I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs?
It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful.
The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution is wider roads.
An incredible policy and prioritization failure. That said, it would take very little work and money to fix the problems. Road diets (as pointed out by the article) and tactical infrastructure is cheap and the solutions are well known. The spend will be a drop in the bucket compared to most other budgets.
We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size.
There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.
Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).
> There's no reason a 1/2 ton pickup should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150
It is funny that we still call trucks like the F150, Ram 1500, Silverado 1500, etc as 1/2 ton pickups. Even though they are still officially categorized like that by all the manufacturers, Edmunds, Motortrend, KBB, and so on, they are actually essentially 1 ton pickups. Our "light-duty pickups" (which is their official classification) are actually 1 ton pickups.
The whole tonnage designation refers to the payload capacity of the truck (people and gear in the bed for example). Traditionally a 1/2 ton pickup could carry 1,000 lbs (half a ton roughly). This was the light-duty, "everyman's pickup".
But take the 2023, F-150. It has a payload capacity of ~2,200lbs on all trims above Lariat. And just shy (~1,800-1,900 lbs) on lower trims. These are literally 1 ton pickups being sold as 'light duty' 1/2 ton pickups. They are way more power than the average person needs, yet they are the best selling vehicles in america. When I look at my neighbords, of the 18 houses on my street, there are 14 pickups (3 of which are 3/4 ton pickups, the rest are 1/2 ton). There is one guy that carries a small trailer a few times each summer with a dirt bike in the back. The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.
Not only are they more dangerous to pedestrians, and are worse for the environment, but they also clutter up the streets because they often don't fit in garages,so more and more people park on the street.
For fun, I looked up the current payload of the Ford Ranger, which is Ford's
1/4 ton pickup. And it clocks in at 3/4 of a ton. So again, we have moved up two notches in truck size.
The other day, I saw a 1990s Chevy S-10 that had been raised to the height of a modern step-up pickup. It looked ridiculous. Similarly I was on my bike at a red-light looking to turn right with a (stock height) late-model F-150 next to me going straight. I couldn't see over its hood.
>There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Sure there is. Those 90's pickup trucks were absolute death traps. Bench seating, no airbags, drum brakes, no ABS, no crunch zones. There are very good reasons that cars have become much heavier in the last 30 years.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo
240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
The 240 was a good car for its time, but its time was the late 70s. A 2023 Camry hybrid is rated at 53 MPG highway and is much safer for everyone involved. When the 240 was sold you could still buy a new car where you were unlikely to survive a 35 mph head on crash into a wall (e.g. crashing into something roughly the same weight).
Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.
There was a brief and futile anti-SUV movement in the 90s. Manufacturers generally got much better about size and safety compared to what they were, but they still sell based primarily on looks. For anyone who actually needs all that interior space, you're always better off with a minivan. And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan. I've got a wife and two kids we can fit ourselves and enough junk for a 4-day vacation in a compact pretty easily (which I rent as needed because I live in a walkable city).
mpg wouldn't be as bad as it is if they didn't allow the giant light truck loophole -- regulating on weight would have the same problems if they excepted a class of vehicles that everyone would then flock to
I don't know the details but apparently some concession was made to big auto on mpg that meant there was a loophole and bigger heavier trucks didn't count against your mpg targets as much. That, not a focus on mpg, is the cause.
In many areas, it would take a ton of work in the effort of making destinations closer to each other. Huge parking lots, setbacks, wide roads, and detached houses on their own quarter, or even eighth, of an acre lot make it so the choice between walking/bicycling and using a personal car is not much of a choice.
Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.
Sure, turning Houston into Madrid would be very hard. But this is one of the most incrementally solvable problems I've ever seen. There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better.
Yes, some areas in particular the big box developments are almost a lost cause. What needs to happen to those first is large, dense development within the plazas. Build residential on top of the mall, remove parking lots (or move them underground), and densify first. Once you move that needle, you can focus on active transport options.
The type of development I describe is happening (two examples in my Canadian city). Ultimately the evolution of a poorly built model.
I think it's difficult to make cities more dense if viewed as just strictly taking the current cities and trying to condense them, but that also seems like the less productive way to do it
First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput
The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing
As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes
It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.
The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is
I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.
No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
I think it depends on where you are, but useful public transit is very possible in most places. Low frequency is the result of poor planning, not a requirement of public transit.
Fixing bad infrastructure takes time, but you don't even need that to reduce pedestrian deaths. If only people had smaller vehicles the rate of survival would go way up.
I could pretty easily imagine a sliding vehicle tax scale where safer, more practical sub-compacts and minivans are subsidized by the mega-lifted land yacht SUVs and pickups. Sure it doesn't fix the design problems of cities, but it at least means the vehicles that are traversing them aren't as likely to kill and maim people while we sort out the other problems.
As true as that is, I'd be happy just with attention being paid to sidewalks and protected bike paths. I live in an area with a grocery store that is well within biking distance. But it is on the other side of a four lane road and there's no safe way to get a bike across it. In other parts of the state, there are housing developments within walking distance of grocery stores, but no sidewalks.
It isn't uncommon to see people get in their car to go to the mail kiosk 2 blocks away, in part because of the lack of sidewalks.
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
There is so much land available in the form of parking lots, and so much unmet housing demand, that you could reasonably infill your standard mall or big box lot if zoning allows.
A lot of malls have been doing this since retail has been in free fall for quite some time.
Lot size isn't really the issue, it's having big swathes of land zoned all-residential or all-commercial. We live in a small college town with mostly half- to one-acre lots outside of the downtown core, but we walk and bike everywhere most of the year because it's an actual town laid out before cars, with pockets of not-housing spread out among houses, and no wastelands of giant retail parking lots.
I would really like to get more infill development and smaller lots, personally, but just for the sake of preserving open space. It's easy to walk and bike in actual cities and towns already. Suburbs are the issue, because they are entirely planned around cars.
The reason why drivers are increasingly angry where I live is because there is no enforcement of traffic laws at all. Red lights are run nonstop, drivers use bicycle lanes as travel lanes, etc. I watched someone just reverse down a road opposite the direction of travel yesterday. Like it was no big deal.
This has been my experience, in my area people have even found ways around the newly installed red light cameras, they just remove their license plate. Usually you would get hit with a pretty big ticket for that but the police are not enforcing any sort of traffic laws and relying on cameras to do the enforcing.
Good luck making policy changes against the wishes of a majority population that's frustrated and angry as it is. We are in deep, deep trouble. Not only are we not removing lanes and giving space back to people, we're still adding lane miles in every city in America. Even my "urbanist" home town of Portland Oregon is about to spend billions to add a few dozen lane miles to an urban freeway that already destroys the entire East bank of our waterfront and a couple historic neighborhoods, and is used mostly by people and companies that don't live here.
Shame we can't instead invest billions into making public transit, especially the max lines running from the suburbs into downtown, far more efficient as a practical solution for commuters. The Esplanade is one of my favorite bike routes in the city, second only to the Springwater corridor. I love cruising up the East side and back on the West side while looking out over the Willamette.
I'm going to be sad if that route gets all fucked up, and all just to add a few lanes that simply induce more demand and do nothing to solve traffic problems in the long run. I hate to be that guy, but its inescapable.. cars (as currently conceived and implemented) are a blight on humanity.
My suburb does as much as it can to make itself walkable. There are crossings and sidewalks everywhere, but it's still a low density suburb so it doesn't make much sense to walk almost anywhere (my kid does walk to school as it happens to be close, but that's it). So while they are trying to address this problem, very few people actually walk.
But all of this said, I want low density. Having lived many years in a high density ant colony (aka "walkable city"), I want nothing to do with that. Keep your high rises to yourself. I think that high density living is inhuman. I respect your opinion, but we don't think alike. And I promise to not mess with your lifestyle if you don't mess with mine, we can all live together many miles apart.
I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go. I exercise every morning by walking around for 45 min in my cookie cutter neighborhood; the air is pure and it's a joy to walk around trees, ducks and birds instead of buses, cabs, people sneezing etc.
Curious, have you considered the in-between here? Consider medium-density European cities, which still have massively higher density suburbs, but rarely the density -- combined employment and population densities -- of the urban core of most American cities.
I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic.
