WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly).
The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those riders.
Meanwhile, everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people, but we do basically nothing. Even on the off chance that we passed a law about them, existing vehicles would certainly be grandfathered in, we would never outright ban current vehicles/motorists. If we banned existing SUVs and trucks, millions of people would be screaming bloody murder about their right to drive pedestrian-killing cars.
The law doesn't ban them. It classifies fast e-bikes as motorcycles (which require registration, insurance, and a motorcycle endorsement).[1] This seems reasonable to me. The previous laws for e-bikes were based on outdated assumptions about battery & motor technology.
I do think it would make more sense to simplify (and future-proof) the law to just say, "If it can go >30mph on level ground and has a motor, it's a motorcycle." But similar to code, it's easier to add legislation than it is to modify existing rules.
There is what some people say is a gray zone (I don't actually think it's that gray) where a device is too fast or powerful to be a legal e-bike, but also doesn't meet the requirements to be a road legal motorcycle. Will Progressive give me motorcycle insurance on my DIY e-bike without a VIN? Will the DVM register it? I don't think so. In most states there is no path to legality, at least as far as operating the thing on public streets goes.
I don't think that's necessarily a problem that needs solved. I'm fine telling the person that bought a Sur-Ron, "too bad, off road only".
> I don't think so. In most states there is no path to legality, at least as far as operating the thing on public streets goes.
Not true. It's common to convert dirt bikes into street legal vehicles with conversion kits that add the required pieces. Depending on the state, that means turn signals, a mirror, headlight, and tail light.
I think it's completely reasonable if we tell people that their Sur-Ron is for private property use only until they add the same equipment we require every other street legal vehicle to have. I also think it's reasonable if we tell them their electric motorcycle doesn't belong on the bike path.
>I think it's completely reasonable if we tell people that their Sur-Ron is for private property use
If only that were actually the law. My roads are 100% private with absolutely zero tax payer funding yet the dumbass registration laws and requirement to display a plate even apply on my private road (only exempt if the owner white-lists traffic, which cannot be done under my easement rules which at best would only might allow me to black-list abusers). In fact pretty much all the roads in my town are completely privately funded and privately owned yet you still need registration/plate along with the legal mumbo jumbo to obtain it.
Pretty soon you realize the laws have nothing to do with the fiction of the laws being there to protect the public roads or public land or taxpayer funding or some such, it's a sham pretense that falls apart upon inspection of how they work.
>If only that were actually the law. My roads are 100% private with absolutely zero tax payer funding yet the dumbass registration laws and requirement to display a plate even apply on my private road (only exempt if the owner white-lists traffic, which cannot be done under my easement rules which at best would only might allow me to black-list abusers). In fact pretty much all the roads in my town are completely privately funded and privately owned yet you still need registration/plate along with the legal mumbo jumbo to obtain it.
It sounds like your roads are accessible by the public though, which means unregulated public traffic, which means all of the tools necessary to ensure a basic level of safety and accountability need to be followed. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, does it not to you?
Like, you still have to follow building codes, pay property taxes, and not murder people on your private property and that doesn't seem outrageous.
People who say this is a "gray zone" are practicing motivated reasoning. It is not gray, they are just illegal. There doesn't have to be a "path to legality" for illegal motorcycles. The only "path" necessary is the one straight to jail for the guy who imports these from China and sells them to the public.
"E-bike" is pedal assist only/mostly with max speed of 30kph/20mph (only while pedalling) and throttle cuts out at low speeds (7kph: basically just there to get some inertial); treated as just another bicycle (perhaps limit age to ≥14 yo). Everything else is an "e-moto" with the same rules as mopeds and motorcycles.
Of course enforcement is key: importing, selling, on the road.
Also worth noting that in some places in the EU a automobile Category B also gives you Category AM allowances:
> In some countries, holders of a B driver licence are also entitled (sometimes with special conditions) to ride motorcycles <= 125 cubic centimetres (7.6 cu in) and power <= 11 kilowatts (15 hp) and ratio power/weight <= 0.1 kilowatts per kilogram (0.061 hp/lb)
omfg I would love that. Like literally force manufacturers to put air brakes on anything above a certain weight limit and demand additional certification to operate one. Full Disclosure: I own four vehicles that would trigger this requirement, each for different reasons, and would be whistling and smirking in the DMV line to take the commercial test.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Driving something so large that it would require a commercial license to transport your family around is ridiculous
They don't require commercial licenses though, because they're not large enough to and don't serve a commercial purpose when transporting families / their things. Plenty of families have the need for third-row seating and the ability to haul things around.
Toyota Camry curb weight is ~3300 pounds. The minivan based on the Camry is the Sienna, curb weight ~4600 lbs. Lincoln Navigator curb weight ~5600 lbs. If the difference between the first two is marginal (~30%), the difference between the second two is less (~20%).
By comparison, actual CDL-requiring commercial trucks weigh up to 80,000 pounds.
That's not the issue. The issue is how tall these grills are and to a lesser extent curb weight. You don't need either to have third row seating or the ability to haul things.
Not if you need to tow a trailer / camper. Maybe there's a reason different kinds of vehicles exist? To fulfill different requirements of their drivers?
But families towed tent trailers back in the 80s behind their sedans and station wagons, too.
Maybe there's a bit of circular reasoning going on here where people bought giant vehicles because they liked the aesthetics and internal roominess, and then the prevalence of giant vehicles opened up the market for larger and heavier towables— rigid body RVs, seadoos, a trailer full of gas dirt bikes, whatever it is.
I also feel like in past times, it was much more common to see a two car household with two very different cars, with one being a hatchback or sedan for getting the family around down and doing grocery runs, and the other a truck or van for those occasional "hauling" requirements. Nowadays I feel like many times it's two big SUVs, just tuned to his and her brand tastes rather than two shared vehicles for different usages. I'd be interested to know if the stats on multi-car households would bear this out.
But that does get to the point. Maybe differentkinds of vehicles need different kinds of qualification testing. Would you trust your 16yo that just passed their driver's test in a sedan to tow a boat through town with an F250?
You're going to have a hard time hiding the entire SUV and Light Duty truck market behind an airstream, especially considering neither have transmissions capable of hauling one. Statistically almost nobody tows anything. Of those that do the vast majority tow stuff that comfortably falls within the pulling capacity of a Subaru Outback (or a VW Golf hatchback if you're really feeling rude). Nobody's trying to take anyone's dually away, just reign in the excesses of the auto industry that were mainstreamed by a combination of emissions laws carveouts and aggressive marketing. Hell if this went through we all might start seeing approximately affordable vehicles on the market again and I feel like that would be a welcome change.
Sure, until you need to tow a trailer weighing more than about 1500 lbs or drive on a dirt road where the minivan bottoms out. You might not need those capabilities but a lot of families do that stuff every week.
You can drive those off-road away from where people live, or you can get properly trained and insured for driving such a dangerous vehicle where people outside vehicles will be present.
I spent significant time recently in both a new F150 and a Toyota Sienna, and it isn't even close in the comfort between them. F150 wins by a mile by the sheer amount of space you have in that thing for both passengers and cargo. Not to mention the ability to tow.
Plenty of minivans also have tall hoods. I assume by combi you're talking about a station wagon, and in that case you're trading cargo capacity and the ability to tow boats / trailers / campers / etc... Ego has nothing to do with it - utility does. You can fit more people and things in a larger vehicle, this isn't rocket science.
I don't think the cargo capacity argument really holds water. I drive a Volvo V60 wagon which has trunk space of 23.2 cubic feet. When it was in the shop, I had a loaner XC60, and I could noticeably feel that the trunk space was about the same, despite the vehicle sitting considerably taller.
Sure enough, the XC60 crossover has a trunk space of 22.4 cubic feet.
It's the same trunk, just higher off the ground, which to me makes it less useful to me: more lifting to get stuff in, harder to rummage through items (eg camping pantry), much more difficult to access my roof box.
True, it's not exactly the same situation, but it does ban them for the riders (the teens) who were previously on them.
You could make it more analogous by saying that we could enforce stricter regulations on big SUVs and trucks in terms of, say, driver licensing, and you'd still have a huge outcry if we tried that.
It blew my mind the first time I rented a 35' long 26,000 GVWR diesel truck and drove it right onto the interstate. What you can accomplish on a simple US driving license is something special you can't get almost anywhere else in the world unless you count places where bribes work.
Canada beats the euro average at 4.7 but similarly allows regular Joe’s to drive a moving truck and trailer a car behind it with a general license.
+ Canada’s rates are better on a per km basis (even beating the Dutch).
Annual/biannual safety inspections are only required in 3 of 10 provinces and those 3 are on the smaller side (PEI, NS and NB).
Motor vehicle infraction enforcement is… an afterthought for Canadian police (they don’t think/care that their salary/town depends on it). But admittedly, even lighter than I’ve experienced in Europe.
It’s gotta be some other factor behind excess US road fatalities.
American drivers are also entitled assholes (I say as an American driver). How DARE you tell me I can't do what I want, when I want, or change my behavior in the slightest to benefit my society/local community?
Couldn't at all be affected by migrants coming in from third world countries that liberal states freely give Licenses/CDL's to and then send across the country
Those sorts of codes do exist already. The problem is that bike manufacturers will put on a "go fast" switch with a "Don't flip this or you'll be breaking the law" note in the manual.
Of course, a lot of people flip that switch because 20mph can feel pretty slow.
The Dutch seem to just do the sensible thing and have mobile e-bike dynos. If they suspect the bike is not properly regulated, they'll test it and keep it if it fails.
Id we wanted to do sth similar for SUVs and Trucks it would be a special driving licence required, with additional requirements and more expansive insurance.
You do realize e-bikes only go 25 km/h? You're confusing them with speed pedelecs. Those go around 50 km/h, although that's still a far cry from scooter speeds, let alone motorbikes.
In some European countries, yes, but other countries like the US have different laws. The UK doesn't have a classification for a speed pedelec, just the 25kph class.
Where I live (western EU) it's simple. If the speed is limited to 25 km/h it's an e-bike. Above it's a speed pedelec and requires registration plate + insurance.
Back in the 20th century, before electric bikes, when I was but a wee lad the neighborhood Karens screeched until the local PD dropped one of those mobile "your speed is" trailers onto my street for about a month.
It turns out 12yo me could go 29mph on a mountain bike.
30 is too low IMO. Make it 35 or something. 25 is a joke.
I picked 30mph because that's the current threshold for what is considered a motorcycle in the state of Washington. Until recently, e-bikes were exempt from this because the old law was made back when e-bikes were rare and couldn't go much faster than regular bicycles.
I've gone >50mph on a bicycle, 40mph on level ground. Yes it's possible, but it requires significant effort and you can't accelerate as quickly as an e-bike. That's why I said, "and has a motor". Heck, a fast runner can endanger people on the sidewalk. When I'm running, I often slow down in crowded areas so that if someone does randomly veer into my path, I'll have time to avoid them.
If lots of people (who I assume are very fit) were riding bicycles dangerously, maybe the legislature would make some laws about that. But until it becomes a problem, there's really no need.
I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable.
I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
Same thing happens on NextDoor, a few kids hanging out and joking around makes people think there's a gang problem, I've seen it happen in my own neighborhood and it's ridiculous.
It is true that violent death and maiming from SUVs and large trucks is a crisis, that society generally ignores. When I once called these hoods "gender affirming" a reply chastised me for being inflammatory and claiming that stating the plain obvious would get in the way of convincing others, but I think it's exactly the opposite: unless we start talking about the truth of these things nothing will happen.
> I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
I thought it was all fun at first, but they've since invaded the bike paths and parks near my house. It seems like more common they become, the more emboldened the riders are to drive 40mph down the bike path and weave around people.
It's so bad now that I have to be on high alert on the mixed-use path to grab my kids and pull them in when I hear the unmistakable sound of a Sur-Ron coming at us from behind at high speed. Usually a group of several kids.
They've also taken to riding through the parks and fields we go to, treating the little hills as jumps. The grass is getting destroyed. Parks have to put up temporary fences and gates to keep the electric motorcycles from destroying the fields.
It's not just kids, either. I've had several close calls this year while I'm riding my (pedal) bike and middle-aged people riding modified e-bikes (not pedaling, just zooming along at high speed) have zoomed around corners and almost hit me. They jump from the road to the sidewalk to the bike path as convenient and everyone else has to avoid them.
It's bad. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not a problem. I spend a lot of time outside with my kids and the problem is getting worse by the year.
I'm tempted to say nothing some baseball bats won't help. But the real problem is that you have bicycles increasingly morphing into things like look more like motorcycles and, if they can't be legally sold that way, someone will sell them or they can be modded.
My anecdote only but the contraptions being sold as “e-bikes” are actually motorcycles. Like all things a few bad apples ruin it for everyone but in what I have seen it’s more than just a few bad apples. From maintained mountain bike trails, to riding at speed on walking paths. They are far more than just some kids being kids. It is ultimately a lack of parenting these days but I don’t believe the new laws coming into place are out of line. A vehicle that can hit 30mph within a few seconds is a lot different than a kid peddling at 20mph sustained.
Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!
Perhaps we can let the few bad apples killing lots of people with their massive hood height lead to better regulation of such hood heights?
We have literal deaths on one hand, and on the other, fears that are already heavily covered by regulation. I don't know Washington, but the laws around the speed regulators, etc., for e-bikes are extensive. People still demand "laws" because they overreact and get fearful.
I just wish people would be more fearful of killing others with their cars. It's the biggest cause of death of children, yet there's no action. Yet here we are, discussing ebikes rather than the real causes of child deaths.
I'm in the SF Bay Area and see small kids pre-adolescent or barely adolescent riding e-bikes with insane acceleration and speeds. The kind of performance, that in my youth, would come from a 250cc four-cycle motorcycle or 125cc 2-cycle motocross bike. And they are riding with absolutely no sense of traffic rules nor that they themselves are part of the same traffic. It's a really bad combination.
It doesn't matter what tiers there are when parents are negligently providing their kids with these kinds of "toys". I don't know if they are totally ignorant and think "it's just a bicycle" or if they know exactly what it can do and just can't see that their kid isn't ready for the responsibility.
I'm as anti-car and pro-bike as they come. Cars and trucks are a much bigger danger than e-bikes...
But California's clear tiers of ebike regulations are meaningless without enforcement. Over the past half decade blue states have become unwilling to enforce almost any laws. when they do enforce the laws it is sporadically. This matters for ebikes, it matters more for cars. Running a stop sign is absolutely not enforced any more.
> Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!
The people buying the hackable e-bikes aren't walking down to their neighborhood e-bike store and paying full retail.
It's an internet phenomenon. They're ordering them online. There are subreddits where you can go and figure out which ones to buy that can be easily hacked or modified.
There are companies addressing this demand by making bikes that are technically capped to a specific tier of performance when sold, but any kid with the internet can find the instructions to "unlock" it to remove all of the limits and use the full power of the bike, not have to pedal, and so on.
I live in WA (south of seattle) and your description is accurate, there are kids riding around on sidewalks in the area around my house on electric motorcycles that are sold as e-bikes. While I don't personally love it, they kept their distance from my small kids so I figure "let kids be kids". The one instance that frustrated me was they also show up at local mountain bike and skate parks. There they ride up the down trails and destroy a lot of the trail edges, a couple of times I've asked folks to leave.
I was hopeful when I saw the new law that it'll be used as a tool to take action on actual problem usage without punishing those using them safely. Unfortunately I'm aware of the history of laws like this, so I'm worried it'll just be used against lower income / privilege folks. We'll see.
You know, the law banning kids from driving vehicles that can go over a certain speed is also already on the books. The new law is just a clarification that no, you can't be an 11 year old going 40 MPH with an unlicensed E-bike.
The big problem is just Seattle being incredibly underpoliced and really no laws under homicide are really enforced or punished.
It's legal in Oregon and Montana as long as you stay in the shoulder. You can walk there too. I can't remember the law in Washington.
In western states with a lot of rural places only serviced by interstate they sometimes never passed blanket prohibition against non-motorized traffic on the interstate property.
You can bike at some places on I-90 in Washington state where better options aren't available. I don't think it applies to E-bikes though, or at least the ones that can go faster than 15 MPH.
Ok, but riding an ebike on the interstate is already illegal. If the problem you're trying to solve is kids taking ebikes onto the interstate, then you don't need any new laws
> I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable
I was driving on a WA highway going ~47 mph (I made note of it for reasons soon to be clear!) when a group of 3 tweens on ebikes, none wearing helmets, passed me up in the bike lane going at least 10mph faster, and I watched them run through a red light up ahead. They got lucky.
I don't have a problem with kids being kids but this is over the top dangerous. To be clear, it's a few small groups of kids. There have been crashes, and they sent a Bellevue woman to the hospital in a hit and run, but as far as I know there's been no fatalities yet.
We don't need to drop the hammer on kids. We just need some common sense.
There's kids who go around on ebikes in my neighborhood, and it's only a matter of time until one of them is hit. I don't mind kids on bikes, and encourage it. I do, however, encourage them to stop at stop signs and to actually look for traffic at intersections, and that's something that these kids are not doing.
To be fair, most cars go too fast in residential areas. I drive like a grandma in them and there's a good chance that someone is up my ass and annoyed that I'm not exceeding the speed limit.
There's a restaurant in a city near fairly near where I live where I often eat at the sidewalk city in the summer. And the (protected) bike lane is this somewhat horrifying combination of bikes, e-bikes, escooters and things like motorcyles together with pedestrians crossing. And, because many people are on bikes, a lot just blow through red lights at the nearby intersection because it's a bike lane.
There's some of that, a lot of it though is e-dirtbikes that can pretty easily do 35+mph stock and 50+ with light modifications. A friend of mine has one and I've ridden it. It's a motorcycle with mountain bike brakes. I don't think they're bad vehicles, but I do think they should be treated as motorcycles as opposed to bicycles, and 13 year olds shouldn't be riding them on public roads.
To be clear, the "e-bikes" in question aren't what you usually think of as e-bikes. Not only do they look different, they're faster and typically don't even require pedaling (and may not have pedals at all). Hence why I said they were kinda like mopeds.
People freak out about non-car transportation in general. Someone on my Nextdoor has been freaking out over temporary bus lanes, because nobody takes the bus but it's going to cause horrible traffic. They posted about rush hour gridlock on that street the other day caused by this grave injustice. The bus lanes haven't been put in yet....
There's constant vitriol about bike lanes, as if it's some huge sacrifice for drivers. And of course heaven forbid you roll a stop sign on a bike. Never mind that drivers do this constantly and are a far greater threat.
A lot of people fear anything that's not what they're used to, and they'll come up with any reason they can find to justify that fear.
There's a few traffic circles / roundabouts near me now. I love them -- they are safer and greatly reduce traffic if I'm headed out that way. The number of people who blame them for serious accidents is nuts, even if the accident is several miles away from the circle.
Stepped out of a coffee shop, got text from wife, grabbed my phone and got missed by inches by a kid on a scooter easily doing 25mph on the sidewalk. The text possibly saved my ability to walk in future by having me to pause just for a moment.
I was 3-4 feet from a building corner when someone raced around it on a scooter. Amazing to me the complete lack of both self-preservation and respect for others.
On the other hand, kids have always been stupid. We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.
> We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.
Automobiles for 16-year olds have been around for a very long time.
Anyways, it's quintessentially American to be talking about oversized landship SUVs and trucks killing people, only to have someone derail it into kvetching about kids and bicycles.
The problem is with bicycles being relegated to either the sidewalk or the main road with cars. I'm really not a fan of how cities create bikelanes by putting a line through the sidewalk and then nobody respects it.
I see the appeal in trying to ride fast, but it gets kind of scary. When I rode a bike I went fast outside the city specifically to avoid pedestrians.
And the main road with cars wouldn't be an issue if people had a little common sense and respect. I was descending down a mountain road on my bicycle once, definitely speeding (enough so that I caught up to the traffic ahead of me -- really just trying to get off the mountain quickly though since I know people like the following exist), and some giant truck decided it was up to them to show me a lesson for riding in the road -- tailgated me the entire way down the bloody mountain, and there was no safe way for me to pull over (no shoulder, trees and steep drop), to speed up (I was already booking it, and there was a car in front of me anyway and no safe way to pass), or slow down (IME, slowing down when in a car sends people like that into a rage, so I wasn't comfortable bleeding off any speed with this guy a few feet behind me). If I had any equipment failures or had to slow down for any reason it would've been a nasty accident.
>I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
It's kind of a hilarious yardstick for societal decline if you think about it.
70yr ago the boomers were drunk crashing sports cars so frequently that laws got passed.
Now late teenagers can barely afford an e-bike and mostly aren't causing problem, but laws still get passed, by the literal same cohort who were drunk crashing muscle cars back in the day.
In my area kids are doing street takeovers and assaulting people in cars and pedestrians. Laws have been passed to deal with it but there is very little on the enforcement side. Plus kids are riding around in effectively what are electric motorcycles that can hit highway speeds which would normally require licensing and registration like any other motor vehicle. Recently I know of a 15 year old who crashed on one of these bikes and died. Having said that, 15 year old me would have absolutely loved having one of these kick ass ebikes.
We also subsidize fossil fuels to some $900B/yr, not counting foreign wars for oil, climate damage, health impacts etc. Fuel should be MUCH more expensive, around $15/gal. If priced right, the market would weed out these giant vehicles for personal/entertainment use.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/in-gasolinegate-the-true-...
There are already mechanisms in place to hold SUV and Truck drivers accountable and track them down (via their license plate).
The problem with ebikes is any unlicensed driver can get one, and go 40mph on a sidewalk without any practical way to hold them accountable.
I live near one of the busiest biking + walking trails in the country, and the egregious disrespect and recklessness of ebike's and scooters is insane to me. Even on the parts of the trail that are split into two or three sections (walking, running, and biking sections) I see people going 20-30mph weaving in and out of walkers. What's crazy is it would be safer if they were operating gas motorcycles, because atleast you could hear them coming.
