there is no difference when research shows there is.
Just to clarify, I said “no difference” in that “big, small, tall, short, electric, or gas powered” vehicles ALL cause severe injuries and death to pedestrians.
I’m not trying to argue that there’s no measurable difference in the amount of damage a larger vehicle can cause vs a smaller one, as I completely agree that there is.
My point is that they are all too dangerous to be around people, so a fatality by a car is “no different” than a fatality by an SUV.
I agree that a fatality by a car is no different to a fatality by an SUV. But I would say that there is a difference in accidents involving cars vs SUVs because the fatality rates differ, which is what is being discussed.
I might be misinterpreting your argument, but my understanding is that you’re saying because both cars and SUVs can cause fatalities, they are all too dangerous to be around people. But many things can cause fatalities, even bikes. We’ll never be able to reduce accidents entirely. But there’s a rate at which the fatalities become too high compared to the benefits. So that’s why I believe talking about the rates of fatalities is more useful than talking about whether something can cause a fatality at all. In this case, I think your acceptable rate for fatalities is at a level where all motorised vehicles clear the threshold, so that’s why you’re saying there’s no difference. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Replacing tall-fronted vehicles with short-fronted vehicles would reduce fatalities, which is why I believe there is a difference and we should try to do that where possible.
I get where you’re coming from, but without context your point comes across as more of a “all cars are dangerous therefore we shouldn’t bother regulating oversized SUVs” rather than the “Yes SUVs are particularly dangerous but let’s keep in mind that all cars are dangerous” that you were aiming for.
“all cars are dangerous therefore we shouldn’t bother regulating oversized SUVs” rather than the “Yes SUVs are particularly dangerous but let’s keep in mind that all cars are dangerous” that you were aiming for.
Oh, geeze. Yeah, I really didn’t intend for it to sound like the first part. I 1000% believe that larger vehicles NEED to be regulated, like yesterday.
A train fits that statement too. So do planes. And boats.
Trains run on tracks, and you can’t get hit by one unless you put yourself on those tracks.
I’m not aware of pedestrians and cyclists getting hit by planes. I’d be interested to hear about this trend.
Boats aren’t typically found on city streets, and pedestrian fatalities involving boats is how common?
City and suburban streets should have fewer cars on it, not more. These are pedestrian areas, and perhaps we can learn a thing or two about how to actually prevent pedestrian fatalities by looking at European city planning and design.
I just wanna say I appreciate people here making intelligent, good faith arguments on both sides without resorting to black or white thinking or getting too aggressive/ abusive.
Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don’t want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that’ll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn’t keep vagrants out.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won’t be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country’s population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
EVs also help with the brake disc “dust” since a lot of the braking is “regenerative breaking” done by the electric motor and does not use the brake pads at all. They require less maintenance, and have fewer parts in them, so fewer manufacturing materials. With very few exceptions, they are also smaller vehicles with more safety features which should result in fewer pedestrian casualties.
Obviously having no vehicles at all would be even better at solving these issues, but that’s not practical for our current reality. Maybe in 100 years.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone.
Which market is it that is producing smaller EVs? They’re all just regular cars turned EV, which means they’re heavier and you can’t feature-rich your way out of physics as per pedestrian safety
China has some great small, low and medium range electric cars. They’re not allowed to be sold in the U.S. due to protectionism, but they exist, and they’re cheap as hell compared to most EVs.
Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a midsize vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid. EVs’ more aggressive torque, which translates into faster acceleration, is another factor that creates more tire particulate mile for mile compared to similar internal combustion engine cars.
100 years is ambitious only if you want to remove all of the cars. There are plenty of milestones that can be attained fairly quickly :
Smaller cars. Less energy, materials, etc. Safer for other road users (you don’t get hit on your vital organs, better vision for the driver and everyone else since pedestrians can easily see over the car).
Less car use is available now, if we just empower the alternatives (make bike usage safe, make public transport good enough)
No more cars in cities. Bikes + trains mostly do the job, you can rent a car if you leave the city, or park it at the outskirts.
Even smaller cities used to be liveable without a car. This could be brought back, but that’s probably a tough hill to climb.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone
Autopilot is a pretty broad category. I like the autopilot on my car, which is nothing like elon musks self driving bullshit. It only turns on on supported highways and uses lidar instead of machine vision. All it does is maintain a following distance and follow the curve of the road. On Long drives it stops your foot and arms being fatigued and frees up a lot more mental space to look out for road hazards, it has a camera in the wheel that makes sure you have your eyes pointed at the road. I don’t see any risks for this sort of simple autopilot but it does have a lot of upside.
I’d definitely rather ride the train if it didn’t cost 200 dollars and come once a day, but until it gets better(and I’ve been writing a lot of letters to my officials) my self driving ev is the best alternative.
Not the same bed width or volume though. Not the same comfort level in the cab or crew capacity. Definitely not the same towing capacity. It’s silly to buy the bigger truck just to drive around town, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get one.
Are you going to tell me that insane difference in vehicle and engine size and weight is needed to gain that extra inch and a half of bed width? I think we can agree it is absolutelty not and I am pretty sure you can find a model of the sane truck with a larger/longer bed as well. Actually here it is, and it hauls way more than the “truck”, crazy bro they even made a version thats closed and higher so you can bring like 3x more stuff and it doesnt rain on your precious power tools or literally whatever you are carrying around.
Not the same comfort level in the cab or crew capacity.
Sorry what? Comfort level? You mean like ass-heating seats or cup holders? Werent we talking about a work vehicle? And even if not, what comfort feature is it not possible to implement in the smaller one? A toilet in the backseats? The crew capacity argument kinda “holds” in the very very specific and nieche scenario where you need to carry a very big team… but also not that many tools and materials? And I think we can agree 99,99% of the trips done in those don’t fall within this scenario.
Definitely not the same towing capacity.
14000 libs towing capacity, my brother in christ, do you need to tow a tank? Because if not, the only thing that number is towing is its marketing
It’s silly to buy the bigger truck just to drive around town, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get one.
And that’s kind of what this entire community is advocating for; I don’t think no one cares if a person that actually needs a worktruck buys the silly type of truck for actual work (even though this posts wants to say that for A LOT of those cases there might be a financially and efficiency-wise better alternative). What’s stupid is that roads in some countries around the world are filled with them and I assure you 99% of them are used for the 1% they are advertised for.
Wall of text, forgot to say that they also have shitty visibility, while the second type one is great
I’m glad you said this. This truck comparison I’ve seen going around is getting tiresome. If someone’s only measure of a work vehicle is bed length, I suggest they widen their scope.
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