For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
The whole high rise situation in almost every U.S. city you described (i.e. small central cluster of high-rises) is more a result of insane zoning policies, not traffic safety. High density and peace and quiet really aren’t mutually exclusive, although admittedly 99% of towns and suburbs in the U.S. fail to build such places, largely, in fact, because of traffic engineering.
For example, I lived in a town of around 100k in the Netherlands called Delft for a while - high density, walkable, and far quieter than the two suburbs I lived in the United States.
Not saying the situation will ever change here. But it is possible.
It is unrealistic to expect this lifestyle in the long term. The era of the car will come to an end, likely in the next few decades. The personal car is a profligate use of materials and energy. We can afford them at the moment only thanks to market distortion and a massive one shot energy surfeit. When the real costs are priced in, very few people will be willing or able to pay. Had the real costs been priced in from the beginning, we might not have designed an entire way of life around them.
Your cookie cutter neighborhood (mine too) depends on circumstances which are unlikely to last. I say this with the utmost respect, and as an SUV owner!
That's fine, but lower density requires lower level of service: narrower roads, some gravel, etc.
> I'm willing to pay for these roads
I'm not saying that it's impossible that you wpuld want to spend that much, but you couldn't possibly know if you live in the US, because you've never paid for it.
I don't mean to suggest that you're in the wrong for taking resources someone has dangled in front of you for something that looks nice; the malpractice lies with the people who designed and perpetuate those systems. But those systems are sucking rural places dry and preventing the creation of new urban places.
There is a middle ground; I live in a detached, standalone house in small east coast city, and I am within a 10 minute walk to a really good coffee shop/bakery, a pharmacy, small public library, a few restaurants, small boutique kitchenware and fabric/clothing shops, etc. I'm also a couple of blocks away from a bus stop that can take me to the train station.
The neighborhood is dense, but there are no high-rises, and I actually know my neighbors.
There is a middle ground. Walkable cities are not a cluster of high rises and this is mostly the result of poor zoning (we lack the appropriate "missing middle")
Which is laughable because for most of human history, we've lived extremely close to each other. Cavemen didn't have acre plots separate from other cavemen.
>I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go
Your lifestyle requires a massive subsidy from the federal government, so you aren't really willing to pay for it. Suburbs generally require other places around them to also have massive parking lots and roads to accommodate the car lifestyle. If suburbanites just stayed in their bland community, it'd be fine, you all want to drive really fast through other people's communities and you clog up our roads.
Assuming https://ourworldindata.org/land-use is reliable data, the world currently has about 1.5 million km^2 of built-up land usable for human dwelling. If we further assume it isn't a viable option to just remove even more of the land currently in use for things like farming, rainforests, and polar ice caps and what not, if we try to divide that land evenly among 8 billion humans, we get roughly 187.5 m^2 per person.
The problem is that is all built-up land, including commercial and industrial use and the roads themselves, including whatever small amount of urban greenspace might exist like parks, including schools and courthouses and everything else we need to just run human society. If we conservatively estimate this takes up maybe half of built-up land use, then we're down to more like 90 m^2 per person.
Let's assume a family of four, so now you get 360 m^2 or about 3875 ft^2. According to https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/sold.html, the average lot size of a single-family house in the US has gone from 18760 ft^2 in 1978 to 13896 ft^2 in 2020. We're talking now something like a quarter of current lot sizes if we wanted everyone to live in a single-family home.
So, as it stands, sure, live how you want, but don't forget that your ability to live the way you want is predicated upon the vast majority of humans on the planet living in much higher density, which you apparently consider to be not living like a human at all, in spite of it being the condition most humans find themselves in.
>I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go.
Except you aren't, nearly all infrastructure that your using will need to be bailed out and paid for by the Federal Government because otherwise your taxes would need to at least double.
Yes they do now, in my State, until I think 30 or 40 years ago, pickups had to register as commercial and had to follow laws specific to them and pay more taxes. Some lows restricts commercial vehicles from many roads. I suspect it was a move by Reagan when he deregulated the trucking industry.
I think if a vehicle meet specific weight and size criteria, it needs to pay more and have restrictions. These new big pickups and SUVs fully meet that criteria.
>The majority of roads are too wide
Actually in my state it is the opposite. Most roads are way too narrow. When two large pickups are driving at each other, one needs to pull over.
In California, pickups are still registered as commercial vehicles. This comes as a surprise to some first-time truck buyers.
The new Rivian R1T is registered commercial and weighs over 3 tons, bringing further restrictions as to the places and times it can be driven or parked. Again, surprising some buyers.
In Washington DC, ridesharing has taken over. I think if someone truly correlated this, they'd find that having a bunch of untrained and self regulated rideshare drivers contributes greatly to these troubling statistics.
Cities are also flooding roads with inexperienced bike and scooter riders on faulty equipment in favor of the revenue it provides, cities also have not updated traffic light infrastructure since the 50s...
The biggest innovation to come to traffic control are simply speed cameras, which dramatically reduced police on streets. It's all be a chaotic mess and cities also lobby their policies online, hiring private companies to provide spin and brigade online on sites like reddit in favor of their failed policies.
DC years ago introduced a campaign that everyone should stop for pedestrians in crosswalks (green light or not) and that has empowered some to walk into streets even when they are not clear. Cities have also turned already congested traffic lanes now into bike lanes, while bicycle traffic is untaxed to fun the arrangement. The aforementioned change also completely removes parking which existed before, leaving driver to double park and dangerously block traffic. The combination of frustrated drivers and frustrated pedestrians is a toxic mix. Many cities and states have been reducing speed limits in the past years since the pandemic to increase their ability to give out citations, despite cars being safer. more efficient, and able to stop faster now than ever. The changes being made now contradict logic as the demand to be on time increases more and more, and the statistics are showing deaths are going up.
In my opinion, separating traffic by type would go a much farther way to encourage safety. Innovation should also be centered around a smarter traffic light system, on separating traffic lanes and routes, and and in better and more affordable parking arrangements in every city. It's not a complex problem, the problem is that decision makers are often high on individual bias and not routed in reason to conquer this issue. Perhaps the decision makers need to be look at more closely, and held accountable for their continual failure to bring the number of casualties downward.
I'm surprised you wouldn't always be required to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Vehicles going fast speeding in dense areas are a huge driver of pedestrian fatalities so reducing speed limits sounds great to me. I've heard that lowering the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph can actually increase average throughput in cities by calming traffic. Here in Massachusetts we're trying to make it legal to use automatic speed limit enforcement (cameras with license plate readers detecting speeding vehicles).
Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).
Barrier separated transport is great for cyclists (and pedestrians), but not if it means restricting cyclists to only riding in bicycle lanes. If you limited cyclists to only riding in places where they had dedicated pathways you'd vastly reduce the practicality of riding in any US city I've been to.
I personally feel much safer riding on streets when there are more cyclists around me. It feels like the motorists are more likely to keep an eye out and not do something careless.
We could also try and force automakers to make safer "light trucks", as they're currently much more dangerous than This article[1] suggests the rate of pedestrian fatalities by vehicle type is 50% higher for light trucks than for cars per mile driven. It's baffling that we allow such large and dangerously-designed vehicles on the road.
I watched a movie (I think from the 50s), and it was amazing to see people ambling casually through the streets, and cars driving slowly and carefully to avoid them as if streets were for people, and cars were the intruder. I'd love to recapture that aspect of the past.
This is a relatively easy fix. Remove zoning regulation and the market should build towards denser towns. It is outright illegal to build dense right now in most of the US. There are other ares that need to be fixed that all exacerbate the issue: The NHSTA recommends large wide roads for moving vehicles faster, CAFE standards makes cars heavier and larger since trucks / suvs don't have the same regulations, FHA loans require developments are built with curvy roads and not grids. We need laws that prioritize pedestrians and bikers, force cars to be smaller through regulation and taxes.
Is zoning regulation as a concept really the root cause, though? Houston famously has no zoning code and is fairly lax with land use generally (although it isn't completely the Wild West), and it isn't very dense. It seems like zoning could even be a key part of the solution, being a tool that could be used to mandate that new construction be more dense around mass transit hubs, for instance. There are lots of anti-density zoning regulations that should be reformed, it's true, but throwing the whole thing out seems like overkill to me.