I suspect the loudest voices would be from the automakers and dealerships, who make their biggest margin from SUVs and oversized trucks. They have powerful lobbyists and spend a lot on PR, so it often seems like their anti-transit, anti-pedestrian positions are more popular than they are.
I'd love to see a real grassroots effort to tax (toll?) based on GVWR or vehicle length. It would be met with tremendous opposition by special interests, but I could see it succeeding in the right environment. Maybe it could be framed as a rebate for small vehicles, rather than a tax on large ones.
When vehicles were starting to get noticeably bigger about 20 years ago, I asked some family members why they were buying vehicles they had to climb up into.
"On the highway, I'd rather kill someone than be killed in a wreck."
They would not recognize that while that might work for a while, it wasn't going to lead anywhere good for our society. A generation of people thinking like that has filled our roads with vehicles that protect their occupants while making it more dangerous for everyone else.
> For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those riders.
This is not true. The law didn't ban anything. It just clarified what's classified as a bike with requirements like "must have pedals" and "you have to pedal it".
There wasn't a ban. Previously there was a gray area where people were taking full on e-motorcycles, which should have been on roads, and trying to ride them in spaces meant for pedal bicycles.
They weren't full on e-motorcycles, they don't meet the legal requirements for motorcycles. As one example among many, some jurisdictions require a motorcycle have turn signals.
So if they can't be operated as an e-bike and they can't be registered as an e-motorcycle, they've been banned.
No, they're not allowed on public roadways or bike/pedestrian paths. Which I think is fair and good, because they're not designed for either space.
There are a lot of different types of vehicles that aren't allowed on the roads of bike paths, but people still use them recreationally on private property. You can find retrofit kits to add the necessary mirrors and turn signals to many dirt bikes if you want to ride on the road.
If someone wants to ride on a bike path, they should have something that meets the definition of a bike. We've stretched the definition to include reasonable e-assist bikes, but we're not stretching it further to include everything with 2 wheels and a motor.
If someone wants to ride on the roads, they need turn signals and a mirror.
We don't have to allow everyone to ride everything on every public shared space.
I agree that some of the more egregious big motor e-bikes should be banned, but whenever you shift the requirements like this you're going to be taking away somebody's only means of getting to work. There are people out there driving big motor e-bikes because they can't afford a car. Or because they can't get a license.
> There are people out there driving big motor e-bikes because they can't afford a car.
Unfortunate for them, but we can't be shaping the laws for everyone around a couple people who already bought a big-motor e-bike to ride on the bike path.
I'm not really persuaded by this argument either, as they can sell their big-motor e-bike and buy a lesser model, or trade someone straight across.
> Or because they can't get a license.
This just raises more questions. If they can't get a license, they shouldn't be driving on the road. That limits them to bike paths, where they shouldn't be driving high powered vehicles anyway. Again, not really persuaded.
People under 16 probably shouldn't be driving vehicles very fast period. That doesn't feel like a double standard since we've already banned them from driving cars.
A 15 year old on a bicycle can easily do 15mph, and even 20mph is easy enough if they are willing to pedal for it. The real problem is that something capable of doing 15mph+ shouldn't be on the sidewalk in the first place.
There are multiple things going on in these situations, and rarely is it just one thing a quick simple ban on ___ will actually fix
Not sure if this is regional or another sign that I'm old.
When I was in elementary school, we were already taught that we ride a bicycle in the street and follow traffic rules. That included things like traveling in the correct lane for the direction we are going and observing stop signs and traffic lights. Also, as we got older, using things like turn lanes just like a motorcycle should do.
We were also taught tp walk it on the sidewalk/crosswalks as a pedestrian when the conditions were too complex for us to safely ride with traffic.
Even ignoring the peril to actual pedestrians, I have seen so many near-accidents in more recent decades from people violating these rules. Riding on sidewalks and/or against traffic flow (wrong side of the road) so that they "come out of nowhere" into traffic, ignoring traffic control lights, etc. Adding the electric speed boosts has just made these reckless things wildly more dangerous.
As people are correctly pointing out, WA is reclassifying certain e-motos as motorcycles, which is to say they'll require a license and insurance to be used on public roads - two things that are already required for all SUVs and trucks on public roads.
Being local to WA and spending a lot of time on bikes, the easiest thing we could do to improve the situation would be for law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing distracted driving laws. The number of drivers with their face buried in a phone during any kind of slow traffic is terrifying if one looks around.
I agree about large vehicles, but does an individual state even have the authority to ban a given kind of car from their roads? I suspect that is more under a federal authority than state-by-state.
SUVs have the power of bigAuto behind them to ensure no "undue" legislation is made against them. There is no bigEbike, so legislation is free to be made so that those legislators can then pat themselves on their back and have action they can point to being pro-safety.
The e-bikes aren't that annoying, it's the kids (and adults) riding all over the city on 4 wheelers and UTVs. The cops chase them around but it doesn't do much good.
> Meanwhile, everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people, but we do basically nothing.
Too much money is tied up to giant trucks and SUVs being the norm. These vehicles only came into widespread existence due to the infamous "SUV loophole" [1], accelerated by them being much more profitable for manufacturers as there was (and is) far less competition in the truck/SUV space from non-American manufacturers and, with that, less competitive pressure that tends to eat up margins.
Trucks and guns have a free pass to cause thousands of deaths yearly. It's that simple. Anybody else doing anything that might be viewed by certain hand wringing hysterical persons as dangerous will be smothered in onerous regulation, despite statistics showing relative (or absolute) harmlessness, but trucks and guns will keep on killing.
More money flows atop highway and road infrastructure than on biking, rail, and scooter infrastructure. By orders of magnitude.
Commuter rail has 1/200th the economic impact of interstate highways.
Biking infrastructure is actually deleterious as it doesn't serve the pregnant, elderly, sick, frail, doesn't work well for rain/snow/high heat/weather, doesn't transport high volumes of goods, etc. etc.
Lots of cities are tearing up road infra to cater to this, and in doing so, they're reducing the economic corridor capacity and throughput of roads. Roads are simply much more valuable and flexible for logistics, people, and business.
The value of roads is going to become even more apparent when we have widespread autonomous vehicles.
Bikes are popular for 20-40-something men, mostly yuppie, mostly upper middle class. But they're not doing the economic heavy lifting.
Biking is not meant to replace everything. More people biking means more room for people that cannot bike. Bike-heavy cities like Amsterdam show that most of your "facts" are incorrect (bikes can be used to transport goods, are usable when it rains, are used by a large part of the population). That's a trope common when bike displaces cars, but studies show the reverse (for example in Madrid: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...). Also, biking is good for health despite the risks (for example https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4521).
> Commuter rail has 1/200th the economic impact of interstate highways.
Ok, and what fraction of investment has it gotten?
We've underfunded rail/bike infrastructure for decades, of course money is going to flow on the cheapest route. Roads are cheap because we've subsidized the shit out of them.
Bikes are not going to deliver your packages and food and medical services. They're not going to
take you on vacation, haul your gear, or provide shelter.
There's a meme that bikes will solve everything and that cars suck, but it's dismissive of the orders of magnitude more value that road infra can and will always provide.
Bikes actually deliver a lot of packages and food in areas where car infrastructure hasn't made other forms of transportation practically impossible, and they do it much more cost-effectively.
On the medical front, that's quite a strawman. I doubt you'll find much of anyone opposed to using cars for medical and emergency services.
The bike meme is unrealistic, and you're dismissing all of my arguments.
You're ripping up infrastructure for yuppie pickleball.
How do you transmit tons of material on bikes? How do people move in the rain or when they're on their period? How do they move multiple small children or being home furniture? What do old and sick people do?
Every lane taken away is centuries of economic activity destroyed.
I think you’re suffering from a false dichotomy. The average car capacity is 1.1 people per car, and 90%+ of the time, a normal individual is not hauling more than a backpack.
Just imagine how much less traffic would be on the road if the people who could just biked. They get 1 protected lane (out of 6), and you get 50% less traffic? Hell yeah, that’s be awesome, right?
In terms of economics, consider how terrible car parking can be. A bike rack can park 20+ people in the space of 1 car parking spot (1-4 people). Do you really think a business would be better off with 1/10th the number of customers who can actually enter their building at once?
Bikes and rail should exist as options, not requirements. And when done well, like in Amsterdam, people will like using them. And driving will be even better, because of so much less traffic.
Counterpoint: there are four Blood Transfusion Service motorbikes parked outside the doctor's surgery across the road most days of the week, because cars are no good for delivering urgent and time-sensitive medical supplies.
Wow there is so much wrong with this post I don't even know where to start.
Widespread car usage has caused an enormous amount of harm. It has destroyed American cities, killed thousands of people directly, tens of thousands more with sedentary lifestyle diseases, and burned a truly enormous amount of fossil fuels into CO2, and locked in the infrastructure to continue to do so for decades. It's an absolutely enormous tragedy.
Cars are also useful and have helped a lot of things, but they should not be the default choice of transportation.
I think there is a difference here. Signal qua signal isn't dangerous. Its purely what one does with it that might constitute a criminal act. In particular, using signal is unlikely to cause problems accidentally.
Driving a giant truck for no good reason entails a certain risk because of both the inevitability of human error (on the part of the driver but also others) and basic physics.
Furthermore, one might argue that the right to private communication is more important than the marginal improvement in life that you get from driving a big car for no particular reason.
Like consider a person who wants to drive a car filled with TNT. By its very nature this is a danger to others regardless of the intent of the driver or other drivers. Society might be argued to have an interest in regulating such behavior. I think there is a good case to be made that unnecessarily large vehicles differ in degree only from the TNT case, but differ categorically from using signal.
I'm not making the case that the differences justify banning big cars, but there are differences between the two situations.
Is that not a significant enough number in and of itself?! Like it even begs the question, how were they allowed to go onto the roads in the first place, when it's not even a hard to reach consequence.
The standard of driving in most places I've lived in the US is very low for a developed country. People blow through pedestrian crossings, get-there-itis, crawling through stops, don't use their turn signals, make illegal U-Turns, ignore overtaking conventions. Compare to most countries in Europe where a driving test is a rigorous 45 minutes and you can fail for all sorts of minor stuff. I live in a place with decent pedestrian infrastructure fortunately. I'm more worried about being involved in a random fatal crash when I'm driving than on foot.
Making right-on-red illegal wouldn't be bad either. The number of times I've almost been run over when a car is stopped in the middle/straight lane and blocks line of sight to a right-turning car that doesn't look.
DUIs are at least treated seriously. It's one of the few offenses that will get a visa instantly revoked. Same in Canada I think.
Wait...is the massive problem that it should be more than an order of magnitude more people killed than those killed in mass shootings, or is it that it should be less than an order of magnitude more?
They are such completely different categories of ways to die I'm having trouble understand how to compare them in any sensible way.
That I guess is the problem they are highlighting. It is more complicated still when comparing to ill health, war, poverty, terrorism. But OTOH we should strive to make transport safer like we do with commercial flight.
We never invest effort in things that provide the most value; we invest in what we're the most emotional about. The number of people killed in 9/11 and every plane hijacking is dwarfed by any single year of deaths due to either vehicle accidents or gun shootings. But we do nothing about either of those things, and instead spend $180B on TSA, to save zero lives. We then roll back things like vaccine mandates, to kill more people (mostly kids).
This is often brought out as though it should engender gasps, but a moment of thought punctures the whole prospect. We need cars and trucks for a variety of purposes, and while I agree that most people don't need a pickup or a Unimog, there are many people and businesses who do. The ability to rapidly travel is a centerpiece of modern life, and has been for quite some time.
Mass shootings by contrast are not economic or personal drivers of freedom, they're not an intended output of the system that creates them, they're a relatively modern perversity of it. Of course people are more concerned with seemingly random violence that many other countries seem to live without, or with much less of, compared to inevitable accidents.
People also love to present "Vehicle vs Ped" as a de facto accident on the part of the vehicle or the driver, and that can certainly be the case! It's also true that about 30% of pedestrians involved in these accidents have a BAC over the legal limit. There are also issues with poorly designed and maintained lights, safety systems on roads, and so on that play a role. None of this is as simple as, "Just bike to work, dummy."
I'd also add that recent stats show a REDUCTION in pedestrian fatalities, it's just that it's been on a rise since 2009, but it's going back down again. Possibly that comes down to addressing some concerns I've mentioned above, some comes down to fewer megamonsterSUV's, and some comes down to smartphone and in-car tech no longer promoting using said phones on the road.
I think you're take is a bit off for multiple reasons.
First, people need transportation, not cars. For the vast majority of people, if you truly need a car, it's because your infrastructure was built in a way that doesn't provide any other modes of transportation.
Second, mass shootings aren't the intended effect of guns in the same way pedestrian fatalities aren't the intended effect of cars. Both cars and guns are providing some perceived value (personal transportation freedom and self-defense/safeguard against tyranny/national defense) with a significant number of deaths as a tradeoff.
Third, implying someone with a BAC over the legal limit for DRIVING is somehow responsible for getting killed while WALKING instead of driving is comical and darkly ironic considering drunk driving accounts for almost a third of traffic deaths in the US [1].
Nothing in the article is suggesting that we do not need cars and trucks.
It does make a compelling case that specifically large trucks and SUVs are causing preventable deaths. And I certainly find no reason that we need very large trucks or SUVs.
Having any car or truck is a choice. People lived before the automobile. They do provide benefits, just as SUVs and trucks provide benefits. The Amish live without cars, so too could we if we chose to. In fact, the Amish could make the same claim about all automobiles that you make about preventable deaths attributed to larger vehicles.
> Is your point that taller trucks and SUVs provide considerable benefits over shorter ones? What are those benefits?
Ground clearance. In some parts of the US and for some use cases this is non-negotiable. It would be like buying a car in Texas without an air conditioner. There is a Japanese automaker (Subaru) that traditionally caters to this market almost exclusively in the US.
I won't buy a vehicle with less than 8 inches of ground clearance for safety reasons.
I believe that you don't need one, and I know that I don't need one, but I think it's a little rich to make that a blanket statement for the species. There are people who have jobs, lives, and live in places unlike your own experiences.
I'm not sure what the need is for a very tall pickup truck that can also hold a family five? But maybe there is one. Perhaps there is also a need for an excavator that holds a family of five, idk. If a real need is demonstrated, then sure, please do not ban the manufacturing of an excavator that has the necessary hook-ups for modern child carseats simply because I, a commenter on HackerNews, made a statement that was a little too sweeping for the needs of past, present, and future human beings on Earth and across potential settlement across the universe and dimensions beyond.
But most people do not need a very large truck or SUV. Vehicles with hoods closer to the ground and better lines-of-sight are safer for those around them, while having practically no impact on the utility of said vehicles as they drive on roads and highways in the USA.
Mass shootings kill almost no one. They're a red herring. Even with a really stupid, inclusive "3 or more people injured" criterion. If you use that criterion for defining what a mass shooting is, the modal number of people killed is...one.
The problem is that other countries have seen nearly identical trends in vehicle market share trending towards larger vehicles and have seen sustained declines in pedestrian fatalities. John Burn-Murdoch went deep on this in the FT a couple of years ago (archive link at bottom).
> Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence suggests this may be mistaken. Last year’s improvement is a case in point. Two reasons often cited as key causes of poor US performance both worsened: the total number of miles driven by Americans increased, and US cars continued to grow larger. Yet fatal collisions still declined.
> Adding to the evidence that this is not a dominant factor, car sizes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have traced similar paths to the US without resulting in a spike in fatalities.
> Another theory is that the rise of homelessness in the US may be pushing pedestrian deaths higher. A recent study found that there had indeed been a marked rise in traffic-related deaths among the homeless, but this, too, can only explain a small portion of the overall rise.
> Instead, an underrated factor seems to be not American cars but American drivers [...] The determining factor seems to be different attitudes to safety, with Americans twice as likely as Canadians or Europeans to say they find it acceptable to use a phone while driving.
I too am unconvinced bigger truck/vehicle means things are getting of control. It's terrible how the NYT article has no facts on overall road deaths, so here I state one for everyone: Occupant deaths have a clear falling trend. So while pedestrian deaths are climbing, the overall deaths are still trending downward, and I shouldn't have to defend that the overall count is more important than the pedestrian subset.
That can be very easily explained as "bigger cars are safer for their occupant and deadlier to the person getting hit by them".
I do think you need to defend your assertion, because the difference between a driver and a pedestrian is that the driver "knew the risks" while the risks were imposed on the pedestrian.
It's the hood geometry, stupid. An effective regulator could fix this. As a side-effect, it would make cars look like the new USPS delivery trucks, which would make petrosexuals big mad.
Where I live you don't touch a phone while driving. Heavy fines and both human and camera based survellience. I think it is excellent and has surely saved lives. Driving is the thing you don't need to multitask.
Data shows that introduction of iPhones in 2007 is a better explanation for the increase in pedestrian deaths than heavier trucks and SUVs: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ubbfrv/oc... (All the credit for this analysis goes to the reddit user, I’m just summarizing.)
Trucks and SUVs have been getting heavier consistently since 1980 while pedestrian deaths consistently decreased from 1980 to 2009. Truck sizes went up much more from 1980 to 2009 than from 2009 to present. But pedestrian deaths dropped almost in half from 1980 to 2009.
The NYT study on which this article is based acknowledges that pedestrian deaths dropped in half from 1980 to 2009, but then does nothing with this information.
The times article hand-waves away distracted driving by saying that other countries haven't seen a similarly large increase. The problem with that is that vehicle sizes in all other countries have also been increasing, and other countries like Canada and Australia have seen almost identical market shares of those large vehicles without the surge in pedestrian fatalities.
The large factors are phone use (more prevalent among american drivers and there's data to show this), and homelessness - the homeless are dramatically overrepresented in US pedestrian deaths and the population has increased dramatically in the US over the past decade. Even more so though it appears to be attitudes, Americans are twice as likely as Europeans or Canadians to say using a phone while driving is acceptable. Though no single factor is a smoking gun, vehicle size is one of the least convincing. Getting hit by a 4000lb car or an 8000lb truck matters much less than how fast the vehicle's going (let's all remember our high school physics class).
Weight of SUVs/Trucks isn't really the right metric to use though.
The proportion of them which have a grill height which impairs visibility of the average height pedestrian would be a "better" metric, except it isn't as easy to cleanly define that.
With me driving in my 2000s Ranger, I can at least see adults walking in front of it just fine, even though it is bigger than a 1980 Toyota pickup.
If the issue is distracted drivers, I don’t see how heavier trucks is still not the issue. With lighter vehicles you would likely have a higher chance of surviving.
Minor quibble: I don't know if 'heavier' is as important as 'taller,' though. I have seen someone hit by an actual sedan, be thrown onto the hood, fall on the ground after the car stops, and survive. Being hit is not the same as being run over, which is much harder to have happen with a car-shaped car.
They can both be factors, just one is much more influential than the other. Alcohol is involved in about half of all pedestrian deaths. So it seems that's the issue, but people would rather talk about vehicle size.
Alcohol is also a factor on the pedestrian side, not just the driver side. This has not been addressed. It is still a relevant factor on both sides. Yes, vehicle size/design is another factor.
Yes, but on the whole we got much heavier trucks from 1980 to 2009 while pedestrian deaths went down.
There’s also the issue that heavier vehicles are inevitable due to EVs. Our bz4x won’t get tagged as a “big evil truck,” but it’s about the same weight as a base model Ford F150. And heavier than a Toyota Tacoma double cab.
The article acknowledges that rise in vehicle height is only part of it and might explain 10% of the rise. I'm not sure how exactly they measured things but there's no reason things could've gone down while car height simultaneously slowed down the decline.
>“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Am I crazy? The article itself points out that only 10% of the increase would have been 'saved' if cars had remained the same size. This goes directly against the title no?
There's certainly more than one reason, my gut would point to more smart phone use both by drivers and even by pedestrians themselves.
I wonder if one day using a smart phone while driving will have the same stigma as a DUI (and similar punishment). I struggle to argue it shouldn't, its sometimes a little crazy to think about that if the person in the other lane gets distracted on their phone, I might be involved in a head on collision at 60+mph.
The quote you've selected from the article is a poor summary of their findings (not your fault, they're the ones who wrote it). You can find a more precise explanation at the end of the article in the Methodology section.
"200 to 400" is a rounded estimate for how decreased hood height could affect recorded collisions. But from the article:
> There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.
It doesn't appear that NYT included in their model the larger blind zones and how that causes more collisions. So they shouldn't have said their 200-400 estimate covers the increase in vehicle "size" when it only models one dimension of size growth.
And it doesn't quantify how many other lives have been saved specifically because the accidents involved bigger, sturdier, safer cars/trucks/SUVs. That has to be a significant statistic.
> “While vehicle safety is critical, blaming larger vehicles for pedestrian deaths overlooks systemic issues” including the design of roads, said Mike Levine, a spokesman for Ford.
10 000 people will see the headline here on HN or somewhere else and form their opinion based on it only.
1000 people will open the article
Out of those, 200 people will understand that the title is completely false relevant to the data.
Out of those 200 people, 150 people will still deny that the title is a lie, down vote, or try to sidetrack, because even a lie has to be supported if it supports their own political agenda.
So this is only one of the reasons, and a relatively small one:
“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Came here to highlight the same. The fact that only 10% are being attributed to bigger cars, but the exact reason isnt being discussed. More than likely its the addiction to technology, the smart phones, and somehow its not part of discussion in the article.
Yes, the old joke about common sense not being common anymore. But of course it was always meant as a figure of speech to indicate plainly logical items.
I have long held that larger vehicles should have higher licensing requirements purely based on stats. We see it in the stats that large vehicles are disproportionately dangerous to other vehicles and people so licensing should catch up. We have motorcycle licenses, why don't we have SUV licenses? Similarly, the penalties and limits should be higher. BAC should be lower. Fines higher. Etc etc. You want to drive a big vehicle, fine, pay for it and do what is needed to protect other people from your choices. I shouldn't have to pay for your decisions. This is a fundamental principle that big vehicle drivers conveniently ignore when they believe 'their freedom' trumps my right to life.
