Between EV's that are much, much heavier than ICE cars and SUVs/Trucks that are much larger than they need to be, vehicles themselves, despite having more safety features than ever, are also better at killing that they've been at a long time too.
We really need to get serious about improving our transportation infrastructure.
Better yet, we really need to consider urbanization. That way everything you need is right there by your own two feet. No need for any extra special transportation at all.
It seems people have a burning desire to live the rural lifestyle, though, even in so-called cities. I'm not sure we can actually overcome that pressure.
I just want like... to not be stacked like a sardine for $3500/mo. I would gladly take a rural lifestyle if I could find a job that would support it.
That being said, to be clear, I don't think we need to make driving illegal or whatever. I think a TON of people would happily not be saddled with the expense of owning a car or the task of driving if there were reasonable alternatives on offer, which in the few pockets of the US that actually have decent mass transit, is broadly the case.
Being heavy is actually a safety feature of sort (but just for the people inside the car, it increases overall fatality).
Yes, these are the rural areas of which we speak. Everything gets spread out and then you're stuck travelling long distances to do anything, just like those who live in actual rural areas. There is no question that transportation is necessary in a rural area.
A proper urban environment, however, puts everything right there in a short distance. No need to ever travel beyond where your feet can take you. That's the whole reason for living so close to other people.
But it's clear that people want to live in (or pretend to live in) rural areas. It seems to be in our nature. As such, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the way things are. Hence the ill-conceived cries for better transportation to maintain the rural way of life instead of actually embracing urbanity.
They're not a great solution to transportation at scale, but they're pretty good at small volume point to point traffic.
There's not enough people going my way on most of my trips to make transportation at scale worthwhile. Ferries work well for part of many of my trips, but I can take a car on the ferry to deal with the lack of scale on either side.
I could sometimes take a bus to the ferry, walk to light rail and take light rail to the airport. But the bus only runs during commute times, so that impacts viable flight times, and the walk to the light rail got pretty sketchy in the past several years and light rail itself can be sketchy too.
Most of my cars run fine any time of day, although peak traffic is annoying, and I'm dealing with lighting issues on one so I can't take it out unless I know I'll be home before dusk.
And like, same. That's also me.
But the problem is the actual costs of that style of home are incredibly, heavily subsidized by the cities they surround and indeed even the rural areas they border, because suburbs are just... a bad goddamn way to house people. They're incredibly inefficient, basically require your own personal car, require the most infrastructure build-out for the smallest population, require the largest footprint of services over the largest area to serve the smallest number of people, etc. etc.
And like, I don't think it's unreasonable to say if you want to live this way, that's fine, but then you need to actually pay for it. Your property taxes need to reflect how much it actually costs to serve your property, to build the huge number of roads needed to access it, to maintain those roads, to maintain the electrical grids, to maintain the water and sewage services, to bus kids to schools, etc. etc. etc.
And yeah that's going to make suburbs WAY less appealing because they're going to be fucking expensive but like, the alternative is, again, everyone wanting that, and not paying for it. The dense urban centers they surround absolutely hemorrhage money supporting the suburbs around them.
Can't wait for displays on pillars, to make them appear transparent.
If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
1. Time. For example, my commute is 25 minutes, but 2 hours ride and three mile walk by public transport.
2. Safety, intimately tied to the homeless problem.
3. Cleanliness. In my experience, related to #2, and the fact that government institutions are incapable of caring about user experience, because they get funding regardless. Matted, stained fabric seat cushions, and dried whatever caked on the floor.
There's nothing better or remotely alluring about public transportation for the vast majority of people (as shown by gridlock traffic).
Back in the day, before cars were widespread, everything had to be close by.
You don't even have to sacrifice the backyard for that, you can have a city layout that puts the houses themselves fairly close to each other, and the yards can radiate outwards. Then you connect each cluster's main street with the other ones, but unlike suburbs, you make each "subdivision" mixed-use and you allow public transit , pedestrians and cyclists to cut across subdivisions for easy access everywhere.
If anything, small towns should be urbanism done right, because they don't (shouldn't?) have the money for sprawl and they don't have all the pressures for increasing density a lot, that big cities have.
Nah. Many cities long predate the car. They absolutely were designed in the same way they are still found now, aside from what are now roads were squares for people to walk in. Return the road back to being a square and nobody would be able to recognize that there was a car era. But, so long as the people want to live a rural lifestyle, good luck…
As for safety, you’re orders of magnitude more likely to get into a car crash than have anything happen to you on the NYC subway. Yes, incidents happen but they’re dramatically inflated in the public consciousness.
Your objection (and most of the others I see) aren’t objections to the fundamental nature of public transit, rather they’re objections to shit public transit or to urban life in general (whole lotta city car parks that aren’t clean!). Which is entirely understandable. But there are plenty of examples of functional public transit serving millions of people in cities across the world. Those people aren’t all secretly wishing they were in a car.