How is that a solution? Downtown L.A., for example, is not "full." And if you "densify" what are now single-family neighborhoods, that single-family neighborhood will simply move to the next frontier. Then the oh-so-horrible reign of terror will continue there. How does that help?
Zoning allows people to choose what kind of neighborhood they want to live in. If I wanted density, I'd live downtown. Why should developers be allowed to just roam in and destroy the lifestyle that the people in the area selected?
I live in a small town with... not enough sidewalks. I try to walk my dog, but half the streets where I live, I have to walk on the street or else on people's lawns. I definitely walk a lot less because of it
Not really a systemic issue in this case, just a pet peeve
I understand the sentiment, but is it these assault vehicles at fault here? I tend to think that the real problem is distracted driving, since EVERYONE from the smallest Kia on the street to the biggest lifted truck seems to have trouble staying off their phones while driving.
How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I don't think it can explain this trend.
US cars seem to be a special case. Saw a Cadillac Escalade on European streets and it was so comically large. The driver looked like an ant. And I complain about SUVs here...
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
How many times are you going to copy and paste the same comment in replay to different parents? I see you do that a lot, and it doesn't seem productive.
I don't think analyzing this issue from the perspective of individual interactions is useful. Even in safe, walkable cities, some pedestrians will be reckless. Even in Phoenix AZ, some drivers will be courteous toward walkers.
All that disappears in the aggregate though, and we're left with the fact that the built environment is the main factor dictating how we interact on our streets. We build wide roads and build huge dangerous vehicles to go very fast on them. That's the issue.
Agreed. A pedestrian recently got themselves killed near my house by darting right into the rode in front of a driver who was going under 35 mph in a 35. Driver had no chance to avoid him. The pedestrian didn't even turn their head before being hit and was likely high or drunk (per the local business owner who was familiar with him).
Article ignores it, but looking at the source data you can see pedestrian deaths were flat, then a large spike in 2020 during Covid, and now we are at a new higher plateau. Cause is not a change in roads, or cars, or more SUVs. Covid/lockdowns changed the way people drive. Less civility, less police enforcement, more chaos. Driving is noticeably worse and more stressful than pre-Covid.
What happened in 2014 was Ferguson, followed by the Ferguson Report, and the initial stages of changes in enforcement. Then in 2020 we had Floyd and an even larger pullback.
Roads did not change. Phones had been around for years by 2016. SUVs had been gaining in popularity for literally decades. It's not dispositive, but the only thing that fits the timing perfectly are the changes in policing after 2014 and 2020.
Police in some cities have almost completely stopped doing traffic enforcement. San Francisco, for example, used to issue something like 12k citations per month. Now they issue just a couple hundred. The change started right after the Ferguson Report was released:
Other cities have done the same. Police didn't just back off. They practically stopped enforcement altogether. We're talking about 95% drops in enforcement in some places.
You are really cherry picking to come to that conclusion, but if citations correlates that strongly to less accidents that should be easy to show. It can not be the only thing though.
I was sort of curious about whether or not other non-pedestrian motor vehicle fatalities also increased and came across an interesting stat. It looks like overall passenger vehicle occupant fatalities have also increased [1] and, interestingly enough, some of this is probably a result of a lower rate of seat belt usage among those fatally injured [2]. All of this coinciding with Covid.
There’s a growing sense of anger in literally almost everyone I know.
Somewhere on the way, people have become more misanthropic, close-minded, and angry. I’m not sure why.
I think it is social media and the enshittification of all these services? Also, the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad may contribute to this? Regardless, more and more I see people living in a fantasy world where people both “suck immeasurably” and (strangely) have no freewill or agency and are just meat robots.
I think these two things together are really pernicious.
It's really easy to explain? If you are conservative you think the world is going upside down with people just allowed to say they are whatever and you think that trans people are all degenerates or stupid and need to shut up and go away. You likely think that the 2020 election was LITERALLY rigged, and you believe that someone was shot in a peaceful protest at the capitol building. You believe all democrats are molesting children regularly, that they killed Epstein and covered it up. You believe that caravans of gang members are driven across the border regularly, and that democrats want to allow them to just walk into the country, collect benefits without working, yet also steal all the jobs. There's a million more things you are mad about, and you think we pay too much attention to the problems of black people.
If you are progressive, you think the world is warming up and imminent horrors are on the horizon, you see a class structure designed to keep you poor, you will never own anything more expensive than a cup of coffee, you see your friends and loved ones being physically harmed by individuals, and structurally harmed by the state itself for the way they were born, for no clear reason. You see women quite literally dying because doctors cannot legally protect them from a dead fetus. A few rich people have strong say on basically everything that happens in your life, and they are all bitching and moaning that their life is so hard. Meanwhile, all your conservative relatives are screaming that this is a liberal hoax, basic science is a liberal hoax, trans people are a threat, and that democrats deserve death.
People are living in two entirely separate realities and it doesn't matter that only one is closer to actual reality if the people in the other just don't care.
The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".
The roads were wide open for 2+ years, people got used to driving very fast and not really paying attention to their surroundings because there wasn't much other traffic to start with. People started running red lights because not other traffic to wait on. You could drive recklessly without much risk. Now people are still driving recklessly but have a lot more cars and activity around them.
One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.
The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.
Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions.
I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.
It coincides with the general rise in anti-social behavior that happened during and after lockdowns.
There's definitely a lot of people reporting a change in driving attitudes. During covid, people went fucking nuts. There for a while, it was a source of local news articles.
I dont have an answer for why. Just it has. I live in a major city in the midwest and its wild how often I see people drive with zero regard for anyone else.
Running red lights and almost hitting someone, cutting people off, swerving in traffic erratically to be faster. Its honestly scary some days.
Edit: My point isn't to argue about all the studies listed, this is just why I think brain damage is a plausible reason for the population-wide decrease in car driving skill.
You have criminals getting out on low or no bond in higher numbers. You have serious issues with felony bond violations as well. You have reduced police enforcement. Your typical felon doesn’t car as much about traffic laws.
It has changed the population of drivers on the road. Wealthy, highly educated professionals are driving less because they work at home more. "Essential workers" are driving as much or more. They are biased toward poorer and less educated people, who are also as a population worse drivers with worse vehicles compared to the population staying at home. These shifts in driver population are more than enough to account for the change.
A proposal that I haven't seen discussed in other responses:
COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.
(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).
The rise in traffic deaths coincides with laws passed that allow drivers to kill pedestrians if they feel threatened by them. Both this, and the charged language used by politicians on this topic, will most likely play part in this increase. Social and political backing for your fear usually doesn't help reduce it.
Pedestrian deaths aren't evenly distributed, they concentrate among the elderly, disabled, and impoverished.
Our covid response forced us to make explicit some parts of our social agreement that were not usually stated outright before. Covid deaths also concentrated among exactly those groups.
We established outright that harms to these groups are an acceptable cost for convenience to the rest. It's not a large leap for people to apply this to their driving behavior, even unconsciously.
There is also the fact that covid isn't the only thing that happened in 2020. Since that summer's protests the police in my city have been on open but unacknowledged soft strike. They only take actions that are personally fulfilling to them individually, which certainly isn't traffic enforcement.
This is certainly true. The number of red light runners in the Bay Area has skyrocketed, but not only that, the number of people driving fast and running red lights has gone way up, too. It feels like chaos out there.
I have been seeing people drive the opposite way on a highway on the shoulder of the road to not sit in traffic. I have seen this many times in the past few years and never saw such flagrant dangerous selfish (in terms of no regards for societal laws) behavior before.
I have seen a car slow down and reverse in one of the inner lanes, because they missed the exit. This was at night in Milano. There was almost no traffic, we passed them from the innermost lane, but there were 2 more lanes to them to the right, all empty.
I'm pretty critical of police forces -- but my experience living in Charlotte NC for the past 8 years leads me to believe that police enforcement is at least a part of the equation.
We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.
I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.
Why? In San Francisco the number of traffic citations issued has fallen to essentially zero. The cops are on strike and no longer perceive any marginal benefit from doing their jobs. They get paid either way.
I personally don't think its "police enforcement" but I would wager a large % of deaths (at least in New Mexico, the state with the highest rate) are from panhandlers in the street. IIRC, they're trying to make new laws to prevent ppl from standing in the middle of the road.