Licensing is mostly based vehicle operating characteristics. We already have large vehicle licenses like class B and A for heavy vehicles. Motorcycles have a separate license due to different operating concerns.
If you're actually following the stats you will see that vehicle size only accounted for 10% of the increase. You would want to focus on the other 90% to make the biggest difference. And using that logic, you should increase the education and testing requirements for all drivers because that will provide gains over the whole driving population instead of a single segment.
Penalties should remain the same for whatever the outcome is - doesn't matter if a bicyclist kills me or a semi truck.
Lower BAC limits are opposed even by groups like MADD. The data shows the current level is good and lowering it further will result in more people ignoring it.
Nobody is asking you to pay for others' decisions (unless we want to go down the rabbit hole of insurance, for which sports cars and high priced electrics are costing all drivers more). Nor is a large vehicle an infringement on anyone's right to life (someone's recklessness could be).
- Nobody is asking you to pay for others' decisions (unless we want to go down the rabbit hole of insurance, for which sports cars and high priced electrics are costing all drivers more). Nor is a large vehicle an infringement on anyone's right to life (someone's recklessness could be).
Large vehicles increase the risk of death for other people. The article was about pedestrians but the stats are clear about collisions with these vehicles, same size = same death rate. Small vs large = major increased risk. The argument that ownership of these vehicles doesn't infringe on my right to life or have costs to the public as a whole is ridiculous when the stats show clearly the impact. I'll even branch out to true monetary and other costs, if we extend further these vehicles have secondary impacts due to the resources they consume. Parking lots and roads are bigger making cities worse. Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in. And, yes, they kill more people. The decision to own a big vehicle like this and drive it around everywhere has direct and major negative impacts on me at multiple levels. So, yes, I am tired of paying for other peoples decisions and just accepting it.
I will agree that in general professionalism on the road should be higher. In general we need to take driving more seriously. It kills tens of thousands each year and has a tragic impact on younger driver stats. These large vehicles though clearly represent a significant fraction and just because there are other areas that could help it doesn't mean we should ignore this one.
When you look around at people in the US there is a strong chance that most of them know personally someone that has died in a car accident or has a friend that knew someone that died. Almost universally everyone knows multiple others that have been in significant accidents or themselves been in major accidents. Just last week my cousin was struck when crossing a street (luckily just a bit banged up but mostly fine). If we can reduce deaths on the road or pedestrian deaths significantly by licensing, even if it just did it by minimizing the number of these vehicles since the bar was higher, I'd take the win.
"The argument that ownership of these vehicles doesn't infringe on my right to life or have costs to the public as a whole is ridiculous when the stats show clearly the impact."
Really, can you show me ownership of these kills people? You aren't looking at this from a systems thinking perspective but just comparing numbers on the surface. Owning a vehicle isnt killing anyone. It's a tool. If used responsibly, the negative affects are minimized. What you are actually comparing is the irresponsible use of a car vs the irresponsible use of a truck. I would rather address the irresponsible use than the marginal difference in fatalities caused by the two. Can you show the stats you talk about, or are we still on the 7.5% from the article?
"Parking lots and roads are bigger making cities worse."
Source? Lane size and parking space width is pretty standard.
"Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in."
Source? Gas mileage is lower, but emissions standards are pretty strict for most pollutants. The bigger issue would be large diesel trucks.
"The decision to own a big vehicle like this and drive it around everywhere has direct and major negative impacts on me at multiple levels."
I have yet to hear you provide a direct negative impact to yourself - they're all theoretical or n-order indirect.
Education and testing would be the best approach as it would cover multiple issues and the entire population.
- It's a tool. If used responsibly, the negative affects are minimized.
This argument gets me all the time. By this argument we should get rid of all regulations on vehicles and requirements for licensing. I too would rather people suddenly woke up and were responsible. Using the 'its just a tool' argument ignores the reality of the impact of that tool and denies their right to life.
-"Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in."
Here is a forbes article saying everything I said with links. Traffic is worse and deaths are higher because of these things. [1] and here are some facts about road deaths involving suvs and light trucks. The key point [2]:
'Conclusion In the case of a crash, SUVs and LTVs cause more severe injuries to pedestrians and cyclists than passenger cars. This effect is larger for fatalities than for KSIs, and the fatality effect is particularly large for children.' [2]
- I have yet to hear you provide a direct negative impact to yourself - they're all theoretical or n-order indirect.
So, yes. They are directly impacting me daily by impacting my city in major negative ways and also increasing my risk of death. I am paying for the decisions of others and it isn't right. The stats show it.
> If you're actually following the stats you will see that vehicle size only accounted for 10% of the increase.
It's a paper that will make money automobile advertising.
Implicitly if there were any other single larger cause for the deaths then the article would be about that.
The sensible thing to do would be to carry on investigating the 90%, but in the meantime get on with saving the 200 to 400 people by removing largest factor - the _unnecessarily_ large vehicles - that are _known_ to be killing them.
New CDL licensees have to take a rather expensive training course before they can get their class A/B CDL (things with a GVWR of >= 26,000# or school bus). There are some online theory only sites that charge up to $300, but in many (maybe all?) states (mine for sure) you still have to take an accredited behind-the-wheel (plus theory) class that runs $4k-5k. Everyone getting their CDL after Feb 2022 has to take this course.
For sure big trucks don't pay the costs of the damage that they do to road surfaces. Road damage is proportional to the cube of speed and 4th power of axle weight. So an 80,000# semi does 4096 the damage of an 4,000# SUV, both driving the same speed.
Math:
80,000 / 5 = 16,000# per axle
4,000 /2 = 2,000# per axle
(16/2)^4 = 4,096.
Disclaimer: I used to work for my state's version of DMV & Highway Department.
"Driving a Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) requires a higher level of knowledge, experience, skills, and physical abilities than that required to drive a non-commercial vehicle. In order to obtain a Commercial Driver's License (CDL), an applicant must pass both skills and knowledge testing geared to these higher standards. Additionally CDL holders are held to a higher standard when operating any type of motor vehicle on public roads. Serious traffic violations committed by a CDL holder can affect their ability to maintain their CDL certification."
- I wonder how things compare for a pedestrian embracing a large SUV vs. a Semi.
You could start by pushing for RVs (both bus and gooseneck) to have to conform to the same standards as a commercial driver would. That seems like one of the most immediate and obvious places where it seems crazy (IMO) that we allow people to get behind of the wheel of stuff they have no business driving.
A reasonable range small EV weighs more than that. 3500kg is reasonable. Regenerative braking and brakes in general are much better than when those weight limits were imposed.
Glad they spent half the article on the a-pillar issue. As a recent recipient of a bit of back pain I'd be real happy if my next car didn't require me to try and peer around those things at every intersection.
People spend a lot of time on Trucks, but I don't see why SUVs get a pass. Every single car is an SUV now. They're higher up, heavier, and have a higher beltline all so that drivers can "feel safer."
The fuel economy figure that a vehicle needs to achieve used to be a set figure. Lobbyists got that changed so that now vehicle fuel economy is a function based on the width and length of the vehicle. And that's why the roads are full of fatmobiles.
Anything with a hood that's so high primarily because it's gender affirming care is paid for with the deaths and injuries of innocents. Regulate the shape of the front end of any vehicle, as I'm sure any honest regulator would.
It's quite sad, the old 1997 F-150 (the first year of the quite-ugly-but-practical "bubble" aesthetic) specifically advertised its low front hood as an intentional measure to improve visibility. And that thing had better visibility than nearly any modern car. It was incredibly despite still being a relatively large truck.
You can thank the CAFE standards for setting emission limits of small vehicles below what was technically possible, driving manufacturers to the larger sizes.
It's honestly frustrating that you can't buy anything like an S10, an O.G. Ranger, Jeep XJ, or even the 90's and early 00's GM and Ford full size trucks. I understand they were at least marginally less safe in a crash, but I think changes could have been made to get them safer and more efficient without compromising the ease of repair and generally more pleasant driving experience. It's amazing how much more divorced from the road and the outside world a new truck is compared to even the late 00's pre financial crash trucks, especially as any additional utility they provide is unchanged at best, and frankly so far as I can tell grossly net negative (i.e. how many 8 foot beds have you see recently? How many flatbeds have you seen that weren't on obvious fleet trucks? The Suburban is also frankly grossly less utilitarian now).
this is part of the subsidy to American car companies.
American Big Three cannot compete with Asian/European cars, so they gave up and erected a regulatory barriers to protect their market:
1. chicken tax
2. Section 179 Deduction - allows writeoff of Vehicles Over 6000 lbs for people non-W2 people (self-employed and small business owners)
3. CAFE footpring and "light truck" loophole and CAFE exemtpions for US trucks
everything designed to protect Big Three's highest margin products at cost of human lives
It's an arms race. My older SUV (Lexus 3XX) is worrisome in it's size and blindspots but it's still dwarfed by current trucks. Moreover, once most SUVs were basically built over a pickup chassis but it seems like pickups have gotten so large that it's unusual to see an equivalent SUV.
Super relevant: Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? by Douglas Husak
One of my favorite philosophy papers. The author argues that because of the high crash incompatibility of SUVs, they are immoral - imposing needless harm on others. It's also ironic that on average, there is no net safety benefit to those who drive them -- because of higher rollover risks!
The original designer wanted the truck to feel like you were driving a fist, punching through the air. So we are killing people so that the driver can have an aggressive aesthetic. And the design has spread like a contagious meme, even BMWs have it now.
2009 coincides with the invention of the smartphone. I've lost count of how many times I've nearly been run over because people are staring at their phones while driving.
The attribution to larger vehicles while ignoring smartphones seems misplaced.
We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.
A major aspect of this are side effects of "safety-first" obsession over the occupants of the vehicles themselves.
Mandatory airbags in the A-pillars is probably the single biggest killer out of everything. The blind spots are massive compared to cars before these regulations. I've seen some models where it seems bad on purpose. Why don't federal regulators want the drivers of these gigantic vehicles to be able to see where the hell they are going?
Weird question that popped into my mind (not a judgement on this), but is there a similar jump in prosecutions for vehicular manslaughter or are these "whoopsie'd" away?
Seeing today's distracted drivers, driving their mini armored troop carriers around in parking lots, makes me wonder what happens when someone "didn't see the person" and runs them over.
Edit (after some research):
"Philadelphia review found only about 16% of drivers who killed vulnerable road users were charged; 30% were closed with no charges, and 46% had no data provided."
So that's a bit concerning but I'm not sure what I'd want if I or a loved one were personally on the end of "making the mistake" vs being a victim of a mistake.
The article keeps mentioning "unintended consequences" but I'm not convinced these are. Trying to come across as scary (perhaps because you are yourself scared) seems to be the whole point. "Get out of my way, look at how little I care about your safety, look at the size of this thing." The article mentions machismo but I don't think that quite covers the (profitable) pathology here.
Yep. Automotive grille design became sharply more aggressive over the last 20 years (not just in terms of hood height). It says a lot about the psychology of consumers.
I believe that as self-driving cars become more ubiquitous, these deaths (and other traffic-related deaths) will decrease. I was driving on a 4 lane road at 5 in the morning and all of a sudden my Tesla model 3 slams on its brakes, missing a deer that jumped across the road by ~2 feet. Its path was completely perpendicular to the road and I couldn't see it until a few seconds after my car started braking.
Imagine a future when a much larger proportion of drivers have 360 degree vision with no blind spots, infinitesimally small reaction times and a human failsafe in the driver seat.
Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.
On a number of occasions I have nearly hit people who I simply could not see crossing in my Volvo XC90 due to these pillars. I've been driving for nearly 30 years in the US and UK and have never felt anything like it.
[edit: for future readers, please note that I am not saying it would be legal or correct to hit these people.
I am saying precisely that the A pillars on the XC90 are dangerous as they introduce blind spots that I've never experienced before. We test drove the vehicle, and they weren't apparent during that test drive. I am now responsible for them.
Down in this thread you will read some responses that seem confused about that point. No, it is not legal to run people over in the road. You will be at fault. No, that doesn't make it smart to jump into the road until it's clear that the traffic has yielded you your lawful right of way. IAAL]
> Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.
Those pedestrians do have the right of way; you need to have another look at the Highway Code.
You chose to buy the car with the big blind spots. You’re responsible for checking your blind spots, by moving your head as necessary. This is part of the driving test.
Your poor consumer choices do not absolve you of your responsibilities and obligations.
Yes, I agree with both of those statements. If you read the original statement before the "tut tut" response, you will note that I was only suggesting the A pillars introduce dangerous blind spots. I understand how that could be confused on other platforms, but I expected folks on HN to extend the benefit of the doubt that posters are not generally oblivious to the law. So the conversation derailed.
It's not a speed issue. They're in a blind spot. Your brain tells you that you can see everything, but it's incorrect.
My experiences have been under slow circumstances only. And that makes sense because the individual "lingers" in the blind spot (and perhaps matches your speed) if you're going slow. If you were going fast, the blind spot would be moving much faster and you would see them.
My experiences have been at around 5mph. Again, it's not speed.
If you watch the video in the post you will understand. The person is just invisible to the driver and they're travelling around the same very low speed.
While their conclusion is probably correct, I would have liked to seen the number of fatalities normalized by population, miles driven, number of pedestrian increase, speed limit change etc
Normalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years.
So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.
Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride
? The correlation is trivially demonstrable. You can probably ask an agent to pull the relevant datasets for a state, run a linear regression, and demonstrate this. It's the entire reason traffic crash statistics in the US are normalized per mile.
> Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people
It's not poor planning, it's what Americans want. Americans, by and large, do not want to live in dense neighborhoods or tiny homes like in many parts of Europe. You get that in places like NYC and quality of life in those places is atrocious.
There are millions of people in American cities, and tons of people move from the less dense suburbs to these cities.
There are probably even more people who would move if they could, but our cities are expensive (because housing is expensive when you don't build it) and so they stick with the "default". Staying put, getting a car, and finding a way to make it work.
You can't conflate "this is what Americans want" and "this is largely the only choice most Americans get".
Quality of life is very subjective though.
Americans by and large are anti-social, so these sparse layouts/nimbyism are a result of that. This in turn reinforces living patterns which may or may not be optimal for any given person.
Again, they may be social enough on their own terms, but insufficient to want to live closer to others for a variety of factors, manifesting in very real differences in civic planning.
I would look to this behavior need to change before any substantive zoning/transportation changes are really adopted.
Yes, that's why people pay the ridiculous cost of living to live in NYC, because the quality of life is atrocious.
At least around where I live (DC suburbs), every dense neighborhood becomes tremendously popular. The limit is that planners are very reluctant to allow them to be built. No problem getting permission to build an 8,000sqft house on a 1/4th acre lot though.
He's right though beside the point about NYC (if it were awful why do people pay for it). Americans love the suburbs, i'd imagine most non Americans would like them .
Americans are just rich enough and lucky with geography to be able to have them.
... his whole point was that people don't want to live in cities, which is just factually incorrect. just baseless, pointless idiocy that is just par for the course on HN these days.
I find any conclusion that doesn't focus on TEXTING to be suspect.
By focusing on the wrong things (especially the endless caterwauling about "speeding"), people are letting legislators off the hook for abetting murder. Texting while driving should be a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties. But year after year, they refuse to do anything about it.
Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads. That's about giant vehicles hitting people above the waistline. If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
> Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads.
From both the NYT video and their article:
> And that increase is unique to the US. Most other wealthy countries haven't seen a similar surge, suggesting that possible culprits, like the raise of smartphones, don't tell the whole story.
---
> If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
How popular do you think the tall-ass trucks are in Portugal?
1990s SUVs were different vehicles than 2026 SUVs. A 2026 4Runner Hybrid weighs 1500lbs more than a 1996 and is 19 inches longer, 12 inches wider, and 6 inches taller. This is significant.
This stuff wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t regularly get reports of an acquaintance’s daughter who is now almost brain dead (can’t speak after a serious accident).
Phone is 99% likely the culprit.
Self driving AI or putting the #%£€ phone down would have prevented it.
All of the problems (high hood, bad visibility downwards) are fixed by sports cars and especially mid-engined and rear-engined sports cars. Plus, the brake distance is much lower.
“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not
have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over
the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents
about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Plenty of oversized trucks and SUVs in urban areas. The majority of the population in the U.S. is considered urban, so why exactly is the "urban perspective" not legitimate?
There’s plenty of rural Europe too, but Europeans mostly use vans (tradesmen) or tractors (farmers) instead. Both have much better visibility than those tall trucks with a long hood, at least from my experience.
The headline is wildly incorrect. Large vehicles are only responsible for about a 7.5% increase. Odd they aren't talking about the bigger issues at play and chose to mislead us.
“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
"According to the report, pedestrian deaths have not only increased by 75% since 2009, but the fatalities have been correlated with the hazards presented by the physical heft, height, and blind spots inherent to today’s big trucks and SUVs."
I'm excited that EVs get to avoid CAFE standards, so we get to have small vehicles again. Even though legacy domestic car manufacturers aren't going to be involved, as they practically wrote the CAFE standards that eliminated small vehicles, and there's bipartisan support to tariff EV imports out of existence, there's still enough market demand for multiple domestic startups.
CAFE isn't all they have to deal with. NTSB has stricter safety requirements now and we will probably not have small vehicles again. I just want a damn Hilux.
> I'm excited that EVs get to avoid CAFE standards, so we get to have small vehicles again.
I don't see evidence for EVs stimulating small vehicle production (but it would be awesome if it were the case). The one smaller vehicle bright spot is perhaps Tesla's Cybercab, which is compared to the Honda Civic, which itself has grown very large over the years. In order to get to that size the passenger mass capacity of the Cybercab is roughly 2/3 of the Civic. [0]
Unfortunately, we still get abominations like the GMC Hummer EV (~9000 lbs, classified as a class 3 medium duty truck). Rumor has it the model has been cancelled after 2026 luckily.
As long as I get to buy a small vehicle, I don't mind if someone else buys something inefficient. It's better that oversized EVs be on the market than just oversized diesel trucks.
> More than 40,000 people die on America’s roads every year, making them nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven than those in other rich nations. What’s more, the death rate has increased over the past decade, despite the adoption of more sophisticated passive safety systems and advanced driver assistance systems such as lane keep assist and automatic braking. The number of pedestrians killed by motor vehicles has almost doubled since 2010. Why? “Weight is to blame,” The Economist insists.
> Using data for 7.5 million two-vehicle crashes in 14 American states in 2013–2023, The Economist found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles killed 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The publication estimates that if the heaviest 10 percent of vehicles on America’s roads were roughly 1,000 pounds lighter, fatalities in multicar crashes would fall by 12 percent, saving 2,300 lives a year, without compromising the safety of the occupants of the heavier vehicles.
> “For every life the heaviest one percent of SUVs or trucks saves in America,” The Economist wrote, “more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.”
> Of course, what’s behind those grim statistics is simple physics. Force equals mass times acceleration: The heavier a vehicle, the harder it impacts an object at any given speed. The core issue in America is the massive differential between the lightest and heaviest vehicles on its roads (and to be clear, The Economist’s reporting is focused on cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks, not heavy-duty commercial trucks or semis).
I don't know the answer to this, and I don't know how to find it. The stats seem to mirror Bird and cohort uptake. Are these datapoints muddied with escooter death and injury?
It's really astonishing how virtually every single quality of life indicator is negatively correlated with number of cars in the road. One of the most effective things you / your city / your nation can do do improve your live in every dimension is to take measures to reduce the number of cars.
Or, put another way, 1% of every traffic fatality, or 8% of every pedestrian killed by cars. Those are not a small number being affected by a single variable.
I can't take the argument seriously when they ask "Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?"
To make a stronger case of their graphic "you go under vs over" you'd only need to sample coroner reports and find evidence of crushing, which shouldn't be that hard given the sample size. This seems a bit correlation != causation pushing hard into p-hacking given the bounds from the 1980 data long before the hood-height hypothesis could carry and other obvious hypothesis like smart phone adoption curve.
Precisely. Want to cross the street? Get in the truck. Want to walk to that Starbucks next door for a quick espresso? Take the truck. Are you a newborn in a stroller? Your fault for not being in a truck and putting yourself at risk.
At the same time avoidance systems have become much better on those large new cars… so would it have even worse had collision avoidance not come into being?
Also interesting that often people tend to imagine F-150s, Silverados ,etc., but if you see what people drive they are large Bentzs, Toyotas and of course Suburbans and F-150s. But everyone is building them not just American manufacturers.
Avoidance systems aren't that much better, some just make an angry beep before plowing into something. Also you can't fix the fact that a heavier car is going to take longer to stop and will impart more force even at lower speeds.
The homemarket websites for Mecedes (Geländewagen), BMW (X series), LandRover (defender), Toyota (LandCruiser, Lexus LX), etc. have the large SUVs for sale. They are not as popular as they are in the US but they are available.
Hard to find reliable data, but could only find (shared) data for 2022 for large SUVs - whatabout doesn't quite cut it imo, feel free to look into midsize SUVs but imo the really large ones are more problematic:
Ford Expedetion: 81,988 in 2021, 71,648 in 2022
Mercedes GLS: 24,482 in 2021, 12,395 in 2022
Chevy Tahoe: 106,030 2021, 109,032 2022
Chevy Suburban: 48,214 2021, 52,459 2022
Dodge Durango: 65,935 2021, 58,627 2022
GMC Yukon: 84,242 2021, 80,731 2022
Nissan Armada: 22,814 2021, 17,551 2022
Toyota Sequoia: 8,070 2021, 7,066 2022 (but about 25,000 after refresh in 2023)
* Ford F-150 [2] *: 726,004 2021, 683,633 in 2022.
