I know, you’re shocked right?
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What? Really? We just tell Congress, surely more data will have them regulate car size immediately. /s with a sigh.
When a certain popular president and congress passed the bail-out of the domestic vehicle industry, written by the same in 2008 that allowed such vehicles to be more profitable then a smaller cars, he was awarded a noble prize and reelected in a landslide.
It is misleading to attribute too much credit to a single individual, even a president. There was a significant clash of social/political forces when Obama was in office. Off the top of my head I can think of the following major forces: War in Iraq & Afghanistan, Great Recession & Occupy, DREAMers, ACA, Gay marriage, Environmentalism / Inconvenient Truth, Global outsourcing & job loss, Tea Party & the rise of militant christian nationalism. That’s the landscape in which progressive policy ambitions were compromised to death to avoid total gridlock.
It’s also worth giving credit where it is due: those auto safety and emissions regulations achieved their goal… for regular cars. Unfortunately, Republicans insisted on exceptions for body-on-frame vehicles (trucks, vans, SUVs). In the years since, those types of vehicles have steadily become the most common in the US, because they are the most profitable for the auto industry.
Would cattle scoop style front ends save lives? The point would need to be crumply plastic for auto collisions, but i wonder if designing for deflection would legitimately benefit pedestrian collision survivability.
Man people really will jump through hoops to make it possible to change nothing about the design of cities and pedestrain safety. Even these massive trucks could be safer if the roads were better designed to minimizse pedestrian and car conflicts, but those designs often slow cars down so we will never see it in North America.
Also a far better option than a cattle scoop would be downward angled hoods. It would provide a similar effect but also provide better visibility which could help reduce collisions with pedestrians.
Vehicle design prioritizing pedestrian survivability is beneficial regardless of urban design, though admittedly an optimal design will depend on median speed of the vehicle.in pedestrian areas.
Return to retro 1940s rounded truck hoods is honestly an inevitable design shift at some point, as fashion always cycles, but the aerodynamics and fuel efficiency standards are against it.
A couple of people that drive massive vehicles they don’t need like Escalades have told me (former practicing psychologist) over the years that they know they are bad drivers, but they want to drive a tank so they can walk away from whatever accidents they know they’ll cause.
Because practicing and improving their driving skills is apparently not on the table. The lack of empathy is unsettling. They don’t care who they kill, they just don’t want to be inconvenienced.
Usually the affluent spouse type.
I think this shows some of the bigger issues in car centric design. Even if you don’t like driving, aren’t good at it, or aren’t comfortable with it, you often have to do it anyway beceause there are no viable alternatives.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The trend was all too apparent at the last auto show we went to—at Chicago in 2020, I felt physically threatened just standing next to some of the products on display by GMC and its competitors.
Intuitively, the supersized hood heights on these pickups seem more dangerous to vulnerable road users, but now there’s hard data to support that.
For decades, urban planners have prioritized car traffic above everything else, and our built environment favors speeding vehicles at the cost of people trying to cross roads or cycle.
Tyndall’s data set started with 13,783 single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crashes, then filtered out those instances where there was no VIN recorded, except if the report included make and model.
He also removed entries that did not record other important variables, such as vehicle speed, leaving a sample size of 3,375 crashes.
When examined by vehicle type, vans proved to be the least dangerous to pedestrians, with a 6.6 percent chance of death.
The original article contains 640 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