I live in a subdivision full of young families with kids. I'm also a runner, an avid dog walker and someone who walks his kids to and from school every day. As someone out on foot on a daily basis I am constantly blown away by the amount of people speeding on residential streets and not stopping at stop signs. I don't get it! These are clearly people who live in these neighbourhoods yet they don't care enough about their own community to drive safely or responsibly.
If people aren't willing to at least drive carefully in their own neighbourhoods, imagine how they drive when they don't have to worry about running over their neighbours kids.
Stop signs basically dont work anywhere. If you want people to drive slowly, you have to build streets that make them do so.
If anyone is interested in this stuff, the youtube channel NotJustBikes talks a lot about this and related topics. Here's a short video on how "traffic calming" infrastructure gets drivers to slow down, and we all know that stop signs just dont.
The psychology of this seems easy to explain, too. Stop signs get folks into a routine of basically, "stop, see nothing is there to stop for, start moving." Do that enough times, and you accidentally move on to "start moving" from habit alone. Contrast that with things that have you slow down, where you will slow down every time from the same learned habit. Even if you accidentally move on and potentially hit something, you will have at least slowed considerably beforehand.
(Yes, you should also be coming to a full stop, but it is impressive how rapidly people will go through the motions of "stop, look, go" to the point that they don't realize they didn't finish any one step. Similar to talking, all told. In speech, most words blend together and you don't have meaningful stops between all words.)
As someone who lives in a pre-car suburb, I don't feel that at all.
Road design goes a long way towards that, and roads that _feel_ safe counter-intuitively make drivers behave in less safe ways, while most drivers (broad generalization) will behave more cautiously when the roads they drive feel unsafe. The fact that your subdivision is statistically likely top have wide roads with plenty of visibility, few (if any) cars parked on the street, and big setbacks means drivers feel more comfortable with going 30+ MPH in a residential zone. On the other hand, my narrow street with cars parked on both sides and only about two feet of clearance on each side tends to make most drivers only go 20-25 MPH (although there's still daredevil scofflaws).
Edit: and the city is improving it -- my street is scheduled to get curb extensions, which should both make it slightly safer for drivers (visibility into intersections will be improved) and for pedestrians (the road will be further narrowed at intersections).
I think the rise of delivery of all sorts of things (food, goods) has people who don't live in our neighborhoods doing a lot of this fast, stop-sign-running behavior. When I walk near dinner time I notice a lot more of the behavior.
Delivery can be especially bad because the drivers have a direct incentive to dash from customer to customer. Maximizing their revenue takes precedence ūber (over) driving safely. This is nothing new. Dominos had to cancel their 30 min or its free guarantee because drivers were running red lights.
Also a runner here - over the years I've lived in a handful of towns, and the wealthier the town, the more likely people are to just totally blow stop signs without checking. (And they get mad if they almost hit you)
As a cyclist in France and Belgium, I'd say it's again the extremes.
Wealthy and poor neighborhoods are the dangerous ones where drivers are absolute dangers.
And to me the reason is simple : there's not much law enforcement there.
The rich ones because they are friends with the mayor/police chief so they have orders to not bother the locals.
The poor ones because not sending police there is the easiest way to keep the bad guys there. At least they are not doing their stuff elsewhere.
Many people told me so and I didn't wanted to believe them because it was too simple.
But bad experience after bad experience made me come to the same conclusion : where there's no law enforcement, more and more people are breaking the law, no matter the consequences for their peers.
same re: runner+kids. It's insane. I watch people blatantly blow through red lights on a daily basis. Someone once grabbed my mother-in-law and pulled her back because she walked when the signal said walk and she would have been hit.
Until now I didn't really have any data, just my eyes, and my brain, and I knew things weren't trending well.
Same. I live within a mile of an elementary school and giant park that I was excited to allow my kids to roam to and to run to myself. There's 300m of 35mph road and a network of 25mph residential streets. The latter feel pretty safe, the 35mph section, though, sees people going 55mph while staring at their phones on a regular basis.
I bike to and from work most days, decked out in fluorescent colors and reflectors and blinky lights that should make a negligent vehicular homicide civil suit a slam-dunk for my wife, plus an excellent set of life insurance policies if that doesn't work.
To my shame, I have a large old SUV that I use on days I can't bike, but it brings me a perverse joy to drive at or just under the actual speed limit on my road and watch the traffic pile up behind me.
There's also a social media element. There are many accounts who post close calls along with questions like "who was in the wrong?"
The answers you see are sometimes jaw-dropping[1] and I suspect there's an element of "the blind leading the blind" as people assume some of this is correct.
[1] For example someone posted a close call where a truck turning left nearly hit a pedestrian crossing in the crosswalk and the top comments claimed that it was the pedestrian's fault because the red hand was flashing and she should not be in the crosswalk.
Edit: There are also sooo many incidents of psychotic road rage posted on social media that it makes you lose faith in humanity. But it's hard to tell if this is an uptick in incidents or an uptick in visibility.
One thing my parents taught me even in the '70s was that a red light or stop sign isn't going to make anyone stop. You never step into a crosswalk just because the light says it's OK.
Transition to trail running if you can. Ive stopped taking chances with road running because of the insane drivers. Same with biking. Added benefits of being in nature and getting off pavement helps your joints a bit.
Key phrase: if you can. I'm a runner too, and I run year 'round in a suburb that has all of the problems others here have mentioned. It is possible, and I've even written guides on how to do it safely. It just takes more effort. In particular, wearing headphones is even less advisable in winter than it is the rest of the year. You need to hear when vehicles are approaching, even if they're EVs and all you're getting is the tire/wind noise. It's certainly not for everyone.
For those who don't want to make the effort, I recommend cross-country skiing or snowshoes. Work with what you have.
If you are a small woman and there are cougars in your area, trail running is also dangerous. You look like prey and trigger the hunting instinct. Pepper spray won't save you either, because they attack your neck from the rear. You're already dead before you are reaching for the spray!
Source: the signs outside Northern California open spaces (and the newspaper)
+1. my favorite loops both have some streets though including ones without sidewalks. I run against traffic and it's basically a game of "does that driver see me" for decent stretches.
That probably varies a lot by region and neighborhood. My neighbors and I don't usually stop at our stop sign. But the sight lines are good and none of us drive faster than 15 mph, so formally stopping just because there is a sign is not worth much. If someone is walking or riding their bike, we stop for them whether there's a stop sign or not. We did have a neighbor once who tended to speed, but peer pressure turns out to be pretty effective, he drives as slow as the rest of us now.
You should try to get the stop signs replaced by yields and possibly some traffic calming. A stop sign everyone blows through is a normalisation of deviance.
Backup cameras are Federally mandated in new cars because there was a predictable kill count of parents running over their own kids in their own driveways. Cars are so common that we don't really think about their dangers.
There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop, and the amount of cars that completely ignore it (ie don't even slow down) is easily <1%. I think this is just more of an issue with local cultural norms.
> There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop
There was some discussion amongst my neighbors about a sign near us and we found that the key variable is the speed at which one considers a vehicle to be "stopped". Some folks felt that a 6 mph (10 kph) rolling stop at an empty intersection counted as a stop while others felt that anything more than 1 mph (1.6 kph) meant that the driver was running the stop sign. Since the majority of drivers fell somewhere in that range the estimates for how many people stopped were wildly different.
In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street.
What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me.
My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.
We had an 8 year old boy die in my hometown to this exact scenario and I have witnessed too many near collisions to count. I would support making passing like this automatic jail time, equivalent in severity to drunk driving.
The problem with making this jailable (which I do not support in the absence of a collision) is that you stopping to let a pedestrian legally cross is difficult to distinguish from you stopping in a travel lane or bike lane to pick up an Uber fare or stopping to double park near someone waiting for their own Uber. The latter two cases are actually obstacles created by anti-social behavior and are probably more common in aggregate than drivers stopping for pedestrians.
Fundamentally the issue is that cars are huge visibility blockers. It is completely inconceivable that a cyclist could stop or slow to let a pedestrian cross, and the driver behind them would not see the pedestrian.