I'm sure the mix is different and skews a lot more Japanese for mid-size (which are probably also dangerous), but these large SUVs and trucks with huge hoods and no rear visibility are getting quite problematic [1]. The front blind zones are pretty ridiculous, to the point that people advocate for front cameras: https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0?si=o0uvSEmKZrn2gHSN&t=205 (with timestamp).
Does the added risk translate proportionally to increased insurance costs? Or is there an imbalance? When I was a teen getting insurance for the first time, certain vehicle colors were significantly more expensive to insure, and that fact factored into my car buying decisions.
"Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century"
They're making loud noise about nothing. 200-400 people in a country of 200+ million is nothing.
Yes... big trucks and SUVs might have something to do with it. Could also be that people are not paying attention more because of their phones. Could also be that the people in these vehicles suck at driving them.
The data doesn't account for particular instances, it's just a guess at what is the cause.
Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.
One thing I was surprised by when driving in Coquitlam where I have cousins is that drivers there would start moving right after the green. This is strange to me because drivers in San Francisco will frequently be stationary for seconds afterwards. Looking at the rough statistics, it appears the RCMP police for smartphone usage in a stricter manner than SFPD does (or at least they write more citations) which makes me think that drivers in that region have adapted by not using their smartphones as much.
I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.
Hah, near me the Police Chief claimed this was fine as they were professional drivers who'd had "special training".
I wonder why this "special training" to allow people to be able to safely text and drive isn't available to all of us... but I think I can hazard some theories...
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen drivers in the Bay Area conducting a full blown Zoom call, video and all.
(I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync’d which otherwise took a half hour.)
It could be Europe has stricter driver's license requirements resulting in fewer people who might succumb to distractions getting behind the wheel. And more availability of walking and public transit options meaning more of those people don't need to drive in the first place. Giant vehicles certainly don't help regardless.
But when we cast around for other explanations, for some reason it's always interesting to zero in on an uncontrollable factor that means we aren't responsible for the situation we find ourselves in.
Btw Europe is full of the same dumb humans that live everywhere else. Granted, they have better bread, cheese, and health care.
>Sedan hits you, you get hit in the knees and fall on the hood. Brodozer hits you, it strikes your chest/head, pushes you over and drives over you.
You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Your two most common options are pavement and windshield. Pavement is worse because cars have a fair bit of engineering that goes into preventing head onto windshield. At the end of the day it's mostly a question about getting hit above or below center of mass.
Modern (ie. larger than they were 20yr ago) crossovers and midsize SUVs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in these stats. But the people who want to talk about this problem tend to drive Rav4s and not Chevy 2500s so the latter gets complained about even though the former outsold it 2:1
Relatedly, minivans are kind of bad no matter how you cut them because it's hard to stay true to the form factor and not have pedestrians go straight into windshield in fairly low speed crashes.
> The issue isn’t mass alone, but also height. Yes, spreading impact over a greater area reduces the force experienced by any given part of your body, but when that surface area rises further and further from the ground, the impact point on your body rises with it. If you’re hit below your center of mass, you’re likely to fall toward the vehicle. If you’re hit at or above that point, you’re likely to be knocked down in front of of the vehicle instead. The latter becomes less survivable due to the poor visibility offered by taller trucks and SUVs.
> “We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash testing for the report. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
Afair, e.g. Land Rover stopped producing the classic Defender due to more stringent pedestrian protection regulations in the EU. They introduced strict front-end safety requirements for cars and SUVs whereas the US does not. So vehicles designed and sold in European (in numbers) are probably safer for pedestrians because it is tested for and required - but there are exceptions for some US trucks somehow.
> You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Not to be combative, but I'd also like to see stats on that - that sounds just as made up. I'd expect a lot of pedestrians to strike the hood (about just as likely as windshield) as most pedestrian accidents happen in parking lots, drive-ways, traffic lights and vehicles exiting across a sidewalk (under 25mph).
maybe there are other confounding factors that make smartphone utilization much less likely in Europe. Specifically no daily long commute in a car where people get bored and are tempted to use them.
Other countries take it way more seriously. The US has way more deaths per capita than Australia (just one example) simply due to lack of enforcement of speeding, drunk driving, smart phone use.
In Australia I would get a speed camera ticket for 2kmh over. 15+ kmh over and I’m getting pulled over, mandatory court appearance, minimum license suspension of 90 days.
I would get a random breath test every 2-3 months. Pulled over, breathalyser handed to me, blow, and then on my way. Very fast and efficient.
Smartphones are an absolute no no. May e you’d touch one in the outback where you can see clearly for 20 miles in every direction that nobody else is around. Everyone sets up hands free operation through a car Bluetooth. If you can’t do it hands free you simply don’t do it. You program in your GPS maps before you release the parking brake.
In America… people are annoyed when they get a $150 fine for going 30kmh over the limit.
Yep. The linked NYT article has this weak-sounding line -
> Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.
- but it is so focused on telling a long-winded story that I didn't bother checking whether they'd really tried to correct for that. (My cynical guess is "no" - since if they really cared and had ruled phones out, they'd clearly say so.)
Surely someone somewhere will bring to bear a solution that will disable all but voice calls on smartphones while the smartphone is paired to the car and the car is moving but allow for the devices of minors in a moving vehicle to still function like smartphones. They might also use interior cameras to ascertain who is driving and which device should be neutered but for emergency communication.
Yes, people would be annoyed at first but they also will experience a sigh of relief that they don't have to reply to a boss's or co-worker's text in the middle of a commute or running deliveries, etc.
Per tfa vehicle size “ represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths” so the title is really a distraction from the (likely) root cause that GP brings up.
Could it be that the other differences are driven by differences in the built environment? Like narrower roads making people drive slower, or bollards, or alternatives to driving making it less likely to have people that shouldn't be driving doing so?
that's called a hypothesis. now go author a study to test it, like the study being reported on. hypotheses without evidence don't stand up to hypotheses that have been tested.
You could compare rates to other countries that do have smartphones like the US, but don't drive the large vehicles like Americans. That might be illuminating.
It could also be from people staring at their cell phone and walking down the road. I see it all the time. I've seen people walk right into intersections against the light.
Maybe, it's even both, because while I can believe large cars aren't helping... I surely know staring on your phone, walking, and not paying attention is just plain dumb.
The NYC DOT did a study on this a few years back and found it not to be the case:
> Reports of device distraction are scarce in the New York City and national fatality data, and estimates of annual mobile device-related injuries are dwarfed nationally by pedestrian injury estimates where pedestrian distraction was not cited. In short, despite growing concerns, DOT found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly
to pedestrian fatalities and injuries.
https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shoul...
You know what's way worse: drivers using their phones when driving.
If you drive in a way that you kill a careless pedestrian it's a problem. It's cars and drivers almost exclusively.
I don't think the US consumers are buying the bigger SUV/trucks because they are safer. At best it might be a minor contributing factor. It's primarily a status/identity thing.
Early SUVs were actually extremely unsafe, high wheel base made them more prone to tipping over (rollover), no crumple zones and similar safety measures because we'll just make it big instead, and so on. This is why newer SUVs have thicker A-pillars and other measures, because the earlier ones before safety regs were enforced were deathtraps.
n=1, I dated a low empathy woman who specifically drove a Chevy Tahoe due to mass for safety reasons and transporting her only child in the vehicle frequently. “Good luck to the other driver.”
On the flip side, there's a lot to be said for a low centre of gravity and it's still the case that US "trucks" get smushed by actual trucks (road trains and heavy haul outmass a tahoe).
Great video. She was sophisticated enough to understand the risk profile, anecdote shared to demonstrate that some folks do decision their purchase around winning the potential tonnage battle. Very “tragedy of the commons” that can only be solved with regulation. Otherwise, some will buy big because they can.
They're only "safer" to the driver. Large vehicles put everyone else at a higher risk.
This is "race to the bottom" logic. The only end to this logic is everyone driving giant vehicles in bubbles because "it's safer for meeeeeeeee" as they hit children in a school zone cuz the blind spot in their Ford fuck550 is a football field long.
Race to the bottom logic is rampant in this form of capitalism that we're experiencing. Everyone's excuse is valid and only shifts the baseline to more excess and extreme behavior.
Yes, this is a problem. Look at a typical truck from the 90s or so, they are tiny compared to today’s trucks.
The same thing is true of cars. Today’s civic is as big as an accord used to be. There is no Del Sol.
We need to turn the incentive knobs that worked so successfully on consumption so we now work on vehicle size.
Also, about the center of gravity discussion: I used to have an old friend that spent decades in business running a body shop. I asked him once what was the worst animal for causing vehicle damage. ( This was in rural South Dakota. I was thinking cow, horse, maybe bison. ) Nope. He said most animals would go up and over the hood, just like the people in the article. He said pigs were the worst. They stay low, going right into the car and not bouncing over. Often resulting in a total loss for that car.
These are gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men. Taking them away is a direct attack on their masculinity. When we say, "Men are under attack," it refers to things like this.
Regardless of any safety claims, for that reason alone, I don't see it as a politically viable issue.
I can't tell if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing that men use big trucks to compensate for a masculine sense of inadequacy. But I think this is a good point, and I think we need to fight against it.
I don't think it's politically impossible. These things are killing children (among many other people). "Giant trucks and SUVs are killing children" seems like a pretty powerful line.
> These are gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men.
I think people simply do find SUVs (which I don't like) convenient. Many women, including a huge number of moms, do happen to just love SUVs. Both in the US and in the EU.
In the EU SUVs are now approaching 60% of all cars sold (59.25% or so, latest numbers). You don't get such a market share by being mostly cars sold to men needing to "gender-affirm".
"SUV" is too broad a category. A RAV4 is an SUV. It's similarly sized to most of the SUVs I've seen in Europe. And a pedestrian getting hit by one would have a similar experience to getting hit by a sedan. It's nothing like the big Rams, GMCs or F250s with the high front grilles that are becoming more popular while also being far deadlier to pedestrians.
A Ford F150 is fucking ridiculous in comparison, and larger than any truck I remember seeing growing up, and there's people with F350s for personal use.
One of them ran over and killed a kid outside a nearby children's museum. Those things are not safe.
What are the benefits of an SUV over a minivan though? They seem objectively worse in practically all regards: worse fuel efficiency, worse doors, less cargo space, worse visibility.
Not all "SUVs" are equivalent. The best ones have AWD and are basically just a beefier sedan/wagon.
They more or less have the capabilities of a small pickup truck, but exchange the bed for more passenger space and inside cargo room. A minivan does have more space, but cannot tow and would immediately get stuck in the first mud patch it sees.
I have no idea why people in the city buy them though (other than snowy regions).
Sure, people can love SUVs, and trucks can be gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men. Both can be true.
Watch a US truck commercial. The market and the motivating themes are immediately obvious. Besides, drivers literally adorn trucks with prosthetic testicles. That's something that cannot be unseen.
You might be the one saying this right now, but how old is this comment?
I don't think I've ever heard any man ever say that in real life, but even online it's probably been almost a decade since this was memed into the ground.
> I don't think I've ever heard any man ever say that in real life
Um, because men get weird when you point out the gender-affirming actions they do? Try it irl and see what the reactions are. There's a reason the only place free of physical intimidation is where this can be safely said.
Besides, how old is the privacy comment or the "parents should parent" comment we see dragged out on every kid's social media ban? It's almost like the age of the sentiment doesn't have any bearing on its relevancy.
I have 360 degree cameras (at toddler height), auto braking, every conceivable safety mechanism. I really think that once these are implemented, any hatred of large vehicles is just jealousy.
Jealous of what exactly? Sounds like you are trying to justify your needlessly large/heavy vehicle. Plenty of accidents still occur with vehicles that have all those features. And accidents involving large/heavy vehicles are deadlier. It’s not rocket science. On top of that they have other downsides, like increased pollution and road degradation.
>Sounds like you are trying to justify your needlessly large/heavy vehicle.
I drove a Honda Jazz until I literally couldn't fit everything in anymore. I found I could carry 4 1.2 meter galvanised steel poles at an angle before I ran out of capacity. Which worked fine for me, I wouldn't be anxious unless they were literally scraping the windshield. I could carry half a rack of servers in the back with the seats folded down, before the back of the thing would start to scrape pavement. I needed something that could do better than that when I upgraded. Most hatches and sedans were a backwards step, and Honda stopped selling the Jazz in Aus. But for whatever reason, people feel the need to comment on the large vehicle.
>Plenty of accidents still occur with vehicles that have all those features.
With reduced impact.
>like increased pollution and road degradation.
I get better distance per litre out of the big one, and if its more polluting then I don't understand why I struggle so hard with the DPF which is literally designed to bring the thing down to our honestly egregious emissions standards, I literally dream about getting it illegally removed. "Road Degredation" seems marginal at best, wider tires spreading the load out further. Seems like another engineering problem if it is a problem. The poms figured out how to prevent their CVR light tanks from causing road damage, I am sure big utes aren't that much of an issue.
My vehicle is as safe or safer than older lighter vehicles currently permitted on the road.
Why should the goalposts run off into the distance? Surely I have now met the common definition of "safe". At what point is it enough? This just brings back to Jealousy or some kind of Tall Poppy syndrome again.
A larger vehicle is more of a hazard to others than a smaller vehicle, and the safety features you describe don't change that.
But, as you're in Australia, I'm not sure your definition of "large" matches the story's or mine. North America has a whole class of huge ass vehicles that are relatively rare elsewhere in the world. Are you driving an Escalade, F-150, or similar?
no, it's the fact that in accidents (where you are not the cause), people die disproportionately under your giant vehicle. it's safer for you, but almost no one else.
and don't get me started on the environmental/political aspects.
why would someone questioning your selfish (I'm not targeting you personally, just voicing a general perspective) decision have anything to do with jealousy?
1. Fuel economy regulations that scale regressively with vehicle size, that incentivize automakers to build and market larger vehicles that are easier to hit regulatory targets.
2. Rollover and crash worthiness regulations that require thicker A-pillars and more robust roof structure.
3. Towing performance. The large pickup manufacturers are in an arms race to beat each other’s power and towing capacity numbers. This requires a large, upright grille to provide adequate cooling for a large engine.
4. Consumer demand. The idea that marketing is telling people what to buy is silly. People are spending $80k+ on massive vehicles because they like them. Simple as that. The industry puts lot of marketing effort behind vehicles that are flops. They can’t make people buy a product they don’t want.
Disclaimer: I own a huge diesel pickup, along with a Tesla Model Y and a Porsche 911. Why? They’re fun! I use the pickup to tow an RV, but it’s also just fun to drive.
I have definitely noticed the visibility problem though. Forget pedestrians, sometimes entire cars are hiding behind the A-pillar! You have to move your head to the side to clear the blind spot safely.
What also happened around 2009?... Smartphones taking off in a big way.
Distracted pedestrians must be a significant factor too. Especially if they've got noise-cancelling Airpods or similar in their ears while looking at their phone.
> Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?
> Whap! Time’s up. What did you get hit by? If you picked small, you might be dead. If you said “large,” your odds are lower. Why? Two reasons. First, F=ma and second, P = F/A. OK, I suppose that’s really just one reason, and it’s called “physics.”
I drive a big SUV because I have a better chance of surviving if something hits me. That has to be a significant statistic somewhere too, right? How many lives were saved because of big cars?
Yes, that's the point. No offense to other people, but I'm trying to not die when I drive to the store. Driving a tank with a sun roof is a good way to do that.
WA state recently passed a law about e-bikes/e-motorcycles to deal with the issue of younger teens on these kinda moped-style e-bikes going very fast around town (and often riding quite recklessly).
The law is reasonable, but it strikes me what a double standard there is for biking vs driving. For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those riders.
Meanwhile, everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people, but we do basically nothing. Even on the off chance that we passed a law about them, existing vehicles would certainly be grandfathered in, we would never outright ban current vehicles/motorists. If we banned existing SUVs and trucks, millions of people would be screaming bloody murder about their right to drive pedestrian-killing cars.
The law doesn't ban them. It classifies fast e-bikes as motorcycles (which require registration, insurance, and a motorcycle endorsement).[1] This seems reasonable to me. The previous laws for e-bikes were based on outdated assumptions about battery & motor technology.
I do think it would make more sense to simplify (and future-proof) the law to just say, "If it can go >30mph on level ground and has a motor, it's a motorcycle." But similar to code, it's easier to add legislation than it is to modify existing rules.
1. https://apps.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=6110&Year=202... text: https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Se...
I think it does ban them, effectively.
There is what some people say is a gray zone (I don't actually think it's that gray) where a device is too fast or powerful to be a legal e-bike, but also doesn't meet the requirements to be a road legal motorcycle. Will Progressive give me motorcycle insurance on my DIY e-bike without a VIN? Will the DVM register it? I don't think so. In most states there is no path to legality, at least as far as operating the thing on public streets goes.
I don't think that's necessarily a problem that needs solved. I'm fine telling the person that bought a Sur-Ron, "too bad, off road only".
> I don't think so. In most states there is no path to legality, at least as far as operating the thing on public streets goes.
Not true. It's common to convert dirt bikes into street legal vehicles with conversion kits that add the required pieces. Depending on the state, that means turn signals, a mirror, headlight, and tail light.
I think it's completely reasonable if we tell people that their Sur-Ron is for private property use only until they add the same equipment we require every other street legal vehicle to have. I also think it's reasonable if we tell them their electric motorcycle doesn't belong on the bike path.
> I think it's completely reasonable if we tell people that their Sur-Ron is for private property use only.
Anywhere an ORV can be legally used. That's not just private property.
>I think it's completely reasonable if we tell people that their Sur-Ron is for private property use
If only that were actually the law. My roads are 100% private with absolutely zero tax payer funding yet the dumbass registration laws and requirement to display a plate even apply on my private road (only exempt if the owner white-lists traffic, which cannot be done under my easement rules which at best would only might allow me to black-list abusers). In fact pretty much all the roads in my town are completely privately funded and privately owned yet you still need registration/plate along with the legal mumbo jumbo to obtain it.
Pretty soon you realize the laws have nothing to do with the fiction of the laws being there to protect the public roads or public land or taxpayer funding or some such, it's a sham pretense that falls apart upon inspection of how they work.
>If only that were actually the law. My roads are 100% private with absolutely zero tax payer funding yet the dumbass registration laws and requirement to display a plate even apply on my private road (only exempt if the owner white-lists traffic, which cannot be done under my easement rules which at best would only might allow me to black-list abusers). In fact pretty much all the roads in my town are completely privately funded and privately owned yet you still need registration/plate along with the legal mumbo jumbo to obtain it.
It sounds like your roads are accessible by the public though, which means unregulated public traffic, which means all of the tools necessary to ensure a basic level of safety and accountability need to be followed. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, does it not to you?
Like, you still have to follow building codes, pay property taxes, and not murder people on your private property and that doesn't seem outrageous.
People get VINs and insurance for DIY vehicles all the time. There are companies that specialize in custom vehicle insurance.
People who say this is a "gray zone" are practicing motivated reasoning. It is not gray, they are just illegal. There doesn't have to be a "path to legality" for illegal motorcycles. The only "path" necessary is the one straight to jail for the guy who imports these from China and sells them to the public.
> The law doesn't ban them. It classifies […]
The Shifter cycling channel recently polled viewers and came out with a pretty good classification system:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z35F2R7FeE&t=17m20s
"E-bike" is pedal assist only/mostly with max speed of 30kph/20mph (only while pedalling) and throttle cuts out at low speeds (7kph: basically just there to get some inertial); treated as just another bicycle (perhaps limit age to ≥14 yo). Everything else is an "e-moto" with the same rules as mopeds and motorcycles.
Of course enforcement is key: importing, selling, on the road.
Also worth noting that in some places in the EU a automobile Category B also gives you Category AM allowances:
> In some countries, holders of a B driver licence are also entitled (sometimes with special conditions) to ride motorcycles <= 125 cubic centimetres (7.6 cu in) and power <= 11 kilowatts (15 hp) and ratio power/weight <= 0.1 kilowatts per kilogram (0.061 hp/lb)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence#Since...
Well, probably the right thing to do for large trucks and suvs is to reclassify them so that you need a commercial license to drive them.
omfg I would love that. Like literally force manufacturers to put air brakes on anything above a certain weight limit and demand additional certification to operate one. Full Disclosure: I own four vehicles that would trigger this requirement, each for different reasons, and would be whistling and smirking in the DMV line to take the commercial test.
Transporting families around comfortably should require a commercial license? Sounds pretty ridiculous.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Driving something so large that it would require a commercial license to transport your family around is ridiculous
They don't require commercial licenses though, because they're not large enough to and don't serve a commercial purpose when transporting families / their things. Plenty of families have the need for third-row seating and the ability to haul things around.
My minivan seats seven. It has the footprint as a toyota camry. It’s only marginally heavier than a camry.
Can you please explain to me again why you need a lincoln navigator or the like?
Toyota Camry curb weight is ~3300 pounds. The minivan based on the Camry is the Sienna, curb weight ~4600 lbs. Lincoln Navigator curb weight ~5600 lbs. If the difference between the first two is marginal (~30%), the difference between the second two is less (~20%).
By comparison, actual CDL-requiring commercial trucks weigh up to 80,000 pounds.
That's not the issue. The issue is how tall these grills are and to a lesser extent curb weight. You don't need either to have third row seating or the ability to haul things.
Minivans and station wagons are just as good as a Tahoe for transporting a family.
Better, actually. Visibility is way better in either of those than a giant-ass SUV.
Not if you need to tow a trailer / camper. Maybe there's a reason different kinds of vehicles exist? To fulfill different requirements of their drivers?
But families towed tent trailers back in the 80s behind their sedans and station wagons, too.
Maybe there's a bit of circular reasoning going on here where people bought giant vehicles because they liked the aesthetics and internal roominess, and then the prevalence of giant vehicles opened up the market for larger and heavier towables— rigid body RVs, seadoos, a trailer full of gas dirt bikes, whatever it is.