There is no technical reason we can't have livable, quiet and spacious apartments, where multiple apartment buildings share a huge, enclosed backyard (almost park-like, even), a setup with tons of small shops, pharmacies, easy access to everything, etc.
Plus you can also have access to large parks, in a suburb you'd never have access to those, just your limited backyard.
But most places will never have that...
The data is really easy to get. I wish more people would avail themselves of it.
Tesla - autopilot that really isn't, gets fooled in many situations, driver lulled into not paying attention, can't react quickly enough when the computer bails, and ends up driving into a bridge abutment at 75mph.
Kia - cheap cars built to minimum safety standards driven by young people who aren't very experienced drivers.
Buick - cars driven by geriatrics whose declines in vision and reaction speed probably should have resulted in their licenses being revoked five years ago but who still insist on driving themselves.
It's just a little funny you think California is unique in this regard. Pretty much all of the US is extremely underdeveloped when it comes to public transportation. Hillbillies in the boonies have to drive a lot too.
Sure if I said public transport is strictly superior because I drive a car that breaks down constantly, you’d see the problems not cars, yeah?
However, most of us understand that films etc are made up stories told for entertainment where if we based our expectations of people solely on that information we'd be grossly mistaken.
There are plenty of people that have their lives severely tilted if not turned upside down from a single DUI. There are also people of means that get off with a much less interruption to their day. I'm guessing it is the same on your side of the pond as well.
However, most traffic fatalities do not come from direct collisions. They come from driver hitting immobile objects.
Smaller, lighter cars take less kinetic energy with them around corners, are easier to steer and avoid obstacles, and are more likely to stay upright when leaving the road.
A car should survive a rollover. But when you make them big & heavy, those pillars have to be big and thick and you get large blind spots.
And later in the study, “When two small cars collide the forces are equalized and both vehicles tend to hold up well. But if a compact hatchback and a full-size pickup truck try to occupy the same space at the same time, the smaller car always loses.”
You’re welcome.
EVs carry their weight lower to the ground. SUVs and pickup trucks are more top heavy. Passenger cars have a higher probability to rollover, but not that much greater than an EV.
A decade or so ago the Georgia Department of Transportation tried to do away with the trees between streets and sidewalks because of so many fatalities coming from collisions with trees. Clearing out an "automative recovery zone" as they called it likely would have saved lives of some people in vehicles but of course it would increase the danger to pedestrians, who might or might not be present at that moment. Lots of trade offs in these types of analysis and not all of them are always immediately obvious.
Indeed, people really under(over?)estimate how small a loss of attention has to be to become catastrophic.
I once wanted to know the name of a track that was playing while driving on the highway. I looked right to the stereo display and read it, that probably took a tenth of a second, but it happened right at the moment when something came into my lane and I had to veer off not to hit it, I did not hit it but also almost drove the car out of the road.
When you're distracted, even if you're looking straight ahead, coming back to reality, assessing the situation, reacting, ... takes at least a couple seconds and that's a lot of time in these scenarios.
I have to shift in my seat to crane around to see if there is oncoming traffic I have to give way to.
They're both 10+ year old cars.
My grandparents, and their parents and grandparents before them, all grew up on farms (as did the majority of Americans during that time).
No, everything did not have to be close by.
They certainly did appreciate cars when they became affordable though.
Urbanization decreases some costs and increases others.
I do agree infras and density is a better option. But lack of infra doesn’t justify to drive drunk.
Road departure fatalities are high because of head-on collisions, not because there is an epidemic of people crashing into trees along the side of the road. If you follow the links on the cited page, they clearly show that head-on crashes result in more fatalities than tree+utility pole crashes.
This is false. Your cited link (https://highways.dot.gov/safety/RwD) clearly demonstrates that head-on collisions cause more fatalities than tree+utility pole collisions combined.
They are wide enough that their horizontal angular width could be larger than the horizontal angular width of a pedestrian more than a couple or so meters away but due to their angle there is plenty of the pedestrian still visible.
I spent a while just sitting in a busy parking lot watching people go by and seeing how their visibility changed and I couldn't find any situation where I'd have trouble seeing a pedestrian unless they were far enough away that there was no chance I'd hit them even if I never saw them.
https://thedriven.io/2024/05/03/are-evs-really-much-heavier-...
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent
I don’t think “much, much” should be used when we are talking 10-15%. This will mislead people. There are outliers of course.
We have the tech for this, we could have literal multi-bike sheds/parking garages and all that's needed is 1 (ONE) water source with a hose inside. As I said, failure on the part of our species :-)
In my city there are actually a few public bike washing stations, so the game plan in this case would be just to bike that way before coming home.
In most of the world villages have at least a cluster of homes nearby, since having other humans close is super handy when shit hits the fan.
It takes until 85+ years old to match the accident frequency of the 16-25 years old cohort. Should we ban young adults from driving?
The reality is that the drivers tests should be MUCH more stringent for all cohorts. The reality is also that not having a car in the US is a horrible handicap.
So, we are stuck in a very suboptimal spot until self-driving cars come online.