Without clear sight lines, drivers would need to communicate. But fundamentally drivers have extremely limited means of communicating information to those around them, and all of them are ambiguous. Hazard lights can mean a million things, including either "please pass me" or "it is extremely dangerous to pass me". In my city they most commonly mean "I want to park in this bike lane." Honking can mean a million things too, and sounds angry, aggressive, and startling. You can't really use your words, in a car, unless all of you have quiet engines, quiet tires, and roll your windows down. It is very hard, in most lighting conditions, to see the driver if they are trying to signal with their hands, because of sun glare, window tinting, lighting differentials between the cabin and the exterior.
So, the car in front blocks your ability to receive information about what's in front of them, while also being unable to communicate any helpful information themselves.
It's very easy to distinguish. People indicating to the right and slowing down are probably picking up or dropping off a pedestrian. If they aren't indicating, you must assume there's a hazard in front of them, slow down, and proceed with caution.
This happened to me and it left me with lasting anxiety. I stopped in town at a crosswalk for a pedestrian waiting to cross, and the car a couple seconds behind me went around and tore through the crosswalk.
I don't know what the answer is. Drivers make mistakes -- they don't see things, they might be preoccupied, etc. etc. And yeah, all too often they're negligent to the point of malice. But urban landscapes are almost explicitly designed to force those misjudgements to have literally life-ending consequences, and I haven't seen any large-scale societal acknowledgement of that.
It's actually solvable like a lot of things if we have time and willingness to invest in doing so. You put cameras at intersections or accept cryptographically signed unmodified dash cam footage and mail out the notice that the offending driver is a pedestrian for the next period of time starting at 3 days and progressively increasing until they are giving up driving for the next year.
If they drive during suspension the same cameras allow us to send escalating fines calculated based on their annual income in the last 12 months terminating in confiscation of their car.
Most bad drivers will get small escalating fines that aren't ruinous and stop driving like assholes. A tiny minority who are basically a menace to society will end up owing a ruinous amount of money and losing their wheels.
The thing to do is NOT do the unexpected. Being excessively courteous and letting an oncoming car turn left, or stopping for a pedestrian who is not already in the crosswalk but is waiting for a gap in traffic, is unexpected. It surprises other drivers and they get annoyed and then do something stupid like zooming around you.
In Britain stopping (to load/unload the car, or to park) at a pedestrian crossing is worth a £100 fine and ¼ of the driving licence 'lost' (do this four times within 3 (?) years and you're banned from driving and must retake the driving test). This is similar to passing a red light, or going slightly faster than the speed limit, though I think they have a larger fine.
I'm not sure what the penalty would be for overtaking a car stopped at a crossing. In theory it's the same, but in practise I think the stronger offence of dangerous driving would be used. If found guilty, that's an automatic ban from driving, an unlimited fine and up to 2 years jail.
This happens a lot in PDX and it makes me furious. It's like putting a hit out on the pedestrian crossing the street. I would like to see how the people honking their horns would like it if someone called for their death.
I see exactly this in Oakland, CA a lot. If someone slows down even a bit, people will rip around them and pass them in what should be turning lane. I think people are stressed, traumatized, maybe disabled from the pandemic/long covid. I also think instant gratification devices/apps have made us super impatient. And there's next to no traffic enforcement in many cities now.
People randomly crossing the street? Yeah you have to stop to the best of your ability because murder is against the law, but if they are jaywalking across a busy street and get hit? I highly doubt any state would prosecute you if you were going the speed limit and hit your brakes but still hit them.
Not only do we kill thousands of people a year with our vehicles, and get away with it, we stole the outdoors from our children. For every child a driver kills, hundreds — thousands — more are told to stay away from the road, to play in the backyard, not the front, and that no, they can't walk or bike to school, maybe when they're older (but of course "older" basically means "when you can drive").
Then we wonder why kids seem so insecure, anxious, and to lack independence. And why adults are so lonely. Where we used to have humans we now have steel beasts hurtling along at terrifying speeds. Our streets are places of violence.
We're moving the the Netherlands this summer because the US has gone absolutely, mind-bendingly insane. Mechs slaughter our children and far too many think the kids are the problem.
I'm not even slightly surprised by this, sadly. Cops need to start ticketing people who drive like maniacs. I drive in DC, and every week I almost get hit by some loon going 30+ over the limit who doesn't care that I'm in the lane they're merging into. I've never seen anyone get ticketed. The roads have become something out of Mad Max, just pure developing-world anarchy.
Enforcement is not the solution because it requires constant vigilance. Road design is because you can build the road in a way that brings about the speed/safety envelope you desire, and then it always works correctly whether anyone is monitoring it or not.
We seriously need to radically re-engineer most roads around me, but the police also really need to step up enforcement.
Before 2020 I could count the number of cars with either no plates or expired temp plates on one hand, since 2020 the number of cars with no plates is crazy, and the number of cars with months expired temp tags is just insane. That also tells me those cars don't have insurance, since I don't know of any insurance that will actually cover any claims you have with no valid registration.
Although I agree in general, enforcement is a reasonable band-aid to save lives while waiting for the entire road system to be re-engineered.
The engineering explanation fails to account for the major change from pre- to post- 2020. The road design didn’t change, but clearly driving behavior did. Strong Towns says it’s because roads are less congested now, but I’ve seen plenty of aggressive, reckless driving regardless of congestion level (it seems some people are frustrated by it and act out).
We need automatic enforcement via speed cameras and such, but whenever these are brought in, the car lobby moans about how it's a "cash grab" and not about saving people's lives.
The merging and the lane etiquette are the two biggest for me, though I do a lot more driving now than a few years ago. People going below the speed limit in the leftmost lanes regularly back up the freeway since no one can pass. Also is way more dangerous since some weave in the middle lanes (or right) to make the pass.
Yeah that is a weird one because no one is going to get ticketed for going the speed limit or 5 over in the passing/leftmost lane and technically they are doing nothing wrong. It just makes driving more difficult for everyone else.
The rightmost lane is somewhat similar. You really shouldnt travel in it. It's for getting on and off the road. If you are in it you're making it harder for other to merge on/off the road. But again you're not going to get a ticket for pulling into that right lane and staying as long as you'd like.
Some people are actually not even aware of these, "rules". I had a friend who at 25 still drove in the right lane all the time and would get mad when people were always slowing down to get off the highway.
How do we pass on this knowledge that, while fairly important, is not actually law?
The developing world (generalizing hugely) can be better in some ways. Yes, the traffic isn't as regimented. But in many places, lots of people are on mopeds and scooters, and a shared sense that everyone is a vulnerable meat-bag persists. Plus there are forms of politeness, like chirping the horn to warn people -- "heads up on your left".
The US, by contrast, is full of SUV and pickup drivers who feel invulnerable, and I don't see the same nods at civility.
On the whole, though, the US' more regimented traffic culture is still safer, I have to admit.
Speed Cameras are a lot cheaper than cops, they don't get killed and they don't need a pension. They should do gofundmes for installing speed cameras in your hood, I'd fork some money.
The efficacy of speed cameras depends on the socioeconomics of the area.
The "car culture" lunatic drivers I've met in the Baltimore / DC area just make a hobby of fighting tickets. They have lawyers they regularly work with and somehow always make it out with their license intact.
DC already has an enormous police:population ratio. If more policing were the answer, surely DC would be on the forefront of using police to stop traffic violations.
Police cannot effectively solve this issue. This requires engineering. DC's super wide, straight streets tell drivers "its safe to go really fast here, you have a ton of space". That's where the problem starts, and thats where the solution has to start.
Just one more evidence point for why crossovers, SUVs, and trucks are stupid passenger vehicles. There are way too many of these behemoths on our roadways, many lifted, making it worse for pedestrians, anyone driving a normal decent car, and the environment.
We have an arms race of stupidity with everyone trying to get a bigger vehicle than everybody else so they can drive more aggressively, see past the other stupidly large boxes, and feed their false egotistical ideas about safety in size.
When will we get regulations that get us back to actual cars on the road instead of a sea of “bimbo boxes” as predicted in Snow Crash?
Is it really stupid to participate in this arms race? The data suggests that you are much safer in an SUV or truck when it comes to vehicle on vehicle accidents. In fact, the average deaths per 10 billion miles for cars and light vehicles is roughly 40, which is almost twice as many deaths as compared to trucks or SUVs. It's even worse for mini 4 door cars, at around 80 deaths per 10 billion miles. The only thing safer than a truck or SUV is a minivan. The correct choice for individuals is to participate in the arms race, unfortunately. You are correct that the only way around this is though regulations, but a lot of people aren't going to hold their breath. If you can't beat em, join em.