I also feel like in past times, it was much more common to see a two car household with two very different cars, with one being a hatchback or sedan for getting the family around down and doing grocery runs, and the other a truck or van for those occasional "hauling" requirements. Nowadays I feel like many times it's two big SUVs, just tuned to his and her brand tastes rather than two shared vehicles for different usages. I'd be interested to know if the stats on multi-car households would bear this out.
>But families towed tent trailers back in the 80s behind their sedans and station wagons, too.
Are we concerned about safety, or are we not? Because towing a 2000+ lb trailer behind a sedan is kind of dangerous.
But that does get to the point. Maybe differentkinds of vehicles need different kinds of qualification testing. Would you trust your 16yo that just passed their driver's test in a sedan to tow a boat through town with an F250?
I see lifted trucks and massive SUVs in neighborhoods and grocery stores. I very rarely see them using their towing capacity.
You're going to have a hard time hiding the entire SUV and Light Duty truck market behind an airstream, especially considering neither have transmissions capable of hauling one. Statistically almost nobody tows anything. Of those that do the vast majority tow stuff that comfortably falls within the pulling capacity of a Subaru Outback (or a VW Golf hatchback if you're really feeling rude). Nobody's trying to take anyone's dually away, just reign in the excesses of the auto industry that were mainstreamed by a combination of emissions laws carveouts and aggressive marketing. Hell if this went through we all might start seeing approximately affordable vehicles on the market again and I feel like that would be a welcome change.
Sure, until you need to tow a trailer weighing more than about 1500 lbs or drive on a dirt road where the minivan bottoms out. You might not need those capabilities but a lot of families do that stuff every week.
You can drive those off-road away from where people live, or you can get properly trained and insured for driving such a dangerous vehicle where people outside vehicles will be present.
Is that a joke? A Tahoe isn't hard to drive. Every regular auto insurer will write policies for them.
I don't tow, but when I had my Chrysler Pacifica (RIP), it was rated to tow 3600 lbs.
People seem to like towing stuff with their Vanagons, but I hope that doesn't involve hills. :P
My god, you wouldn't want to ever be (shudder) ... uncomfortable!
Dutch grandmas can transport 3 kids to school on a cargo bike but young parents in the US need a 4-ton lifted truck? Odd.
What's more comfortable about SUV or a truck than a minivan or combi?
How is a tall hood increasing your family comfort? It only increases your ego.
I spent significant time recently in both a new F150 and a Toyota Sienna, and it isn't even close in the comfort between them. F150 wins by a mile by the sheer amount of space you have in that thing for both passengers and cargo. Not to mention the ability to tow.
How often people tow anything?
Plenty of minivans also have tall hoods. I assume by combi you're talking about a station wagon, and in that case you're trading cargo capacity and the ability to tow boats / trailers / campers / etc... Ego has nothing to do with it - utility does. You can fit more people and things in a larger vehicle, this isn't rocket science.
Which ones? Caravan's, Sienna's, etc all have significantly lower hood heights than a typical 3 row SUV.
They all have sloping hoods. A sloping hood increases visibility and reduces air resistance.
Why does a Kenworth have a sloping hood but F-150's and SUV's don't?
I don't think the cargo capacity argument really holds water. I drive a Volvo V60 wagon which has trunk space of 23.2 cubic feet. When it was in the shop, I had a loaner XC60, and I could noticeably feel that the trunk space was about the same, despite the vehicle sitting considerably taller.
Sure enough, the XC60 crossover has a trunk space of 22.4 cubic feet.
It's the same trunk, just higher off the ground, which to me makes it less useful to me: more lifting to get stuff in, harder to rummage through items (eg camping pantry), much more difficult to access my roof box.
True, it's not exactly the same situation, but it does ban them for the riders (the teens) who were previously on them.
You could make it more analogous by saying that we could enforce stricter regulations on big SUVs and trucks in terms of, say, driver licensing, and you'd still have a huge outcry if we tried that.
It blew my mind the first time I rented a 35' long 26,000 GVWR diesel truck and drove it right onto the interstate. What you can accomplish on a simple US driving license is something special you can't get almost anywhere else in the world unless you count places where bribes work.
The EU cuts you off at like 8,000 lbs.
Gotta love regulation stifling the living daylights our of your society.
Or: Gotta love regulation keeping our societies alive.
The US averages 14.9/100k traffic fatalities, Europe 6.7 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Canada beats the euro average at 4.7 but similarly allows regular Joe’s to drive a moving truck and trailer a car behind it with a general license.
+ Canada’s rates are better on a per km basis (even beating the Dutch).
Annual/biannual safety inspections are only required in 3 of 10 provinces and those 3 are on the smaller side (PEI, NS and NB).
Motor vehicle infraction enforcement is… an afterthought for Canadian police (they don’t think/care that their salary/town depends on it). But admittedly, even lighter than I’ve experienced in Europe.
It’s gotta be some other factor behind excess US road fatalities.
American drivers are also entitled assholes (I say as an American driver). How DARE you tell me I can't do what I want, when I want, or change my behavior in the slightest to benefit my society/local community?
Couldn't at all be affected by migrants coming in from third world countries that liberal states freely give Licenses/CDL's to and then send across the country
If you think Canada of all places doesn't have immigrants driving around, boy do I have news for you.
Those sorts of codes do exist already. The problem is that bike manufacturers will put on a "go fast" switch with a "Don't flip this or you'll be breaking the law" note in the manual.
Of course, a lot of people flip that switch because 20mph can feel pretty slow.
The Dutch seem to just do the sensible thing and have mobile e-bike dynos. If they suspect the bike is not properly regulated, they'll test it and keep it if it fails.
AFAICT, lots of people in the Netherlands also complain about kids on fat tire ebikes that look like motorcycles.
OTOH people in 80's complained about kids on BMX bikes terrorizing the neighborhood, and those things were slow.
Id we wanted to do sth similar for SUVs and Trucks it would be a special driving licence required, with additional requirements and more expansive insurance.
You do realize e-bikes only go 25 km/h? You're confusing them with speed pedelecs. Those go around 50 km/h, although that's still a far cry from scooter speeds, let alone motorbikes.
In some European countries, yes, but other countries like the US have different laws. The UK doesn't have a classification for a speed pedelec, just the 25kph class.
Are these categories very widely recognized in the e-bike community or in legislation? I’ve never heard of a pedelec (but I’m not well informed).
Where I live (western EU) it's simple. If the speed is limited to 25 km/h it's an e-bike. Above it's a speed pedelec and requires registration plate + insurance.
In Norway e-scooters don't require registration plates but do require liability insurance. It's less than 100 NOK per month (~10 EUR).
Back in the 20th century, before electric bikes, when I was but a wee lad the neighborhood Karens screeched until the local PD dropped one of those mobile "your speed is" trailers onto my street for about a month.
It turns out 12yo me could go 29mph on a mountain bike.
30 is too low IMO. Make it 35 or something. 25 is a joke.
I picked 30mph because that's the current threshold for what is considered a motorcycle in the state of Washington. Until recently, e-bikes were exempt from this because the old law was made back when e-bikes were rare and couldn't go much faster than regular bicycles.
I've gone >50mph on a bicycle, 40mph on level ground. Yes it's possible, but it requires significant effort and you can't accelerate as quickly as an e-bike. That's why I said, "and has a motor". Heck, a fast runner can endanger people on the sidewalk. When I'm running, I often slow down in crowded areas so that if someone does randomly veer into my path, I'll have time to avoid them.
If lots of people (who I assume are very fit) were riding bicycles dangerously, maybe the legislature would make some laws about that. But until it becomes a problem, there's really no need.
I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable.
I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
Same thing happens on NextDoor, a few kids hanging out and joking around makes people think there's a gang problem, I've seen it happen in my own neighborhood and it's ridiculous.
It is true that violent death and maiming from SUVs and large trucks is a crisis, that society generally ignores. When I once called these hoods "gender affirming" a reply chastised me for being inflammatory and claiming that stating the plain obvious would get in the way of convincing others, but I think it's exactly the opposite: unless we start talking about the truth of these things nothing will happen.
> I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
I thought it was all fun at first, but they've since invaded the bike paths and parks near my house. It seems like more common they become, the more emboldened the riders are to drive 40mph down the bike path and weave around people.
It's so bad now that I have to be on high alert on the mixed-use path to grab my kids and pull them in when I hear the unmistakable sound of a Sur-Ron coming at us from behind at high speed. Usually a group of several kids.
They've also taken to riding through the parks and fields we go to, treating the little hills as jumps. The grass is getting destroyed. Parks have to put up temporary fences and gates to keep the electric motorcycles from destroying the fields.
It's not just kids, either. I've had several close calls this year while I'm riding my (pedal) bike and middle-aged people riding modified e-bikes (not pedaling, just zooming along at high speed) have zoomed around corners and almost hit me. They jump from the road to the sidewalk to the bike path as convenient and everyone else has to avoid them.
It's bad. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not a problem. I spend a lot of time outside with my kids and the problem is getting worse by the year.
I'm tempted to say nothing some baseball bats won't help. But the real problem is that you have bicycles increasingly morphing into things like look more like motorcycles and, if they can't be legally sold that way, someone will sell them or they can be modded.
My anecdote only but the contraptions being sold as “e-bikes” are actually motorcycles. Like all things a few bad apples ruin it for everyone but in what I have seen it’s more than just a few bad apples. From maintained mountain bike trails, to riding at speed on walking paths. They are far more than just some kids being kids. It is ultimately a lack of parenting these days but I don’t believe the new laws coming into place are out of line. A vehicle that can hit 30mph within a few seconds is a lot different than a kid peddling at 20mph sustained.
Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!
Perhaps we can let the few bad apples killing lots of people with their massive hood height lead to better regulation of such hood heights?
We have literal deaths on one hand, and on the other, fears that are already heavily covered by regulation. I don't know Washington, but the laws around the speed regulators, etc., for e-bikes are extensive. People still demand "laws" because they overreact and get fearful.
I just wish people would be more fearful of killing others with their cars. It's the biggest cause of death of children, yet there's no action. Yet here we are, discussing ebikes rather than the real causes of child deaths.
I'm in the SF Bay Area and see small kids pre-adolescent or barely adolescent riding e-bikes with insane acceleration and speeds. The kind of performance, that in my youth, would come from a 250cc four-cycle motorcycle or 125cc 2-cycle motocross bike. And they are riding with absolutely no sense of traffic rules nor that they themselves are part of the same traffic. It's a really bad combination.
It doesn't matter what tiers there are when parents are negligently providing their kids with these kinds of "toys". I don't know if they are totally ignorant and think "it's just a bicycle" or if they know exactly what it can do and just can't see that their kid isn't ready for the responsibility.
I'm as anti-car and pro-bike as they come. Cars and trucks are a much bigger danger than e-bikes...
But California's clear tiers of ebike regulations are meaningless without enforcement. Over the past half decade blue states have become unwilling to enforce almost any laws. when they do enforce the laws it is sporadically. This matters for ebikes, it matters more for cars. Running a stop sign is absolutely not enforced any more.
> Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!
The people buying the hackable e-bikes aren't walking down to their neighborhood e-bike store and paying full retail.
It's an internet phenomenon. They're ordering them online. There are subreddits where you can go and figure out which ones to buy that can be easily hacked or modified.
There are companies addressing this demand by making bikes that are technically capped to a specific tier of performance when sold, but any kid with the internet can find the instructions to "unlock" it to remove all of the limits and use the full power of the bike, not have to pedal, and so on.
In NJ there was a string of teen ebike deaths, all of which were cars hitting teens riding on the side of the road.
The solution the state came up with was regulating the living hell out of ebikes.
I live in WA (south of seattle) and your description is accurate, there are kids riding around on sidewalks in the area around my house on electric motorcycles that are sold as e-bikes. While I don't personally love it, they kept their distance from my small kids so I figure "let kids be kids". The one instance that frustrated me was they also show up at local mountain bike and skate parks. There they ride up the down trails and destroy a lot of the trail edges, a couple of times I've asked folks to leave.
I was hopeful when I saw the new law that it'll be used as a tool to take action on actual problem usage without punishing those using them safely. Unfortunately I'm aware of the history of laws like this, so I'm worried it'll just be used against lower income / privilege folks. We'll see.
When the kids decide to take their E-bikes on I-5, you know something is wrong with their decision making skills: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1sjv7ua/teens_on_e...
Yes, people freak out when they see a kid on an e-bike on a crowded freeway.
Surely this isn't as stupid as an SUV trying to take light rail though right?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how...
Maybe Seattle is the problem ;)
I remember hearing about that kind of problem in Europe all the time 20 years ago.
I'll never forget that time my mom accidentally drove straight into a tram tunnel. One of the "we can laugh about it now" stories.
Reasonable people freak out when they see that on a freeway
There are also plenty of unreasonable people who freak out when they see that on a not-freeway
Do they really need a new law to prevent bikes on freeways? I think that's already highly illegal.
You know, the law banning kids from driving vehicles that can go over a certain speed is also already on the books. The new law is just a clarification that no, you can't be an 11 year old going 40 MPH with an unlicensed E-bike.
The big problem is just Seattle being incredibly underpoliced and really no laws under homicide are really enforced or punished.
It's legal in Oregon and Montana as long as you stay in the shoulder. You can walk there too. I can't remember the law in Washington.
In western states with a lot of rural places only serviced by interstate they sometimes never passed blanket prohibition against non-motorized traffic on the interstate property.
You can bike at some places on I-90 in Washington state where better options aren't available. I don't think it applies to E-bikes though, or at least the ones that can go faster than 15 MPH.
Yes, sometimes the interstate is the only reasonable route through a pass in the western US.
It is/was legal on rural interstates in Washington. I've cycled down I90 in roughly the North Bend area (in the late 90's).
Ok, but riding an ebike on the interstate is already illegal. If the problem you're trying to solve is kids taking ebikes onto the interstate, then you don't need any new laws
> I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable
I was driving on a WA highway going ~47 mph (I made note of it for reasons soon to be clear!) when a group of 3 tweens on ebikes, none wearing helmets, passed me up in the bike lane going at least 10mph faster, and I watched them run through a red light up ahead. They got lucky.
I don't have a problem with kids being kids but this is over the top dangerous. To be clear, it's a few small groups of kids. There have been crashes, and they sent a Bellevue woman to the hospital in a hit and run, but as far as I know there's been no fatalities yet.
We don't need to drop the hammer on kids. We just need some common sense.
There's kids who go around on ebikes in my neighborhood, and it's only a matter of time until one of them is hit. I don't mind kids on bikes, and encourage it. I do, however, encourage them to stop at stop signs and to actually look for traffic at intersections, and that's something that these kids are not doing.
To be fair, most cars go too fast in residential areas. I drive like a grandma in them and there's a good chance that someone is up my ass and annoyed that I'm not exceeding the speed limit.
There's a restaurant in a city near fairly near where I live where I often eat at the sidewalk city in the summer. And the (protected) bike lane is this somewhat horrifying combination of bikes, e-bikes, escooters and things like motorcyles together with pedestrians crossing. And, because many people are on bikes, a lot just blow through red lights at the nearby intersection because it's a bike lane.
> there's a good chance that someone is up my ass and annoyed that I'm not exceeding the speed limit.
Same with not going right on red when it's impossible to see if anybody is coming without pulling way past the crosswalk.
Sometimes the car behind me honks to show their support.
Cars do go too fast through neighborhoods: one ran into a house and killed someone inside.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-person-killed-tesla-a...
There's some of that, a lot of it though is e-dirtbikes that can pretty easily do 35+mph stock and 50+ with light modifications. A friend of mine has one and I've ridden it. It's a motorcycle with mountain bike brakes. I don't think they're bad vehicles, but I do think they should be treated as motorcycles as opposed to bicycles, and 13 year olds shouldn't be riding them on public roads.
To be clear, the "e-bikes" in question aren't what you usually think of as e-bikes. Not only do they look different, they're faster and typically don't even require pedaling (and may not have pedals at all). Hence why I said they were kinda like mopeds.
People freak out about non-car transportation in general. Someone on my Nextdoor has been freaking out over temporary bus lanes, because nobody takes the bus but it's going to cause horrible traffic. They posted about rush hour gridlock on that street the other day caused by this grave injustice. The bus lanes haven't been put in yet....
There's constant vitriol about bike lanes, as if it's some huge sacrifice for drivers. And of course heaven forbid you roll a stop sign on a bike. Never mind that drivers do this constantly and are a far greater threat.
A lot of people fear anything that's not what they're used to, and they'll come up with any reason they can find to justify that fear.
There's a few traffic circles / roundabouts near me now. I love them -- they are safer and greatly reduce traffic if I'm headed out that way. The number of people who blame them for serious accidents is nuts, even if the accident is several miles away from the circle.
Stepped out of a coffee shop, got text from wife, grabbed my phone and got missed by inches by a kid on a scooter easily doing 25mph on the sidewalk. The text possibly saved my ability to walk in future by having me to pause just for a moment.
I was 3-4 feet from a building corner when someone raced around it on a scooter. Amazing to me the complete lack of both self-preservation and respect for others.
On the other hand, kids have always been stupid. We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.
Okay, now do the times when some reckless driver nearly got you killed...
I don't disagree cars are more dangerous. But I can manage to be concerned about two things simultaneously.
But this post is about SUVs and somehow the biggest thread is about the danger of ebikes and scooters. It sure does make you think...
I'm way more concerned about getting run over or T-boned by a distracted driver in a huge pickup, and literally nothing is getting done about that.
on the sidewalk? Never.
> We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.
Automobiles for 16-year olds have been around for a very long time.
Anyways, it's quintessentially American to be talking about oversized landship SUVs and trucks killing people, only to have someone derail it into kvetching about kids and bicycles.
The problem is with bicycles being relegated to either the sidewalk or the main road with cars. I'm really not a fan of how cities create bikelanes by putting a line through the sidewalk and then nobody respects it.
I see the appeal in trying to ride fast, but it gets kind of scary. When I rode a bike I went fast outside the city specifically to avoid pedestrians.
And the main road with cars wouldn't be an issue if people had a little common sense and respect. I was descending down a mountain road on my bicycle once, definitely speeding (enough so that I caught up to the traffic ahead of me -- really just trying to get off the mountain quickly though since I know people like the following exist), and some giant truck decided it was up to them to show me a lesson for riding in the road -- tailgated me the entire way down the bloody mountain, and there was no safe way for me to pull over (no shoulder, trees and steep drop), to speed up (I was already booking it, and there was a car in front of me anyway and no safe way to pass), or slow down (IME, slowing down when in a car sends people like that into a rage, so I wasn't comfortable bleeding off any speed with this guy a few feet behind me). If I had any equipment failures or had to slow down for any reason it would've been a nasty accident.
>I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.
It's kind of a hilarious yardstick for societal decline if you think about it.
70yr ago the boomers were drunk crashing sports cars so frequently that laws got passed.
Now late teenagers can barely afford an e-bike and mostly aren't causing problem, but laws still get passed, by the literal same cohort who were drunk crashing muscle cars back in the day.
In my area kids are doing street takeovers and assaulting people in cars and pedestrians. Laws have been passed to deal with it but there is very little on the enforcement side. Plus kids are riding around in effectively what are electric motorcycles that can hit highway speeds which would normally require licensing and registration like any other motor vehicle. Recently I know of a 15 year old who crashed on one of these bikes and died. Having said that, 15 year old me would have absolutely loved having one of these kick ass ebikes.
Maybe not so much "ban" giant vehicles as stop subsidizing, rewarding, and encouraging them.
There's safety and emissions loopholes that brought this on: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-lo...
We also subsidize fossil fuels to some $900B/yr, not counting foreign wars for oil, climate damage, health impacts etc. Fuel should be MUCH more expensive, around $15/gal. If priced right, the market would weed out these giant vehicles for personal/entertainment use. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/in-gasolinegate-the-true-...
There are already mechanisms in place to hold SUV and Truck drivers accountable and track them down (via their license plate).
The problem with ebikes is any unlicensed driver can get one, and go 40mph on a sidewalk without any practical way to hold them accountable.
I live near one of the busiest biking + walking trails in the country, and the egregious disrespect and recklessness of ebike's and scooters is insane to me. Even on the parts of the trail that are split into two or three sections (walking, running, and biking sections) I see people going 20-30mph weaving in and out of walkers. What's crazy is it would be safer if they were operating gas motorcycles, because atleast you could hear them coming.
I suspect the loudest voices would be from the automakers and dealerships, who make their biggest margin from SUVs and oversized trucks. They have powerful lobbyists and spend a lot on PR, so it often seems like their anti-transit, anti-pedestrian positions are more popular than they are.
I'd love to see a real grassroots effort to tax (toll?) based on GVWR or vehicle length. It would be met with tremendous opposition by special interests, but I could see it succeeding in the right environment. Maybe it could be framed as a rebate for small vehicles, rather than a tax on large ones.
When vehicles were starting to get noticeably bigger about 20 years ago, I asked some family members why they were buying vehicles they had to climb up into.
"On the highway, I'd rather kill someone than be killed in a wreck."
They would not recognize that while that might work for a while, it wasn't going to lead anywhere good for our society. A generation of people thinking like that has filled our roads with vehicles that protect their occupants while making it more dangerous for everyone else.
I agree, but in order to effect change in an arms race, you need a higher power that deletes the arms. Otherwise you just lose the arms race and die.
>everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people
The number of things I believe "everyone knows" has tended to zero over time.
I think at the very least owners of these vehicles should be made to undergo more rigorous licensing education and testing.
> For biking, there's a danger that's noticed, and we quickly pass a law that straight up bans that type of bike for those riders.
This is not true. The law didn't ban anything. It just clarified what's classified as a bike with requirements like "must have pedals" and "you have to pedal it".
There wasn't a ban. Previously there was a gray area where people were taking full on e-motorcycles, which should have been on roads, and trying to ride them in spaces meant for pedal bicycles.
They weren't full on e-motorcycles, they don't meet the legal requirements for motorcycles. As one example among many, some jurisdictions require a motorcycle have turn signals.