Good point. This can be trivially tackled to have ie vehicle tax based on some formula with horse power, weight, category of vehicle etc. Ie Switzerland has it, each canton their own rules. You wanna destroy roads and environment more with your poor car choices? Pay up and go ahead if you want. Use earned money to road repairs, cleanup of pollution etc.
That sounds reasonable but I wonder how well it'll work. Gas here in SoCal is over 5$ a gallon and people still driving massive cars paying over 100$ per fill up. It's nuts!
Also related, one of my favorite philosophy papers: Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? by Douglas Husak
Argues that SUVs are immoral because of the high crash incompatibility. They cause more damage to others (disproportionally), and ironically don't provide more safety for drivers due to higher rollover instances.
This is also one of my favorite papers. It's utterly ridiculous how the "normal"/"average" vehicle in the US is now a huge crossover that drives like a beached whale, most of which have 4 occupants or less from manufacture to when they end up in a junkyard. It's utterly ridiculous. Nearly anything a crossover or SUV can do, an AWD hatchback can do better while being safer for pedestrians, other drivers, better for the environment, and generally less of a nuisance.
Americans have become pathologically selfish when it comes to driving.
Readit News
It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful.
The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution is wider roads.
An incredible policy and prioritization failure. That said, it would take very little work and money to fix the problems. Road diets (as pointed out by the article) and tactical infrastructure is cheap and the solutions are well known. The spend will be a drop in the bucket compared to most other budgets.
There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.
If regulations actually focused on MPG, these vehicles would not be the size and weight that they are.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo...
Right target. Bad implementation.
Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).
It is funny that we still call trucks like the F150, Ram 1500, Silverado 1500, etc as 1/2 ton pickups. Even though they are still officially categorized like that by all the manufacturers, Edmunds, Motortrend, KBB, and so on, they are actually essentially 1 ton pickups. Our "light-duty pickups" (which is their official classification) are actually 1 ton pickups.
The whole tonnage designation refers to the payload capacity of the truck (people and gear in the bed for example). Traditionally a 1/2 ton pickup could carry 1,000 lbs (half a ton roughly). This was the light-duty, "everyman's pickup".
But take the 2023, F-150. It has a payload capacity of ~2,200lbs on all trims above Lariat. And just shy (~1,800-1,900 lbs) on lower trims. These are literally 1 ton pickups being sold as 'light duty' 1/2 ton pickups. They are way more power than the average person needs, yet they are the best selling vehicles in america. When I look at my neighbords, of the 18 houses on my street, there are 14 pickups (3 of which are 3/4 ton pickups, the rest are 1/2 ton). There is one guy that carries a small trailer a few times each summer with a dirt bike in the back. The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.
Not only are they more dangerous to pedestrians, and are worse for the environment, but they also clutter up the streets because they often don't fit in garages,so more and more people park on the street.
For fun, I looked up the current payload of the Ford Ranger, which is Ford's 1/4 ton pickup. And it clocks in at 3/4 of a ton. So again, we have moved up two notches in truck size.
Doesn't this work both ways? If you focus on MPG then lighter, smaller variants of the same model will win out over bigger, heavier ones.
Sure there is. Those 90's pickup trucks were absolute death traps. Bench seating, no airbags, drum brakes, no ABS, no crunch zones. There are very good reasons that cars have become much heavier in the last 30 years.
Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.
Because batteries are heavy. Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever?
> There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Did that have a back seat big enough for adults to sit in? If not, then there's your reason.
I don't know the details but apparently some concession was made to big auto on mpg that meant there was a loophole and bigger heavier trucks didn't count against your mpg targets as much. That, not a focus on mpg, is the cause.
Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.
The type of development I describe is happening (two examples in my Canadian city). Ultimately the evolution of a poorly built model.
First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput
The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing
As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes
It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.
The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people
I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.
No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.
I think it depends on where you are, but useful public transit is very possible in most places. Low frequency is the result of poor planning, not a requirement of public transit.
I could pretty easily imagine a sliding vehicle tax scale where safer, more practical sub-compacts and minivans are subsidized by the mega-lifted land yacht SUVs and pickups. Sure it doesn't fix the design problems of cities, but it at least means the vehicles that are traversing them aren't as likely to kill and maim people while we sort out the other problems.
It isn't uncommon to see people get in their car to go to the mail kiosk 2 blocks away, in part because of the lack of sidewalks.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
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A lot of malls have been doing this since retail has been in free fall for quite some time.
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I would really like to get more infill development and smaller lots, personally, but just for the sake of preserving open space. It's easy to walk and bike in actual cities and towns already. Suburbs are the issue, because they are entirely planned around cars.
Good luck making policy changes against the wishes of a majority population that's frustrated and angry as it is. We are in deep, deep trouble. Not only are we not removing lanes and giving space back to people, we're still adding lane miles in every city in America. Even my "urbanist" home town of Portland Oregon is about to spend billions to add a few dozen lane miles to an urban freeway that already destroys the entire East bank of our waterfront and a couple historic neighborhoods, and is used mostly by people and companies that don't live here.
I'm going to be sad if that route gets all fucked up, and all just to add a few lanes that simply induce more demand and do nothing to solve traffic problems in the long run. I hate to be that guy, but its inescapable.. cars (as currently conceived and implemented) are a blight on humanity.
But all of this said, I want low density. Having lived many years in a high density ant colony (aka "walkable city"), I want nothing to do with that. Keep your high rises to yourself. I think that high density living is inhuman. I respect your opinion, but we don't think alike. And I promise to not mess with your lifestyle if you don't mess with mine, we can all live together many miles apart.
I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go. I exercise every morning by walking around for 45 min in my cookie cutter neighborhood; the air is pure and it's a joy to walk around trees, ducks and birds instead of buses, cabs, people sneezing etc.
I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic.
For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
For example, I lived in a town of around 100k in the Netherlands called Delft for a while - high density, walkable, and far quieter than the two suburbs I lived in the United States.
Not saying the situation will ever change here. But it is possible.
Your cookie cutter neighborhood (mine too) depends on circumstances which are unlikely to last. I say this with the utmost respect, and as an SUV owner!
That's fine, but lower density requires lower level of service: narrower roads, some gravel, etc.
> I'm willing to pay for these roads
I'm not saying that it's impossible that you wpuld want to spend that much, but you couldn't possibly know if you live in the US, because you've never paid for it.
I don't mean to suggest that you're in the wrong for taking resources someone has dangled in front of you for something that looks nice; the malpractice lies with the people who designed and perpetuate those systems. But those systems are sucking rural places dry and preventing the creation of new urban places.
The neighborhood is dense, but there are no high-rises, and I actually know my neighbors.
Take a look at a city like Brussels to understand how a capital city can be both walkable and high density without being Seoul.
There is a middle ground. Walkable cities are not a cluster of high rises and this is mostly the result of poor zoning (we lack the appropriate "missing middle")
Which is laughable because for most of human history, we've lived extremely close to each other. Cavemen didn't have acre plots separate from other cavemen.
>I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go
Your lifestyle requires a massive subsidy from the federal government, so you aren't really willing to pay for it. Suburbs generally require other places around them to also have massive parking lots and roads to accommodate the car lifestyle. If suburbanites just stayed in their bland community, it'd be fine, you all want to drive really fast through other people's communities and you clog up our roads.
The problem is that is all built-up land, including commercial and industrial use and the roads themselves, including whatever small amount of urban greenspace might exist like parks, including schools and courthouses and everything else we need to just run human society. If we conservatively estimate this takes up maybe half of built-up land use, then we're down to more like 90 m^2 per person.
Let's assume a family of four, so now you get 360 m^2 or about 3875 ft^2. According to https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/sold.html, the average lot size of a single-family house in the US has gone from 18760 ft^2 in 1978 to 13896 ft^2 in 2020. We're talking now something like a quarter of current lot sizes if we wanted everyone to live in a single-family home.
So, as it stands, sure, live how you want, but don't forget that your ability to live the way you want is predicated upon the vast majority of humans on the planet living in much higher density, which you apparently consider to be not living like a human at all, in spite of it being the condition most humans find themselves in.
I think if a vehicle meet specific weight and size criteria, it needs to pay more and have restrictions. These new big pickups and SUVs fully meet that criteria.
>The majority of roads are too wide
Actually in my state it is the opposite. Most roads are way too narrow. When two large pickups are driving at each other, one needs to pull over.
There are two interpretations. One is that the roads are too narrow. The other is that the vehicles are too wide.
The new Rivian R1T is registered commercial and weighs over 3 tons, bringing further restrictions as to the places and times it can be driven or parked. Again, surprising some buyers.
Cities are also flooding roads with inexperienced bike and scooter riders on faulty equipment in favor of the revenue it provides, cities also have not updated traffic light infrastructure since the 50s...
The biggest innovation to come to traffic control are simply speed cameras, which dramatically reduced police on streets. It's all be a chaotic mess and cities also lobby their policies online, hiring private companies to provide spin and brigade online on sites like reddit in favor of their failed policies.
DC years ago introduced a campaign that everyone should stop for pedestrians in crosswalks (green light or not) and that has empowered some to walk into streets even when they are not clear. Cities have also turned already congested traffic lanes now into bike lanes, while bicycle traffic is untaxed to fun the arrangement. The aforementioned change also completely removes parking which existed before, leaving driver to double park and dangerously block traffic. The combination of frustrated drivers and frustrated pedestrians is a toxic mix. Many cities and states have been reducing speed limits in the past years since the pandemic to increase their ability to give out citations, despite cars being safer. more efficient, and able to stop faster now than ever. The changes being made now contradict logic as the demand to be on time increases more and more, and the statistics are showing deaths are going up.
In my opinion, separating traffic by type would go a much farther way to encourage safety. Innovation should also be centered around a smarter traffic light system, on separating traffic lanes and routes, and and in better and more affordable parking arrangements in every city. It's not a complex problem, the problem is that decision makers are often high on individual bias and not routed in reason to conquer this issue. Perhaps the decision makers need to be look at more closely, and held accountable for their continual failure to bring the number of casualties downward.
Vehicles going fast speeding in dense areas are a huge driver of pedestrian fatalities so reducing speed limits sounds great to me. I've heard that lowering the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph can actually increase average throughput in cities by calming traffic. Here in Massachusetts we're trying to make it legal to use automatic speed limit enforcement (cameras with license plate readers detecting speeding vehicles).
Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).
Barrier separated transport is great for cyclists (and pedestrians), but not if it means restricting cyclists to only riding in bicycle lanes. If you limited cyclists to only riding in places where they had dedicated pathways you'd vastly reduce the practicality of riding in any US city I've been to.
I personally feel much safer riding on streets when there are more cyclists around me. It feels like the motorists are more likely to keep an eye out and not do something careless.
We could also try and force automakers to make safer "light trucks", as they're currently much more dangerous than This article[1] suggests the rate of pedestrian fatalities by vehicle type is 50% higher for light trucks than for cars per mile driven. It's baffling that we allow such large and dangerously-designed vehicles on the road.
[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232
Zoning allows people to choose what kind of neighborhood they want to live in. If I wanted density, I'd live downtown. Why should developers be allowed to just roam in and destroy the lifestyle that the people in the area selected?
Do you have more information on this mechanism? I can readily connect this with anything I’ve seen.
Not really a systemic issue in this case, just a pet peeve
[1] https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/Table?IndicatorCode=59
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I swear, bro. Just let me build one more lane. I swear we're gonna fix traffic.
https://youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
All that disappears in the aggregate though, and we're left with the fact that the built environment is the main factor dictating how we interact on our streets. We build wide roads and build huge dangerous vehicles to go very fast on them. That's the issue.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FzU9P7iX0AARi1F?format=jpg
What happened in 2014 was Ferguson, followed by the Ferguson Report, and the initial stages of changes in enforcement. Then in 2020 we had Floyd and an even larger pullback.
Roads did not change. Phones had been around for years by 2016. SUVs had been gaining in popularity for literally decades. It's not dispositive, but the only thing that fits the timing perfectly are the changes in policing after 2014 and 2020.
Police in some cities have almost completely stopped doing traffic enforcement. San Francisco, for example, used to issue something like 12k citations per month. Now they issue just a couple hundred. The change started right after the Ferguson Report was released:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/10lkdhk/traff...
Other cities have done the same. Police didn't just back off. They practically stopped enforcement altogether. We're talking about 95% drops in enforcement in some places.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... [2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...
Somewhere on the way, people have become more misanthropic, close-minded, and angry. I’m not sure why.
I think it is social media and the enshittification of all these services? Also, the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad may contribute to this? Regardless, more and more I see people living in a fantasy world where people both “suck immeasurably” and (strangely) have no freewill or agency and are just meat robots.
I think these two things together are really pernicious.
If you are progressive, you think the world is warming up and imminent horrors are on the horizon, you see a class structure designed to keep you poor, you will never own anything more expensive than a cup of coffee, you see your friends and loved ones being physically harmed by individuals, and structurally harmed by the state itself for the way they were born, for no clear reason. You see women quite literally dying because doctors cannot legally protect them from a dead fetus. A few rich people have strong say on basically everything that happens in your life, and they are all bitching and moaning that their life is so hard. Meanwhile, all your conservative relatives are screaming that this is a liberal hoax, basic science is a liberal hoax, trans people are a threat, and that democrats deserve death.
People are living in two entirely separate realities and it doesn't matter that only one is closer to actual reality if the people in the other just don't care.
The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".
Seems more likely you had a lot of shifting around of people’s driving (e.g. city dwellers moving to suburbs)
One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.
Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions.
I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.
There's definitely a lot of people reporting a change in driving attitudes. During covid, people went fucking nuts. There for a while, it was a source of local news articles.
Running red lights and almost hitting someone, cutting people off, swerving in traffic erratically to be faster. Its honestly scary some days.
https://www.google.com/search?q=people+driving+more+aggressi...
Edit: My point isn't to argue about all the studies listed, this is just why I think brain damage is a plausible reason for the population-wide decrease in car driving skill.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-ju...
COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.
(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).
Congestion generally works to keep vehicle speeds slower and therefore safer.
Our covid response forced us to make explicit some parts of our social agreement that were not usually stated outright before. Covid deaths also concentrated among exactly those groups.
We established outright that harms to these groups are an acceptable cost for convenience to the rest. It's not a large leap for people to apply this to their driving behavior, even unconsciously.
There is also the fact that covid isn't the only thing that happened in 2020. Since that summer's protests the police in my city have been on open but unacknowledged soft strike. They only take actions that are personally fulfilling to them individually, which certainly isn't traffic enforcement.
Some people are just really bad at this :/
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We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.
I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.
[1] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...
[2] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article26...
https://transpomaps.org/san-francisco/ca/sfpd-traffic-enforc...
I personally don't think its "police enforcement" but I would wager a large % of deaths (at least in New Mexico, the state with the highest rate) are from panhandlers in the street. IIRC, they're trying to make new laws to prevent ppl from standing in the middle of the road.
If people aren't willing to at least drive carefully in their own neighbourhoods, imagine how they drive when they don't have to worry about running over their neighbours kids.
If anyone is interested in this stuff, the youtube channel NotJustBikes talks a lot about this and related topics. Here's a short video on how "traffic calming" infrastructure gets drivers to slow down, and we all know that stop signs just dont.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tGOBOw9s-QM
(Yes, you should also be coming to a full stop, but it is impressive how rapidly people will go through the motions of "stop, look, go" to the point that they don't realize they didn't finish any one step. Similar to talking, all told. In speech, most words blend together and you don't have meaningful stops between all words.)
Someone probably died here for this roundabout to be added though.
Are there some numbers on this? Even if your own?
I mean, _some_ people don't stop, sure that's valid on its face.
But they "just don't work anywhere", is that what, half of drivers refusing to stop at a four way stop? One in four?
I get that it's a fraught topic, but still...
Road design goes a long way towards that, and roads that _feel_ safe counter-intuitively make drivers behave in less safe ways, while most drivers (broad generalization) will behave more cautiously when the roads they drive feel unsafe. The fact that your subdivision is statistically likely top have wide roads with plenty of visibility, few (if any) cars parked on the street, and big setbacks means drivers feel more comfortable with going 30+ MPH in a residential zone. On the other hand, my narrow street with cars parked on both sides and only about two feet of clearance on each side tends to make most drivers only go 20-25 MPH (although there's still daredevil scofflaws).