So if they can't be operated as an e-bike and they can't be registered as an e-motorcycle, they've been banned.
> they've been banned.
No, they're not allowed on public roadways or bike/pedestrian paths. Which I think is fair and good, because they're not designed for either space.
There are a lot of different types of vehicles that aren't allowed on the roads of bike paths, but people still use them recreationally on private property. You can find retrofit kits to add the necessary mirrors and turn signals to many dirt bikes if you want to ride on the road.
If someone wants to ride on a bike path, they should have something that meets the definition of a bike. We've stretched the definition to include reasonable e-assist bikes, but we're not stretching it further to include everything with 2 wheels and a motor.
If someone wants to ride on the roads, they need turn signals and a mirror.
We don't have to allow everyone to ride everything on every public shared space.
Sounds like a ban to me.
I agree that some of the more egregious big motor e-bikes should be banned, but whenever you shift the requirements like this you're going to be taking away somebody's only means of getting to work. There are people out there driving big motor e-bikes because they can't afford a car. Or because they can't get a license.
> There are people out there driving big motor e-bikes because they can't afford a car.
Unfortunate for them, but we can't be shaping the laws for everyone around a couple people who already bought a big-motor e-bike to ride on the bike path.
I'm not really persuaded by this argument either, as they can sell their big-motor e-bike and buy a lesser model, or trade someone straight across.
> Or because they can't get a license.
This just raises more questions. If they can't get a license, they shouldn't be driving on the road. That limits them to bike paths, where they shouldn't be driving high powered vehicles anyway. Again, not really persuaded.
People under 16 probably shouldn't be driving vehicles very fast period. That doesn't feel like a double standard since we've already banned them from driving cars.
It seems orthogonal to SUVs.
A 15 year old on a bicycle can easily do 15mph, and even 20mph is easy enough if they are willing to pedal for it. The real problem is that something capable of doing 15mph+ shouldn't be on the sidewalk in the first place.
There are multiple things going on in these situations, and rarely is it just one thing a quick simple ban on ___ will actually fix
Not sure if this is regional or another sign that I'm old.
When I was in elementary school, we were already taught that we ride a bicycle in the street and follow traffic rules. That included things like traveling in the correct lane for the direction we are going and observing stop signs and traffic lights. Also, as we got older, using things like turn lanes just like a motorcycle should do.
We were also taught tp walk it on the sidewalk/crosswalks as a pedestrian when the conditions were too complex for us to safely ride with traffic.
Even ignoring the peril to actual pedestrians, I have seen so many near-accidents in more recent decades from people violating these rules. Riding on sidewalks and/or against traffic flow (wrong side of the road) so that they "come out of nowhere" into traffic, ignoring traffic control lights, etc. Adding the electric speed boosts has just made these reckless things wildly more dangerous.
I recall that an SUV killed a 7 year old and his parents were charged with manslaughter and jailed, not the driver. https://globalnews.ca/news/11214748/parents-charged-death-so...
As an outsider (from a fairly corrupt country), this reeks of corruption and that law favours rich.
As people are correctly pointing out, WA is reclassifying certain e-motos as motorcycles, which is to say they'll require a license and insurance to be used on public roads - two things that are already required for all SUVs and trucks on public roads.
Being local to WA and spending a lot of time on bikes, the easiest thing we could do to improve the situation would be for law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing distracted driving laws. The number of drivers with their face buried in a phone during any kind of slow traffic is terrifying if one looks around.
I agree about large vehicles, but does an individual state even have the authority to ban a given kind of car from their roads? I suspect that is more under a federal authority than state-by-state.
SUVs have the power of bigAuto behind them to ensure no "undue" legislation is made against them. There is no bigEbike, so legislation is free to be made so that those legislators can then pat themselves on their back and have action they can point to being pro-safety.
The e-bikes aren't that annoying, it's the kids (and adults) riding all over the city on 4 wheelers and UTVs. The cops chase them around but it doesn't do much good.
that's because lobbyists own our souls :)
> Meanwhile, everyone knows that these giant trucks and SUVs are killing people, but we do basically nothing.
Too much money is tied up to giant trucks and SUVs being the norm. These vehicles only came into widespread existence due to the infamous "SUV loophole" [1], accelerated by them being much more profitable for manufacturers as there was (and is) far less competition in the truck/SUV space from non-American manufacturers and, with that, less competitive pressure that tends to eat up margins.
[1] https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in...
Cars are a major domestic industry for production, sales, and service. E-mopeds aren’t. That’s all.
Trucks and guns have a free pass to cause thousands of deaths yearly. It's that simple. Anybody else doing anything that might be viewed by certain hand wringing hysterical persons as dangerous will be smothered in onerous regulation, despite statistics showing relative (or absolute) harmlessness, but trucks and guns will keep on killing.
Cars >>> Bikes + Rail + Pedestrian infrastructure
More money flows atop highway and road infrastructure than on biking, rail, and scooter infrastructure. By orders of magnitude.
Commuter rail has 1/200th the economic impact of interstate highways.
Biking infrastructure is actually deleterious as it doesn't serve the pregnant, elderly, sick, frail, doesn't work well for rain/snow/high heat/weather, doesn't transport high volumes of goods, etc. etc.
Lots of cities are tearing up road infra to cater to this, and in doing so, they're reducing the economic corridor capacity and throughput of roads. Roads are simply much more valuable and flexible for logistics, people, and business.
The value of roads is going to become even more apparent when we have widespread autonomous vehicles.
Bikes are popular for 20-40-something men, mostly yuppie, mostly upper middle class. But they're not doing the economic heavy lifting.
Biking is not meant to replace everything. More people biking means more room for people that cannot bike. Bike-heavy cities like Amsterdam show that most of your "facts" are incorrect (bikes can be used to transport goods, are usable when it rains, are used by a large part of the population). That's a trope common when bike displaces cars, but studies show the reverse (for example in Madrid: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642...). Also, biking is good for health despite the risks (for example https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4521).
> Commuter rail has 1/200th the economic impact of interstate highways.
Ok, and what fraction of investment has it gotten?
We've underfunded rail/bike infrastructure for decades, of course money is going to flow on the cheapest route. Roads are cheap because we've subsidized the shit out of them.
Bikes are not going to deliver your packages and food and medical services. They're not going to take you on vacation, haul your gear, or provide shelter.
There's a meme that bikes will solve everything and that cars suck, but it's dismissive of the orders of magnitude more value that road infra can and will always provide.
Bikes actually deliver a lot of packages and food in areas where car infrastructure hasn't made other forms of transportation practically impossible, and they do it much more cost-effectively.
On the medical front, that's quite a strawman. I doubt you'll find much of anyone opposed to using cars for medical and emergency services.
Bike couriers in shambles to discover this.
Yes, they are, and they do.
The bike meme is unrealistic, and you're dismissing all of my arguments.
You're ripping up infrastructure for yuppie pickleball.
How do you transmit tons of material on bikes? How do people move in the rain or when they're on their period? How do they move multiple small children or being home furniture? What do old and sick people do?
Every lane taken away is centuries of economic activity destroyed.
Could you kindly explain to me how being on my period would in any way shape or form affect my ability to ride a bike? I'm all ears.
Have you ever been to China? They haul huge amounts of stuff with bicycle trailers.
But yeah, you got me. It's impossible to ride a bike in the rain, or on your period. Checkmate, I surrender.
I think you’re suffering from a false dichotomy. The average car capacity is 1.1 people per car, and 90%+ of the time, a normal individual is not hauling more than a backpack. Just imagine how much less traffic would be on the road if the people who could just biked. They get 1 protected lane (out of 6), and you get 50% less traffic? Hell yeah, that’s be awesome, right?
In terms of economics, consider how terrible car parking can be. A bike rack can park 20+ people in the space of 1 car parking spot (1-4 people). Do you really think a business would be better off with 1/10th the number of customers who can actually enter their building at once?
Bikes and rail should exist as options, not requirements. And when done well, like in Amsterdam, people will like using them. And driving will be even better, because of so much less traffic.
You'd be ok with restricting automobile traffic to delivery vans and trucks then? With regular checks to ensure they're actually delivering stuff.
I've heard from the same sources that woman on their period cannot drive a car or even ride in one so that's a wash... :)
> How do you transmit tons of material on bikes?
How do you transmit tons of materials with these crappy oversize pickup trucks? Their towing and payload capacity is pathetic.
Why does someone who is not literally a builder or joiner need to drive something as big as a full-size Ford Transit to take their child to school?
Counterpoint: there are four Blood Transfusion Service motorbikes parked outside the doctor's surgery across the road most days of the week, because cars are no good for delivering urgent and time-sensitive medical supplies.
Here's a bicycle used for transporting blood tests/samples in Copenhagen.
I see these go past my office fairly often. A Facebook photo (I won't link) shows there's at least 8 of them.
https://www.dreamstime.com/official-blood-test-transporting-...
And one from a private analysis company. It's obviously a fake photo, as we all know it's impossible to ride a bike when there's snow.
https://dbio.dk/nyheder/nytaenkning-cykelbud-med-friske-blod...
that literally happens in NYC right now
Wow there is so much wrong with this post I don't even know where to start.
Widespread car usage has caused an enormous amount of harm. It has destroyed American cities, killed thousands of people directly, tens of thousands more with sedentary lifestyle diseases, and burned a truly enormous amount of fossil fuels into CO2, and locked in the infrastructure to continue to do so for decades. It's an absolutely enormous tragedy.
Cars are also useful and have helped a lot of things, but they should not be the default choice of transportation.
How would you react if told you could no longer drive your primary mode of transportation?
This question is the exact point they’re making about the biased response to/willingness to create bike vs car laws.
I agree. We should legalize drunk driving so that no one can be denied their god-given right to drive a car.
~No one in the US is letting their "god given right" be denied. They are driving their car anyway even when the government says they can't.
So to answer the question, they would act in insubordination, and anything harsh enough to stop the insubordination won't be practically implemented.
How would you react if told that your primary mode of transportation is causing a big increase in deaths? Isn't that a more relevant question?
Complete indifference.
That's the same class of argument as telling people they shouldn't use Signal because criminals use Signal.
I think there is a difference here. Signal qua signal isn't dangerous. Its purely what one does with it that might constitute a criminal act. In particular, using signal is unlikely to cause problems accidentally.
Driving a giant truck for no good reason entails a certain risk because of both the inevitability of human error (on the part of the driver but also others) and basic physics.
Furthermore, one might argue that the right to private communication is more important than the marginal improvement in life that you get from driving a big car for no particular reason.
Like consider a person who wants to drive a car filled with TNT. By its very nature this is a danger to others regardless of the intent of the driver or other drivers. Society might be argued to have an interest in regulating such behavior. I think there is a good case to be made that unnecessarily large vehicles differ in degree only from the TNT case, but differ categorically from using signal.
I'm not making the case that the differences justify banning big cars, but there are differences between the two situations.
"How would you react if told that your primary mode of transportation is causing a big increase in deaths?"
I'd ask to see the data since TFA shows only a 7.5% increase due to size. The rest of the 75% increase is due to other factors.
Edit: why disagee, is my data wrong?
Is that not a significant enough number in and of itself?! Like it even begs the question, how were they allowed to go onto the roads in the first place, when it's not even a hard to reach consequence.
"only" a 7% increase in deaths
Are you talking about the bike or the SUV?
I suppose you'd have to sell it, possibly at a loss, just like you'd have to sell a restaurant that failed a food safety inspection.
> just like you'd have to sell a restaurant that failed a food safety inspection. reply
Oh my sweet summer child...
At the absolute most they might get shut down for a shift or two.
My primary mode of transportation is an e-bike; how should I react?
i would be upset that i had bought a murdertruck
Why would that be happening? No-one is preventing people from driving.
Utter disbelief. (will that do?)
In the USA, an order of magnitude more people on foot are killed each year by people driving cars and trucks than are killed in mass shootings. [0][1]
It is a massive problem that receives a disproportionate amount of attention.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
The standard of driving in most places I've lived in the US is very low for a developed country. People blow through pedestrian crossings, get-there-itis, crawling through stops, don't use their turn signals, make illegal U-Turns, ignore overtaking conventions. Compare to most countries in Europe where a driving test is a rigorous 45 minutes and you can fail for all sorts of minor stuff. I live in a place with decent pedestrian infrastructure fortunately. I'm more worried about being involved in a random fatal crash when I'm driving than on foot.
Making right-on-red illegal wouldn't be bad either. The number of times I've almost been run over when a car is stopped in the middle/straight lane and blocks line of sight to a right-turning car that doesn't look.
DUIs are at least treated seriously. It's one of the few offenses that will get a visa instantly revoked. Same in Canada I think.
45 minutes? In Germany getting your license takes most people around a year and costs thousands of euros.
I assume he meant the actual final practical test.
my point is, in germany it takes longer than a test to get your license, unlike the US.
Wait...is the massive problem that it should be more than an order of magnitude more people killed than those killed in mass shootings, or is it that it should be less than an order of magnitude more?
They are such completely different categories of ways to die I'm having trouble understand how to compare them in any sensible way.
That I guess is the problem they are highlighting. It is more complicated still when comparing to ill health, war, poverty, terrorism. But OTOH we should strive to make transport safer like we do with commercial flight.
There are indeed a lot more mentally unstable people wandering onto free ways in the US.
We never invest effort in things that provide the most value; we invest in what we're the most emotional about. The number of people killed in 9/11 and every plane hijacking is dwarfed by any single year of deaths due to either vehicle accidents or gun shootings. But we do nothing about either of those things, and instead spend $180B on TSA, to save zero lives. We then roll back things like vaccine mandates, to kill more people (mostly kids).
This is often brought out as though it should engender gasps, but a moment of thought punctures the whole prospect. We need cars and trucks for a variety of purposes, and while I agree that most people don't need a pickup or a Unimog, there are many people and businesses who do. The ability to rapidly travel is a centerpiece of modern life, and has been for quite some time.
Mass shootings by contrast are not economic or personal drivers of freedom, they're not an intended output of the system that creates them, they're a relatively modern perversity of it. Of course people are more concerned with seemingly random violence that many other countries seem to live without, or with much less of, compared to inevitable accidents.
People also love to present "Vehicle vs Ped" as a de facto accident on the part of the vehicle or the driver, and that can certainly be the case! It's also true that about 30% of pedestrians involved in these accidents have a BAC over the legal limit. There are also issues with poorly designed and maintained lights, safety systems on roads, and so on that play a role. None of this is as simple as, "Just bike to work, dummy."
I'd also add that recent stats show a REDUCTION in pedestrian fatalities, it's just that it's been on a rise since 2009, but it's going back down again. Possibly that comes down to addressing some concerns I've mentioned above, some comes down to fewer megamonsterSUV's, and some comes down to smartphone and in-car tech no longer promoting using said phones on the road.
https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalit...
I think you're take is a bit off for multiple reasons.
First, people need transportation, not cars. For the vast majority of people, if you truly need a car, it's because your infrastructure was built in a way that doesn't provide any other modes of transportation.
Second, mass shootings aren't the intended effect of guns in the same way pedestrian fatalities aren't the intended effect of cars. Both cars and guns are providing some perceived value (personal transportation freedom and self-defense/safeguard against tyranny/national defense) with a significant number of deaths as a tradeoff.
Third, implying someone with a BAC over the legal limit for DRIVING is somehow responsible for getting killed while WALKING instead of driving is comical and darkly ironic considering drunk driving accounts for almost a third of traffic deaths in the US [1].
1. https://www.cdc.gov/impaired-driving/facts/index.html#:~:tex...
Nothing in the article is suggesting that we do not need cars and trucks.
It does make a compelling case that specifically large trucks and SUVs are causing preventable deaths. And I certainly find no reason that we need very large trucks or SUVs.
Having any car or truck is a choice. People lived before the automobile. They do provide benefits, just as SUVs and trucks provide benefits. The Amish live without cars, so too could we if we chose to. In fact, the Amish could make the same claim about all automobiles that you make about preventable deaths attributed to larger vehicles.
Is your point that taller trucks and SUVs provide considerable benefits over shorter ones? What are those benefits?
Or do you mean simply that trucks and SUVs, regardless of their height, provide benefits? I don't doubt that and do not mean to imply otherwise.
> Is your point that taller trucks and SUVs provide considerable benefits over shorter ones? What are those benefits?
Ground clearance. In some parts of the US and for some use cases this is non-negotiable. It would be like buying a car in Texas without an air conditioner. There is a Japanese automaker (Subaru) that traditionally caters to this market almost exclusively in the US.
I won't buy a vehicle with less than 8 inches of ground clearance for safety reasons.
Sorry if I'm being dense, but what parts of the USA? Or, I guess more specifically, what is it that you are needing to clear?
I believe that you don't need one, and I know that I don't need one, but I think it's a little rich to make that a blanket statement for the species. There are people who have jobs, lives, and live in places unlike your own experiences.
Ugh, ok. Most people do not need one.
I'm not sure what the need is for a very tall pickup truck that can also hold a family five? But maybe there is one. Perhaps there is also a need for an excavator that holds a family of five, idk. If a real need is demonstrated, then sure, please do not ban the manufacturing of an excavator that has the necessary hook-ups for modern child carseats simply because I, a commenter on HackerNews, made a statement that was a little too sweeping for the needs of past, present, and future human beings on Earth and across potential settlement across the universe and dimensions beyond.
But most people do not need a very large truck or SUV. Vehicles with hoods closer to the ground and better lines-of-sight are safer for those around them, while having practically no impact on the utility of said vehicles as they drive on roads and highways in the USA.
Mass shootings kill almost no one. They're a red herring. Even with a really stupid, inclusive "3 or more people injured" criterion. If you use that criterion for defining what a mass shooting is, the modal number of people killed is...one.
The problem is that other countries have seen nearly identical trends in vehicle market share trending towards larger vehicles and have seen sustained declines in pedestrian fatalities. John Burn-Murdoch went deep on this in the FT a couple of years ago (archive link at bottom).
> Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence suggests this may be mistaken. Last year’s improvement is a case in point. Two reasons often cited as key causes of poor US performance both worsened: the total number of miles driven by Americans increased, and US cars continued to grow larger. Yet fatal collisions still declined.
> Adding to the evidence that this is not a dominant factor, car sizes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have traced similar paths to the US without resulting in a spike in fatalities.
> Another theory is that the rise of homelessness in the US may be pushing pedestrian deaths higher. A recent study found that there had indeed been a marked rise in traffic-related deaths among the homeless, but this, too, can only explain a small portion of the overall rise.
> Instead, an underrated factor seems to be not American cars but American drivers [...] The determining factor seems to be different attitudes to safety, with Americans twice as likely as Canadians or Europeans to say they find it acceptable to use a phone while driving.
https://archive.is/Lggyg#30%
I too am unconvinced bigger truck/vehicle means things are getting of control. It's terrible how the NYT article has no facts on overall road deaths, so here I state one for everyone: Occupant deaths have a clear falling trend. So while pedestrian deaths are climbing, the overall deaths are still trending downward, and I shouldn't have to defend that the overall count is more important than the pedestrian subset.
That can be very easily explained as "bigger cars are safer for their occupant and deadlier to the person getting hit by them".
I do think you need to defend your assertion, because the difference between a driver and a pedestrian is that the driver "knew the risks" while the risks were imposed on the pedestrian.
March 2024: The effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death risk
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
It's the hood geometry, stupid. An effective regulator could fix this. As a side-effect, it would make cars look like the new USPS delivery trucks, which would make petrosexuals big mad.
Where I live you don't touch a phone while driving. Heavy fines and both human and camera based survellience. I think it is excellent and has surely saved lives. Driving is the thing you don't need to multitask.
Data shows that introduction of iPhones in 2007 is a better explanation for the increase in pedestrian deaths than heavier trucks and SUVs: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ubbfrv/oc... (All the credit for this analysis goes to the reddit user, I’m just summarizing.)
Trucks and SUVs have been getting heavier consistently since 1980 while pedestrian deaths consistently decreased from 1980 to 2009. Truck sizes went up much more from 1980 to 2009 than from 2009 to present. But pedestrian deaths dropped almost in half from 1980 to 2009.
The NYT study on which this article is based acknowledges that pedestrian deaths dropped in half from 1980 to 2009, but then does nothing with this information.
The times article hand-waves away distracted driving by saying that other countries haven't seen a similarly large increase. The problem with that is that vehicle sizes in all other countries have also been increasing, and other countries like Canada and Australia have seen almost identical market shares of those large vehicles without the surge in pedestrian fatalities.
The large factors are phone use (more prevalent among american drivers and there's data to show this), and homelessness - the homeless are dramatically overrepresented in US pedestrian deaths and the population has increased dramatically in the US over the past decade. Even more so though it appears to be attitudes, Americans are twice as likely as Europeans or Canadians to say using a phone while driving is acceptable. Though no single factor is a smoking gun, vehicle size is one of the least convincing. Getting hit by a 4000lb car or an 8000lb truck matters much less than how fast the vehicle's going (let's all remember our high school physics class).
This blog post is the best deep dive I've seen on the data: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/more-on-us-pedestrian...
Thank you, I hadn't even considered that smartphone use may differ between drivers in developed countries.
Weight of SUVs/Trucks isn't really the right metric to use though.
The proportion of them which have a grill height which impairs visibility of the average height pedestrian would be a "better" metric, except it isn't as easy to cleanly define that.
With me driving in my 2000s Ranger, I can at least see adults walking in front of it just fine, even though it is bigger than a 1980 Toyota pickup.
It's any easy to measure metric, the article even shows it.
What we need is a "distance from the front of the car a 4' person is visible." metric. Car manufactures should be penalized for poor visibility.
It is doable, but it is harder for the average redditor to compute something reasonable than just looking at GVW.
You should really take into account driver height, pedestrian height and hood slope and length and height.
It doesn't help the truck size is usually inversely proportional to driver height.
If the issue is distracted drivers, I don’t see how heavier trucks is still not the issue. With lighter vehicles you would likely have a higher chance of surviving.
Minor quibble: I don't know if 'heavier' is as important as 'taller,' though. I have seen someone hit by an actual sedan, be thrown onto the hood, fall on the ground after the car stops, and survive. Being hit is not the same as being run over, which is much harder to have happen with a car-shaped car.
They can both be factors, just one is much more influential than the other. Alcohol is involved in about half of all pedestrian deaths. So it seems that's the issue, but people would rather talk about vehicle size.
Drunk driving is already criminalized, generally socially unacceptable, and has received lots of attention over the decades.
Vehicle size is a relevant factor in vehicle-pedestrian collisions regardless of the cause of the collision.
Alcohol is also a factor on the pedestrian side, not just the driver side. This has not been addressed. It is still a relevant factor on both sides. Yes, vehicle size/design is another factor.
Yes, but on the whole we got much heavier trucks from 1980 to 2009 while pedestrian deaths went down.
There’s also the issue that heavier vehicles are inevitable due to EVs. Our bz4x won’t get tagged as a “big evil truck,” but it’s about the same weight as a base model Ford F150. And heavier than a Toyota Tacoma double cab.
The article acknowledges that rise in vehicle height is only part of it and might explain 10% of the rise. I'm not sure how exactly they measured things but there's no reason things could've gone down while car height simultaneously slowed down the decline.
>“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Am I crazy? The article itself points out that only 10% of the increase would have been 'saved' if cars had remained the same size. This goes directly against the title no?
There's certainly more than one reason, my gut would point to more smart phone use both by drivers and even by pedestrians themselves.
I wonder if one day using a smart phone while driving will have the same stigma as a DUI (and similar punishment). I struggle to argue it shouldn't, its sometimes a little crazy to think about that if the person in the other lane gets distracted on their phone, I might be involved in a head on collision at 60+mph.
The quote you've selected from the article is a poor summary of their findings (not your fault, they're the ones who wrote it). You can find a more precise explanation at the end of the article in the Methodology section.
"200 to 400" is a rounded estimate for how decreased hood height could affect recorded collisions. But from the article:
> There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.
It doesn't appear that NYT included in their model the larger blind zones and how that causes more collisions. So they shouldn't have said their 200-400 estimate covers the increase in vehicle "size" when it only models one dimension of size growth.
> I wonder if one day using a smart phone while driving will have the same stigma as a DUI (and similar punishment).
Thankfully, it is beginning to, in some places outside the US.
> You can be fined $1,251 and have 4 demerit points recorded against your traffic history for using a mobile phone illegally while driving. [1]
> 0.05 and over, but under 0.10
Disqualification: 1 to 9 months
Fine: $2,336 [2]
[1]: https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/mobile-p...
[2]: https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/drink-dr...
And it doesn't quantify how many other lives have been saved specifically because the accidents involved bigger, sturdier, safer cars/trucks/SUVs. That has to be a significant statistic.
For the bigger vehicle, perhaps, but a smaller vehicle, even if up to modern standards, is less safe due to the larger one.
E=1/2mv^2
The energy of a crash at the same speed is linearly scaled with mass though. Especially when you have two such monsters collide, it's significant.
I do think the article title is a bit misleading.
"75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are *One Reason*" would be a more accurate title based on my reading.
> “While vehicle safety is critical, blaming larger vehicles for pedestrian deaths overlooks systemic issues” including the design of roads, said Mike Levine, a spokesman for Ford.
This is from the NYT article
This is how modern online influencing works.
10 000 people will see the headline here on HN or somewhere else and form their opinion based on it only.
1000 people will open the article
Out of those, 200 people will understand that the title is completely false relevant to the data.
Out of those 200 people, 150 people will still deny that the title is a lie, down vote, or try to sidetrack, because even a lie has to be supported if it supports their own political agenda.
So this is only one of the reasons, and a relatively small one:
“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Sometimes safety comes from lots of little adjustments. So perhaps we should see 10% as large, not small.
Sadly, most will ignore your common sense just as they are ignoring the data.
Came here to highlight the same. The fact that only 10% are being attributed to bigger cars, but the exact reason isnt being discussed. More than likely its the addiction to technology, the smart phones, and somehow its not part of discussion in the article.
If ignored, it would imply that the sense you're referring to is not a common one.
Yes, the old joke about common sense not being common anymore. But of course it was always meant as a figure of speech to indicate plainly logical items.
I have long held that larger vehicles should have higher licensing requirements purely based on stats. We see it in the stats that large vehicles are disproportionately dangerous to other vehicles and people so licensing should catch up. We have motorcycle licenses, why don't we have SUV licenses? Similarly, the penalties and limits should be higher. BAC should be lower. Fines higher. Etc etc. You want to drive a big vehicle, fine, pay for it and do what is needed to protect other people from your choices. I shouldn't have to pay for your decisions. This is a fundamental principle that big vehicle drivers conveniently ignore when they believe 'their freedom' trumps my right to life.
Licensing is mostly based vehicle operating characteristics. We already have large vehicle licenses like class B and A for heavy vehicles. Motorcycles have a separate license due to different operating concerns.
If you're actually following the stats you will see that vehicle size only accounted for 10% of the increase. You would want to focus on the other 90% to make the biggest difference. And using that logic, you should increase the education and testing requirements for all drivers because that will provide gains over the whole driving population instead of a single segment.
Penalties should remain the same for whatever the outcome is - doesn't matter if a bicyclist kills me or a semi truck.
Lower BAC limits are opposed even by groups like MADD. The data shows the current level is good and lowering it further will result in more people ignoring it.
Nobody is asking you to pay for others' decisions (unless we want to go down the rabbit hole of insurance, for which sports cars and high priced electrics are costing all drivers more). Nor is a large vehicle an infringement on anyone's right to life (someone's recklessness could be).
- Nobody is asking you to pay for others' decisions (unless we want to go down the rabbit hole of insurance, for which sports cars and high priced electrics are costing all drivers more). Nor is a large vehicle an infringement on anyone's right to life (someone's recklessness could be).
Large vehicles increase the risk of death for other people. The article was about pedestrians but the stats are clear about collisions with these vehicles, same size = same death rate. Small vs large = major increased risk. The argument that ownership of these vehicles doesn't infringe on my right to life or have costs to the public as a whole is ridiculous when the stats show clearly the impact. I'll even branch out to true monetary and other costs, if we extend further these vehicles have secondary impacts due to the resources they consume. Parking lots and roads are bigger making cities worse. Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in. And, yes, they kill more people. The decision to own a big vehicle like this and drive it around everywhere has direct and major negative impacts on me at multiple levels. So, yes, I am tired of paying for other peoples decisions and just accepting it.
I will agree that in general professionalism on the road should be higher. In general we need to take driving more seriously. It kills tens of thousands each year and has a tragic impact on younger driver stats. These large vehicles though clearly represent a significant fraction and just because there are other areas that could help it doesn't mean we should ignore this one.
When you look around at people in the US there is a strong chance that most of them know personally someone that has died in a car accident or has a friend that knew someone that died. Almost universally everyone knows multiple others that have been in significant accidents or themselves been in major accidents. Just last week my cousin was struck when crossing a street (luckily just a bit banged up but mostly fine). If we can reduce deaths on the road or pedestrian deaths significantly by licensing, even if it just did it by minimizing the number of these vehicles since the bar was higher, I'd take the win.
"The argument that ownership of these vehicles doesn't infringe on my right to life or have costs to the public as a whole is ridiculous when the stats show clearly the impact."
Really, can you show me ownership of these kills people? You aren't looking at this from a systems thinking perspective but just comparing numbers on the surface. Owning a vehicle isnt killing anyone. It's a tool. If used responsibly, the negative affects are minimized. What you are actually comparing is the irresponsible use of a car vs the irresponsible use of a truck. I would rather address the irresponsible use than the marginal difference in fatalities caused by the two. Can you show the stats you talk about, or are we still on the 7.5% from the article?
"Parking lots and roads are bigger making cities worse."
Source? Lane size and parking space width is pretty standard.
"Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in."
Source? Gas mileage is lower, but emissions standards are pretty strict for most pollutants. The bigger issue would be large diesel trucks.
"The decision to own a big vehicle like this and drive it around everywhere has direct and major negative impacts on me at multiple levels."
I have yet to hear you provide a direct negative impact to yourself - they're all theoretical or n-order indirect.
Education and testing would be the best approach as it would cover multiple issues and the entire population.
- It's a tool. If used responsibly, the negative affects are minimized.
This argument gets me all the time. By this argument we should get rid of all regulations on vehicles and requirements for licensing. I too would rather people suddenly woke up and were responsible. Using the 'its just a tool' argument ignores the reality of the impact of that tool and denies their right to life.
-"Pollution in cities is worse impacting my health and my enjoyment of the city I live in."
Here is a forbes article saying everything I said with links. Traffic is worse and deaths are higher because of these things. [1] and here are some facts about road deaths involving suvs and light trucks. The key point [2]:
'Conclusion In the case of a crash, SUVs and LTVs cause more severe injuries to pedestrians and cyclists than passenger cars. This effect is larger for fatalities than for KSIs, and the fatality effect is particularly large for children.' [2]
- I have yet to hear you provide a direct negative impact to yourself - they're all theoretical or n-order indirect.
So, yes. They are directly impacting me daily by impacting my city in major negative ways and also increasing my risk of death. I am paying for the decisions of others and it isn't right. The stats show it.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2025/05/07/suvs-... [2] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/early/20...
More mass = more momentum = harder crash. That's physics.
> If you're actually following the stats you will see that vehicle size only accounted for 10% of the increase.
It's a paper that will make money automobile advertising.
Implicitly if there were any other single larger cause for the deaths then the article would be about that.
The sensible thing to do would be to carry on investigating the 90%, but in the meantime get on with saving the 200 to 400 people by removing largest factor - the _unnecessarily_ large vehicles - that are _known_ to be killing them.
New CDL licensees have to take a rather expensive training course before they can get their class A/B CDL (things with a GVWR of >= 26,000# or school bus). There are some online theory only sites that charge up to $300, but in many (maybe all?) states (mine for sure) you still have to take an accredited behind-the-wheel (plus theory) class that runs $4k-5k. Everyone getting their CDL after Feb 2022 has to take this course.
https://tpr.fmcsa.dot.gov/
https://tpr.fmcsa.dot.gov/content/Resources/ELDT-Applicabili...
> BAC should be lower. Fines higher.
This is already the case.
For sure big trucks don't pay the costs of the damage that they do to road surfaces. Road damage is proportional to the cube of speed and 4th power of axle weight. So an 80,000# semi does 4096 the damage of an 4,000# SUV, both driving the same speed.
Math:
80,000 / 5 = 16,000# per axle 4,000 /2 = 2,000# per axle
(16/2)^4 = 4,096.
Disclaimer: I used to work for my state's version of DMV & Highway Department.
Larger vehicles do have different licensing standards:
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/cdl
"Driving a Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) requires a higher level of knowledge, experience, skills, and physical abilities than that required to drive a non-commercial vehicle. In order to obtain a Commercial Driver's License (CDL), an applicant must pass both skills and knowledge testing geared to these higher standards. Additionally CDL holders are held to a higher standard when operating any type of motor vehicle on public roads. Serious traffic violations committed by a CDL holder can affect their ability to maintain their CDL certification."
- I wonder how things compare for a pedestrian embracing a large SUV vs. a Semi.
You could start by pushing for RVs (both bus and gooseneck) to have to conform to the same standards as a commercial driver would. That seems like one of the most immediate and obvious places where it seems crazy (IMO) that we allow people to get behind of the wheel of stuff they have no business driving.
In most of Europe you can drive a 4250kg EV with a simple drivers license you got after taking six lessons in 1972. Madness.
Anything over 2000kg should require a truck license including retesting every five years imho.
A reasonable range small EV weighs more than that. 3500kg is reasonable. Regenerative braking and brakes in general are much better than when those weight limits were imposed.
It is worth reading the interactive Times article. Amazing piece of work https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/21/us/trucks-suv...
The animations and comparisons of current vehicles with two-three decades ago are extremely informative indeed.
Glad they spent half the article on the a-pillar issue. As a recent recipient of a bit of back pain I'd be real happy if my next car didn't require me to try and peer around those things at every intersection.
People spend a lot of time on Trucks, but I don't see why SUVs get a pass. Every single car is an SUV now. They're higher up, heavier, and have a higher beltline all so that drivers can "feel safer."
The fuel economy figure that a vehicle needs to achieve used to be a set figure. Lobbyists got that changed so that now vehicle fuel economy is a function based on the width and length of the vehicle. And that's why the roads are full of fatmobiles.
Anything with a hood that's so high primarily because it's gender affirming care is paid for with the deaths and injuries of innocents. Regulate the shape of the front end of any vehicle, as I'm sure any honest regulator would.
It's quite sad, the old 1997 F-150 (the first year of the quite-ugly-but-practical "bubble" aesthetic) specifically advertised its low front hood as an intentional measure to improve visibility. And that thing had better visibility than nearly any modern car. It was incredibly despite still being a relatively large truck.
You can thank the CAFE standards for setting emission limits of small vehicles below what was technically possible, driving manufacturers to the larger sizes.
Well maybe we'll get small cars again because the fine for violating CAFE is now... $0.
https://environmentalhealthsafetybrief.sidley.com/2025/07/08...
It's honestly frustrating that you can't buy anything like an S10, an O.G. Ranger, Jeep XJ, or even the 90's and early 00's GM and Ford full size trucks. I understand they were at least marginally less safe in a crash, but I think changes could have been made to get them safer and more efficient without compromising the ease of repair and generally more pleasant driving experience. It's amazing how much more divorced from the road and the outside world a new truck is compared to even the late 00's pre financial crash trucks, especially as any additional utility they provide is unchanged at best, and frankly so far as I can tell grossly net negative (i.e. how many 8 foot beds have you see recently? How many flatbeds have you seen that weren't on obvious fleet trucks? The Suburban is also frankly grossly less utilitarian now).
this is part of the subsidy to American car companies.
American Big Three cannot compete with Asian/European cars, so they gave up and erected a regulatory barriers to protect their market:
1. chicken tax 2. Section 179 Deduction - allows writeoff of Vehicles Over 6000 lbs for people non-W2 people (self-employed and small business owners) 3. CAFE footpring and "light truck" loophole and CAFE exemtpions for US trucks
everything designed to protect Big Three's highest margin products at cost of human lives
It's an arms race. My older SUV (Lexus 3XX) is worrisome in it's size and blindspots but it's still dwarfed by current trucks. Moreover, once most SUVs were basically built over a pickup chassis but it seems like pickups have gotten so large that it's unusual to see an equivalent SUV.
Super relevant: Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked? by Douglas Husak
One of my favorite philosophy papers. The author argues that because of the high crash incompatibility of SUVs, they are immoral - imposing needless harm on others. It's also ironic that on average, there is no net safety benefit to those who drive them -- because of higher rollover risks!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447
The Grille Trend that Kills 509 People per Year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU video discussed previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39584166
These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
The original designer wanted the truck to feel like you were driving a fist, punching through the air. So we are killing people so that the driver can have an aggressive aesthetic. And the design has spread like a contagious meme, even BMWs have it now.
2009 coincides with the invention of the smartphone. I've lost count of how many times I've nearly been run over because people are staring at their phones while driving.
The attribution to larger vehicles while ignoring smartphones seems misplaced.
And I'm sure some of these stats are caused by pedestrians staring at their phones as well.
We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.
In Sunnyvale the police definitely does this! At one point the sting was a small child crossing the road repeatedly while an officer observed nearby.
A major aspect of this are side effects of "safety-first" obsession over the occupants of the vehicles themselves.
Mandatory airbags in the A-pillars is probably the single biggest killer out of everything. The blind spots are massive compared to cars before these regulations. I've seen some models where it seems bad on purpose. Why don't federal regulators want the drivers of these gigantic vehicles to be able to see where the hell they are going?
Weird question that popped into my mind (not a judgement on this), but is there a similar jump in prosecutions for vehicular manslaughter or are these "whoopsie'd" away?
Seeing today's distracted drivers, driving their mini armored troop carriers around in parking lots, makes me wonder what happens when someone "didn't see the person" and runs them over.
Edit (after some research): "Philadelphia review found only about 16% of drivers who killed vulnerable road users were charged; 30% were closed with no charges, and 46% had no data provided."
So that's a bit concerning but I'm not sure what I'd want if I or a loved one were personally on the end of "making the mistake" vs being a victim of a mistake.
I think that in Europe the trend is in the other direction: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... - e.g. -15% since 2019.
The article keeps mentioning "unintended consequences" but I'm not convinced these are. Trying to come across as scary (perhaps because you are yourself scared) seems to be the whole point. "Get out of my way, look at how little I care about your safety, look at the size of this thing." The article mentions machismo but I don't think that quite covers the (profitable) pathology here.
Yep. Automotive grille design became sharply more aggressive over the last 20 years (not just in terms of hood height). It says a lot about the psychology of consumers.
I believe that as self-driving cars become more ubiquitous, these deaths (and other traffic-related deaths) will decrease. I was driving on a 4 lane road at 5 in the morning and all of a sudden my Tesla model 3 slams on its brakes, missing a deer that jumped across the road by ~2 feet. Its path was completely perpendicular to the road and I couldn't see it until a few seconds after my car started braking.
Imagine a future when a much larger proportion of drivers have 360 degree vision with no blind spots, infinitesimally small reaction times and a human failsafe in the driver seat.
Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.
On a number of occasions I have nearly hit people who I simply could not see crossing in my Volvo XC90 due to these pillars. I've been driving for nearly 30 years in the US and UK and have never felt anything like it.
[edit: for future readers, please note that I am not saying it would be legal or correct to hit these people.
I am saying precisely that the A pillars on the XC90 are dangerous as they introduce blind spots that I've never experienced before. We test drove the vehicle, and they weren't apparent during that test drive. I am now responsible for them.
Down in this thread you will read some responses that seem confused about that point. No, it is not legal to run people over in the road. You will be at fault. No, that doesn't make it smart to jump into the road until it's clear that the traffic has yielded you your lawful right of way. IAAL]
> Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.
Those pedestrians do have the right of way; you need to have another look at the Highway Code.
This is such a British response.
Obviously that's what the law says, yes. But if they hop into someone's blind spot, it won't matter to their family much that they were in the right.
It will matter to you when you’re sentenced, though.
Speaking as a fellow immigrant, your attitude is what gives immigrants a bad name worldwide.
Of course it would! That's the whole point.
People shouldn't enter the road until it's clear they've been seen.
I'm not sure what you're missing here guy.
I've said the A bar is a liability because of the blind spot it introduces.
Your response was that the person in the road has the right of way. This is known.
Somehow I give immigrants a bad name because I acknowledge that it is difficult to manage people who assert their right-of-way into blind spots.
It's called a blind spot for a reason. How can one yield to something they by definition don't see?
You chose to buy the car with the big blind spots. You’re responsible for checking your blind spots, by moving your head as necessary. This is part of the driving test.
Your poor consumer choices do not absolve you of your responsibilities and obligations.
I think I've just lost 10 IQ points in this thread.
YES! OF COURSE. I SAID IT'S A LIABILITY. I AM SHARING INFORMATION, PERHAPS TO AFFECT FUTURE CONSUMER CHOICE.
Well the onus is obviously on a driver to make sure they see what they need to see. And that they drive a vehicle that allows them to see things.
That doesn't mean the pedestrians should not be careful...
Yes, I agree with both of those statements. If you read the original statement before the "tut tut" response, you will note that I was only suggesting the A pillars introduce dangerous blind spots. I understand how that could be confused on other platforms, but I expected folks on HN to extend the benefit of the doubt that posters are not generally oblivious to the law. So the conversation derailed.
I like Teslas Forward Collision Warning system which alerts me if it sees the obstacle such as car, a corner, or pedestrian on a path.
there is also Active collision avoidance that will adjust vehicle if it senses a car on the nearby lane about to hit my side
I think these safety systems need to be mandatory
Can’t see if there are pedestrians at the crossing? Slow down
It's not a speed issue. They're in a blind spot. Your brain tells you that you can see everything, but it's incorrect.
My experiences have been under slow circumstances only. And that makes sense because the individual "lingers" in the blind spot (and perhaps matches your speed) if you're going slow. If you were going fast, the blind spot would be moving much faster and you would see them.
Not being able to see is a blind spot issue. Not slowing down because of it is… something else. Irresponsible is the most polite I can come up with.
My experiences have been at around 5mph. Again, it's not speed.
If you watch the video in the post you will understand. The person is just invisible to the driver and they're travelling around the same very low speed.
Blah. It's a regulation problem. Allow powerful trucks to be small again and they will. Perverse incentives are a bitch.
While their conclusion is probably correct, I would have liked to seen the number of fatalities normalized by population, miles driven, number of pedestrian increase, speed limit change etc
Normalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years.
So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.
Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride
Not at all. Demonstrating that miles driven increases pedestrian deaths would be tremendously useful.
? The correlation is trivially demonstrable. You can probably ask an agent to pull the relevant datasets for a state, run a linear regression, and demonstrate this. It's the entire reason traffic crash statistics in the US are normalized per mile.
> Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people
It's not poor planning, it's what Americans want. Americans, by and large, do not want to live in dense neighborhoods or tiny homes like in many parts of Europe. You get that in places like NYC and quality of life in those places is atrocious.
There are millions of people in American cities, and tons of people move from the less dense suburbs to these cities.
There are probably even more people who would move if they could, but our cities are expensive (because housing is expensive when you don't build it) and so they stick with the "default". Staying put, getting a car, and finding a way to make it work.
You can't conflate "this is what Americans want" and "this is largely the only choice most Americans get".
Quality of life is very subjective though. Americans by and large are anti-social, so these sparse layouts/nimbyism are a result of that. This in turn reinforces living patterns which may or may not be optimal for any given person. Again, they may be social enough on their own terms, but insufficient to want to live closer to others for a variety of factors, manifesting in very real differences in civic planning. I would look to this behavior need to change before any substantive zoning/transportation changes are really adopted.