Edit: and the city is improving it -- my street is scheduled to get curb extensions, which should both make it slightly safer for drivers (visibility into intersections will be improved) and for pedestrians (the road will be further narrowed at intersections).
Residential speeders are bunch of no-account ruffians if you ask me.
Wealthy and poor neighborhoods are the dangerous ones where drivers are absolute dangers. And to me the reason is simple : there's not much law enforcement there. The rich ones because they are friends with the mayor/police chief so they have orders to not bother the locals. The poor ones because not sending police there is the easiest way to keep the bad guys there. At least they are not doing their stuff elsewhere.
Many people told me so and I didn't wanted to believe them because it was too simple. But bad experience after bad experience made me come to the same conclusion : where there's no law enforcement, more and more people are breaking the law, no matter the consequences for their peers.
I don't read much into that. It's extremely common for people to become angry when startled, especially in a near-collision situation.
Until now I didn't really have any data, just my eyes, and my brain, and I knew things weren't trending well.
Sad.
I bike to and from work most days, decked out in fluorescent colors and reflectors and blinky lights that should make a negligent vehicular homicide civil suit a slam-dunk for my wife, plus an excellent set of life insurance policies if that doesn't work.
To my shame, I have a large old SUV that I use on days I can't bike, but it brings me a perverse joy to drive at or just under the actual speed limit on my road and watch the traffic pile up behind me.
The answers you see are sometimes jaw-dropping[1] and I suspect there's an element of "the blind leading the blind" as people assume some of this is correct.
[1] For example someone posted a close call where a truck turning left nearly hit a pedestrian crossing in the crosswalk and the top comments claimed that it was the pedestrian's fault because the red hand was flashing and she should not be in the crosswalk.
Edit: There are also sooo many incidents of psychotic road rage posted on social media that it makes you lose faith in humanity. But it's hard to tell if this is an uptick in incidents or an uptick in visibility.
Key phrase: if you can. I'm a runner too, and I run year 'round in a suburb that has all of the problems others here have mentioned. It is possible, and I've even written guides on how to do it safely. It just takes more effort. In particular, wearing headphones is even less advisable in winter than it is the rest of the year. You need to hear when vehicles are approaching, even if they're EVs and all you're getting is the tire/wind noise. It's certainly not for everyone.
For those who don't want to make the effort, I recommend cross-country skiing or snowshoes. Work with what you have.
Source: the signs outside Northern California open spaces (and the newspaper)
https://abcnews.go.com/US/cars-us-now-required-backup-camera...
There was some discussion amongst my neighbors about a sign near us and we found that the key variable is the speed at which one considers a vehicle to be "stopped". Some folks felt that a 6 mph (10 kph) rolling stop at an empty intersection counted as a stop while others felt that anything more than 1 mph (1.6 kph) meant that the driver was running the stop sign. Since the majority of drivers fell somewhere in that range the estimates for how many people stopped were wildly different.
What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me.
My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.
We had an 8 year old boy die in my hometown to this exact scenario and I have witnessed too many near collisions to count. I would support making passing like this automatic jail time, equivalent in severity to drunk driving.
Fundamentally the issue is that cars are huge visibility blockers. It is completely inconceivable that a cyclist could stop or slow to let a pedestrian cross, and the driver behind them would not see the pedestrian.
Without clear sight lines, drivers would need to communicate. But fundamentally drivers have extremely limited means of communicating information to those around them, and all of them are ambiguous. Hazard lights can mean a million things, including either "please pass me" or "it is extremely dangerous to pass me". In my city they most commonly mean "I want to park in this bike lane." Honking can mean a million things too, and sounds angry, aggressive, and startling. You can't really use your words, in a car, unless all of you have quiet engines, quiet tires, and roll your windows down. It is very hard, in most lighting conditions, to see the driver if they are trying to signal with their hands, because of sun glare, window tinting, lighting differentials between the cabin and the exterior.
So, the car in front blocks your ability to receive information about what's in front of them, while also being unable to communicate any helpful information themselves.
I don't know what the answer is. Drivers make mistakes -- they don't see things, they might be preoccupied, etc. etc. And yeah, all too often they're negligent to the point of malice. But urban landscapes are almost explicitly designed to force those misjudgements to have literally life-ending consequences, and I haven't seen any large-scale societal acknowledgement of that.
If they drive during suspension the same cameras allow us to send escalating fines calculated based on their annual income in the last 12 months terminating in confiscation of their car.
Most bad drivers will get small escalating fines that aren't ruinous and stop driving like assholes. A tiny minority who are basically a menace to society will end up owing a ruinous amount of money and losing their wheels.
I'm not sure what the penalty would be for overtaking a car stopped at a crossing. In theory it's the same, but in practise I think the stronger offence of dangerous driving would be used. If found guilty, that's an automatic ban from driving, an unlimited fine and up to 2 years jail.
It's so rare I can't find any news on this happening without other serious offences (speeding in residential areas, etc). I think it would count as "overtaking dangerously" though: https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...
The area you aren't allowed to stop within, or overtake within, is marked with zig-zag lines: https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/pedestrian-crossings.html
Wait, are there states where this is not required?
Then we wonder why kids seem so insecure, anxious, and to lack independence. And why adults are so lonely. Where we used to have humans we now have steel beasts hurtling along at terrifying speeds. Our streets are places of violence.
We're moving the the Netherlands this summer because the US has gone absolutely, mind-bendingly insane. Mechs slaughter our children and far too many think the kids are the problem.
We seriously need to radically re-engineer most roads around me, but the police also really need to step up enforcement.
Before 2020 I could count the number of cars with either no plates or expired temp plates on one hand, since 2020 the number of cars with no plates is crazy, and the number of cars with months expired temp tags is just insane. That also tells me those cars don't have insurance, since I don't know of any insurance that will actually cover any claims you have with no valid registration.
https://www.thv11.com/article/traffic/arkansas-has-27000-car...
Even crazier to me, it looks like California is going to exact opposite direction and making it something you can't be pulled over for.
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB50/id/2813949
The engineering explanation fails to account for the major change from pre- to post- 2020. The road design didn’t change, but clearly driving behavior did. Strong Towns says it’s because roads are less congested now, but I’ve seen plenty of aggressive, reckless driving regardless of congestion level (it seems some people are frustrated by it and act out).
Not just this, but people who continue to drive like maniacs need their licenses and cars taken away. Driving is a privilege.
The rightmost lane is somewhat similar. You really shouldnt travel in it. It's for getting on and off the road. If you are in it you're making it harder for other to merge on/off the road. But again you're not going to get a ticket for pulling into that right lane and staying as long as you'd like.
Some people are actually not even aware of these, "rules". I had a friend who at 25 still drove in the right lane all the time and would get mad when people were always slowing down to get off the highway.
How do we pass on this knowledge that, while fairly important, is not actually law?
The developing world (generalizing hugely) can be better in some ways. Yes, the traffic isn't as regimented. But in many places, lots of people are on mopeds and scooters, and a shared sense that everyone is a vulnerable meat-bag persists. Plus there are forms of politeness, like chirping the horn to warn people -- "heads up on your left".
The US, by contrast, is full of SUV and pickup drivers who feel invulnerable, and I don't see the same nods at civility.
On the whole, though, the US' more regimented traffic culture is still safer, I have to admit.
The "car culture" lunatic drivers I've met in the Baltimore / DC area just make a hobby of fighting tickets. They have lawyers they regularly work with and somehow always make it out with their license intact.
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Police cannot effectively solve this issue. This requires engineering. DC's super wide, straight streets tell drivers "its safe to go really fast here, you have a ton of space". That's where the problem starts, and thats where the solution has to start.
We have an arms race of stupidity with everyone trying to get a bigger vehicle than everybody else so they can drive more aggressively, see past the other stupidly large boxes, and feed their false egotistical ideas about safety in size.
When will we get regulations that get us back to actual cars on the road instead of a sea of “bimbo boxes” as predicted in Snow Crash?
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Argues that SUVs are immoral because of the high crash incompatibility. They cause more damage to others (disproportionally), and ironically don't provide more safety for drivers due to higher rollover instances.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447
Americans have become pathologically selfish when it comes to driving.