Yes, that's why people pay the ridiculous cost of living to live in NYC, because the quality of life is atrocious.
At least around where I live (DC suburbs), every dense neighborhood becomes tremendously popular. The limit is that planners are very reluctant to allow them to be built. No problem getting permission to build an 8,000sqft house on a 1/4th acre lot though.
sometimes i just really enjoy comments that are just so amazingly breathtaking in their stupidity. it's such a treat.
He's right though beside the point about NYC (if it were awful why do people pay for it). Americans love the suburbs, i'd imagine most non Americans would like them .
Americans are just rich enough and lucky with geography to be able to have them.
... his whole point was that people don't want to live in cities, which is just factually incorrect. just baseless, pointless idiocy that is just par for the course on HN these days.
I find any conclusion that doesn't focus on TEXTING to be suspect.
By focusing on the wrong things (especially the endless caterwauling about "speeding"), people are letting legislators off the hook for abetting murder. Texting while driving should be a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties. But year after year, they refuse to do anything about it.
What would make non-Americans text less?
Why non-Americans?
Because the effects are explicitly called out for US roads and not other locales.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/FDvTWy0LMt4
Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads. That's about giant vehicles hitting people above the waistline. If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
> Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads.
From both the NYT video and their article:
> And that increase is unique to the US. Most other wealthy countries haven't seen a similar surge, suggesting that possible culprits, like the raise of smartphones, don't tell the whole story.
---
> If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
How popular do you think the tall-ass trucks are in Portugal?
This study didn’t nearly enough to disambiguate for widespread phone use while driving, which IMO is the biggest factor.
Self driving AI is the answer.
They have phones in Europe and their numbers are going down.
Yeah, but Americans would not tolerate Euro style driving laws and enforcement.
So… we have the technology to fix this problem. Let’s just do it!
Would've been trivial to just run the same calculations on 1990s numbers when SUVs first became popular but long before smartphones.
I think it speaks volumes that they didn't.
1990s SUVs were different vehicles than 2026 SUVs. A 2026 4Runner Hybrid weighs 1500lbs more than a 1996 and is 19 inches longer, 12 inches wider, and 6 inches taller. This is significant.
This stuff wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t regularly get reports of an acquaintance’s daughter who is now almost brain dead (can’t speak after a serious accident).
Phone is 99% likely the culprit.
Self driving AI or putting the #%£€ phone down would have prevented it.
All of the problems (high hood, bad visibility downwards) are fixed by sports cars and especially mid-engined and rear-engined sports cars. Plus, the brake distance is much lower.
I recently visited Portugal and it was so refreshing not to see huge near monster trucks on the road. Which have a very intimidating vibe to them.
I was like oh look at people can actually function without big trucks, wow! What a surprise!
Very urban perspective. If you are a contractor or farmer in rural America, there is no way to survive without a good sized truck.
Well from my experience visiting Portugal, there's tons of farming there and they didn't have all these oversized trucks. I wonder how they do it...
It seems uniquely American to have these huge trucks and most of the people here don't even farm. They just use them to flex.
Plenty of oversized trucks and SUVs in urban areas. The majority of the population in the U.S. is considered urban, so why exactly is the "urban perspective" not legitimate?
Did you know that only 1,6% of US population works in agriculture compared to 5% in Portugal? See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/employmen...
There’s plenty of rural Europe too, but Europeans mostly use vans (tradesmen) or tractors (farmers) instead. Both have much better visibility than those tall trucks with a long hood, at least from my experience.
The headline is wildly incorrect. Large vehicles are only responsible for about a 7.5% increase. Odd they aren't talking about the bigger issues at play and chose to mislead us.
“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century,” the report continued. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
"According to the report, pedestrian deaths have not only increased by 75% since 2009, but the fatalities have been correlated with the hazards presented by the physical heft, height, and blind spots inherent to today’s big trucks and SUVs."
They also drink a lot more fuel and contributing for co2 emissions. Thank you Americans for destroying Earth
No mention of CAFE standards? How can you write this article without mentioning the policy that incentivizes larger vehicles?
I'm excited that EVs get to avoid CAFE standards, so we get to have small vehicles again. Even though legacy domestic car manufacturers aren't going to be involved, as they practically wrote the CAFE standards that eliminated small vehicles, and there's bipartisan support to tariff EV imports out of existence, there's still enough market demand for multiple domestic startups.
CAFE isn't all they have to deal with. NTSB has stricter safety requirements now and we will probably not have small vehicles again. I just want a damn Hilux.
> I'm excited that EVs get to avoid CAFE standards, so we get to have small vehicles again.
I don't see evidence for EVs stimulating small vehicle production (but it would be awesome if it were the case). The one smaller vehicle bright spot is perhaps Tesla's Cybercab, which is compared to the Honda Civic, which itself has grown very large over the years. In order to get to that size the passenger mass capacity of the Cybercab is roughly 2/3 of the Civic. [0]
0. https://insideevs.com/news/798790/tesla-cybercab-specs/
Unfortunately, we still get abominations like the GMC Hummer EV (~9000 lbs, classified as a class 3 medium duty truck). Rumor has it the model has been cancelled after 2026 luckily.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/11/driving-the-biggest-lea...
https://www.torquenews.com/17998/i-leased-hummer-ev-because-...
As long as I get to buy a small vehicle, I don't mind if someone else buys something inefficient. It's better that oversized EVs be on the market than just oversized diesel trucks.
Bigger vehicles kill people in smaller vehicles in accidents.
Heavy Toll: America's Huge, Heavy Cars Are Killing More People - https://www.motortrend.com/features/why-americas-roads-keep-... - September 24th, 2024
> More than 40,000 people die on America’s roads every year, making them nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven than those in other rich nations. What’s more, the death rate has increased over the past decade, despite the adoption of more sophisticated passive safety systems and advanced driver assistance systems such as lane keep assist and automatic braking. The number of pedestrians killed by motor vehicles has almost doubled since 2010. Why? “Weight is to blame,” The Economist insists.
> Using data for 7.5 million two-vehicle crashes in 14 American states in 2013–2023, The Economist found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles killed 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The publication estimates that if the heaviest 10 percent of vehicles on America’s roads were roughly 1,000 pounds lighter, fatalities in multicar crashes would fall by 12 percent, saving 2,300 lives a year, without compromising the safety of the occupants of the heavier vehicles.
> “For every life the heaviest one percent of SUVs or trucks saves in America,” The Economist wrote, “more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.”
> Of course, what’s behind those grim statistics is simple physics. Force equals mass times acceleration: The heavier a vehicle, the harder it impacts an object at any given speed. The core issue in America is the massive differential between the lightest and heaviest vehicles on its roads (and to be clear, The Economist’s reporting is focused on cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks, not heavy-duty commercial trucks or semis).
No mention of the 1964 chicken tax either.
Vehicles accelerate a LOT faster on average than years ago, EVs and Turbo Engines...
I don't know the answer to this, and I don't know how to find it. The stats seem to mirror Bird and cohort uptake. Are these datapoints muddied with escooter death and injury?
What a marvelous piece of visualization. Best in class
Self driving cars can’t come soon enough. Can’t believe there is debate between Waymo tesla and others while completely missing a goal.
It's really astonishing how virtually every single quality of life indicator is negatively correlated with number of cars in the road. One of the most effective things you / your city / your nation can do do improve your live in every dimension is to take measures to reduce the number of cars.
I take my 7 year old daughter to learn how to ride a bicycle You take your 7 year old daughter to the gun range
We are not the same.
The inevitable march of progress.
"200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died"
Or, put another way, 0.000058% to 0.0001159% of the population.
Or, put another way, 1% of every traffic fatality, or 8% of every pedestrian killed by cars. Those are not a small number being affected by a single variable.
Recent Climate Town video on the move to trucks and SUVs: https://youtu.be/JPm4de6-eTg?si=Eu1y3uQIeCGnkR_2
If you don't know Rollie Williams, Climate Town videos are informative but suffused with a lot of humor to prevent it from being too preachy.
++ -- Rollie Williams == for edutainment. His channel is responsible for me becoming a patreon subscriber
I can't take the argument seriously when they ask "Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?"
Either way you're dead.
Human drivers are killing people, not the cars.
Weirdly NYC just blocked Waymo again.
Isn’t Waymo a guy driving a car remotely (or at least supervising)?
To make a stronger case of their graphic "you go under vs over" you'd only need to sample coroner reports and find evidence of crushing, which shouldn't be that hard given the sample size. This seems a bit correlation != causation pushing hard into p-hacking given the bounds from the 1980 data long before the hood-height hypothesis could carry and other obvious hypothesis like smart phone adoption curve.
Deadly for the rest. Not the owners. We need more trucks. Be the good guy in a truck.
Precisely. Want to cross the street? Get in the truck. Want to walk to that Starbucks next door for a quick espresso? Take the truck. Are you a newborn in a stroller? Your fault for not being in a truck and putting yourself at risk.
Took less than 5 seconds of reading the article to find out the title is a total lie:
“That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”
Edit: The title of the OP has been changed after I made this reply.
At the same time avoidance systems have become much better on those large new cars… so would it have even worse had collision avoidance not come into being?
Also interesting that often people tend to imagine F-150s, Silverados ,etc., but if you see what people drive they are large Bentzs, Toyotas and of course Suburbans and F-150s. But everyone is building them not just American manufacturers.
Avoidance systems aren't that much better, some just make an angry beep before plowing into something. Also you can't fix the fact that a heavier car is going to take longer to stop and will impart more force even at lower speeds.
> But everyone is building them not just American manufacturers
But for, and driven by, the American market.
I would hazard a guess that Silverados sold outside of US, Canada, Mexico and Australia can fit in a single parking lot.
The homemarket websites for Mecedes (Geländewagen), BMW (X series), LandRover (defender), Toyota (LandCruiser, Lexus LX), etc. have the large SUVs for sale. They are not as popular as they are in the US but they are available.
Hard to find reliable data, but could only find (shared) data for 2022 for large SUVs - whatabout doesn't quite cut it imo, feel free to look into midsize SUVs but imo the really large ones are more problematic:
Ford Expedetion: 81,988 in 2021, 71,648 in 2022
Mercedes GLS: 24,482 in 2021, 12,395 in 2022
Chevy Tahoe: 106,030 2021, 109,032 2022
Chevy Suburban: 48,214 2021, 52,459 2022
Dodge Durango: 65,935 2021, 58,627 2022
GMC Yukon: 84,242 2021, 80,731 2022
Nissan Armada: 22,814 2021, 17,551 2022
Toyota Sequoia: 8,070 2021, 7,066 2022 (but about 25,000 after refresh in 2023)
* Ford F-150 [2] *: 726,004 2021, 683,633 in 2022.
The Large SUVs are all linked here: https://carfigures.com/us-market-segment/large-suvs
I'm sure the mix is different and skews a lot more Japanese for mid-size (which are probably also dangerous), but these large SUVs and trucks with huge hoods and no rear visibility are getting quite problematic [1]. The front blind zones are pretty ridiculous, to the point that people advocate for front cameras: https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0?si=o0uvSEmKZrn2gHSN&t=205 (with timestamp).
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar... [2] https://carfigures.com/us-market-brand/ford/f-series
Does the added risk translate proportionally to increased insurance costs? Or is there an imbalance? When I was a teen getting insurance for the first time, certain vehicle colors were significantly more expensive to insure, and that fact factored into my car buying decisions.
There are almost never consequences for hitting someone with your car.
"Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century"
They're making loud noise about nothing. 200-400 people in a country of 200+ million is nothing.
Yes... big trucks and SUVs might have something to do with it. Could also be that people are not paying attention more because of their phones. Could also be that the people in these vehicles suck at driving them.
The data doesn't account for particular instances, it's just a guess at what is the cause.
there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones
Then surely Europe shares that trends and shows growth in pedestrian death.
But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...
Anecdotally...
Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.
One thing I was surprised by when driving in Coquitlam where I have cousins is that drivers there would start moving right after the green. This is strange to me because drivers in San Francisco will frequently be stationary for seconds afterwards. Looking at the rough statistics, it appears the RCMP police for smartphone usage in a stricter manner than SFPD does (or at least they write more citations) which makes me think that drivers in that region have adapted by not using their smartphones as much.
I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.
In downtown LA I routinely spot on-duty police officers, who are usually cruising in large SUVs, texting while driving.
Hah, near me the Police Chief claimed this was fine as they were professional drivers who'd had "special training".
I wonder why this "special training" to allow people to be able to safely text and drive isn't available to all of us... but I think I can hazard some theories...
Everyone around the world seems to eat cereal while driving:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-614...
https://www.cbs42.com/news/crime/ohio-woman-caught-eating-ce...
https://www.carthrottle.com/news/cyclist-berated-woman-eatin...
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen drivers in the Bay Area conducting a full blown Zoom call, video and all.
(I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync’d which otherwise took a half hour.)
It could be Europe has stricter driver's license requirements resulting in fewer people who might succumb to distractions getting behind the wheel. And more availability of walking and public transit options meaning more of those people don't need to drive in the first place. Giant vehicles certainly don't help regardless.
Sure, it could be that.
But when we cast around for other explanations, for some reason it's always interesting to zero in on an uncontrollable factor that means we aren't responsible for the situation we find ourselves in.
Btw Europe is full of the same dumb humans that live everywhere else. Granted, they have better bread, cheese, and health care.
Sedan hits you, you get hit in the knees and fall on the hood. Brodozer hits you, it strikes your chest/head, pushes you over and drives over you.
>Sedan hits you, you get hit in the knees and fall on the hood. Brodozer hits you, it strikes your chest/head, pushes you over and drives over you.
You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Your two most common options are pavement and windshield. Pavement is worse because cars have a fair bit of engineering that goes into preventing head onto windshield. At the end of the day it's mostly a question about getting hit above or below center of mass.
Modern (ie. larger than they were 20yr ago) crossovers and midsize SUVs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in these stats. But the people who want to talk about this problem tend to drive Rav4s and not Chevy 2500s so the latter gets complained about even though the former outsold it 2:1
Relatedly, minivans are kind of bad no matter how you cut them because it's hard to stay true to the form factor and not have pedestrians go straight into windshield in fairly low speed crashes.
TFA addresses this.
> The issue isn’t mass alone, but also height. Yes, spreading impact over a greater area reduces the force experienced by any given part of your body, but when that surface area rises further and further from the ground, the impact point on your body rises with it. If you’re hit below your center of mass, you’re likely to fall toward the vehicle. If you’re hit at or above that point, you’re likely to be knocked down in front of of the vehicle instead. The latter becomes less survivable due to the poor visibility offered by taller trucks and SUVs.
> “We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash testing for the report. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
Afair, e.g. Land Rover stopped producing the classic Defender due to more stringent pedestrian protection regulations in the EU. They introduced strict front-end safety requirements for cars and SUVs whereas the US does not. So vehicles designed and sold in European (in numbers) are probably safer for pedestrians because it is tested for and required - but there are exceptions for some US trucks somehow.
> You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Not to be combative, but I'd also like to see stats on that - that sounds just as made up. I'd expect a lot of pedestrians to strike the hood (about just as likely as windshield) as most pedestrian accidents happen in parking lots, drive-ways, traffic lights and vehicles exiting across a sidewalk (under 25mph).
Anecdotally, it seems to me that most Europeans aren't as consumed by their dopamine delivery devices in day to day activities as most Americans are.
Possibly American drivers are more reckless? Compare intoxicated driving deaths in the US vs Britain for instance.
Aren’t the laws in Europe about phones actually enforced?
Our cars are getting pretty big too.
A BMW X5 is only slightly narrower than an F150, a range rover vogue only another inch off that.
All fun and games with road infrastructure built for 108s and clios.....
My 08 X5 is bigger than my 01 F150. Heavier, too. Also requires premium fuel.
maybe there are other confounding factors that make smartphone utilization much less likely in Europe. Specifically no daily long commute in a car where people get bored and are tempted to use them.
There’s plenty of people spending hours commuting by car each way over here too.
Other countries have smartphones too.
Other countries take it way more seriously. The US has way more deaths per capita than Australia (just one example) simply due to lack of enforcement of speeding, drunk driving, smart phone use.
In Australia I would get a speed camera ticket for 2kmh over. 15+ kmh over and I’m getting pulled over, mandatory court appearance, minimum license suspension of 90 days.
I would get a random breath test every 2-3 months. Pulled over, breathalyser handed to me, blow, and then on my way. Very fast and efficient.
Smartphones are an absolute no no. May e you’d touch one in the outback where you can see clearly for 20 miles in every direction that nobody else is around. Everyone sets up hands free operation through a car Bluetooth. If you can’t do it hands free you simply don’t do it. You program in your GPS maps before you release the parking brake.
In America… people are annoyed when they get a $150 fine for going 30kmh over the limit.
They generally don’t have brodozers
Australia had plenty, yet mysteriously has far fewer deaths.
A Hilux is hardly a lifted 1500.
Exactly.
Yep. The linked NYT article has this weak-sounding line -
> Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.
- but it is so focused on telling a long-winded story that I didn't bother checking whether they'd really tried to correct for that. (My cynical guess is "no" - since if they really cared and had ruled phones out, they'd clearly say so.)
Surely someone somewhere will bring to bear a solution that will disable all but voice calls on smartphones while the smartphone is paired to the car and the car is moving but allow for the devices of minors in a moving vehicle to still function like smartphones. They might also use interior cameras to ascertain who is driving and which device should be neutered but for emergency communication.
Yes, people would be annoyed at first but they also will experience a sigh of relief that they don't have to reply to a boss's or co-worker's text in the middle of a commute or running deliveries, etc.
Won’t happen. Self driving AI is the only way out of this. Until then, we will have mass carnage on the roads because that’s what people choose.
Almost like we need a study to figure out what the actual cause is. Oh, that's what the article is about, the study.
Per tfa vehicle size “ represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths” so the title is really a distraction from the (likely) root cause that GP brings up.
Could it be that the other differences are driven by differences in the built environment? Like narrower roads making people drive slower, or bollards, or alternatives to driving making it less likely to have people that shouldn't be driving doing so?
Also, 10% is a huge effect.
that's called a hypothesis. now go author a study to test it, like the study being reported on. hypotheses without evidence don't stand up to hypotheses that have been tested.
And how did this study rule out smartphones?
You could compare rates to other countries that do have smartphones like the US, but don't drive the large vehicles like Americans. That might be illuminating.
It could be why.
It could also be from people staring at their cell phone and walking down the road. I see it all the time. I've seen people walk right into intersections against the light.
Maybe, it's even both, because while I can believe large cars aren't helping... I surely know staring on your phone, walking, and not paying attention is just plain dumb.
The NYC DOT did a study on this a few years back and found it not to be the case:
> Reports of device distraction are scarce in the New York City and national fatality data, and estimates of annual mobile device-related injuries are dwarfed nationally by pedestrian injury estimates where pedestrian distraction was not cited. In short, despite growing concerns, DOT found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly to pedestrian fatalities and injuries. https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shoul...
You know what's way worse: drivers using their phones when driving. If you drive in a way that you kill a careless pedestrian it's a problem. It's cars and drivers almost exclusively.
Unfortunately, in the car size arms race, bigger and heavier cars are safer for their occupants.
"Everyone outside the car be damned" is the expressed preference of US buyers.
I don't think the US consumers are buying the bigger SUV/trucks because they are safer. At best it might be a minor contributing factor. It's primarily a status/identity thing.
Early SUVs were actually extremely unsafe, high wheel base made them more prone to tipping over (rollover), no crumple zones and similar safety measures because we'll just make it big instead, and so on. This is why newer SUVs have thicker A-pillars and other measures, because the earlier ones before safety regs were enforced were deathtraps.
n=1, I dated a low empathy woman who specifically drove a Chevy Tahoe due to mass for safety reasons and transporting her only child in the vehicle frequently. “Good luck to the other driver.”
On the flip side, there's a lot to be said for a low centre of gravity and it's still the case that US "trucks" get smushed by actual trucks (road trains and heavy haul outmass a tahoe).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TskUzmg6Sk
(Site safety video, engine and transmission removed in example vehicle .. still ..)
Great video. She was sophisticated enough to understand the risk profile, anecdote shared to demonstrate that some folks do decision their purchase around winning the potential tonnage battle. Very “tragedy of the commons” that can only be solved with regulation. Otherwise, some will buy big because they can.
They're only "safer" to the driver. Large vehicles put everyone else at a higher risk.
This is "race to the bottom" logic. The only end to this logic is everyone driving giant vehicles in bubbles because "it's safer for meeeeeeeee" as they hit children in a school zone cuz the blind spot in their Ford fuck550 is a football field long.
Race to the bottom logic is rampant in this form of capitalism that we're experiencing. Everyone's excuse is valid and only shifts the baseline to more excess and extreme behavior.
non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/21/us/trucks-suv...
all we want are 70-series land cruisers, prados and suzuki jimnys
end the idiotic chicken tax and make small trucks and utes legal again
while we are on the topic, full size vans make a lot more sense than "suvs" for most families
Yeah, but no one want's to buy a mom van </s>
Yes, this is a problem. Look at a typical truck from the 90s or so, they are tiny compared to today’s trucks.
The same thing is true of cars. Today’s civic is as big as an accord used to be. There is no Del Sol.
We need to turn the incentive knobs that worked so successfully on consumption so we now work on vehicle size.
Also, about the center of gravity discussion: I used to have an old friend that spent decades in business running a body shop. I asked him once what was the worst animal for causing vehicle damage. ( This was in rural South Dakota. I was thinking cow, horse, maybe bison. ) Nope. He said most animals would go up and over the hood, just like the people in the article. He said pigs were the worst. They stay low, going right into the car and not bouncing over. Often resulting in a total loss for that car.
These are gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men. Taking them away is a direct attack on their masculinity. When we say, "Men are under attack," it refers to things like this.
Regardless of any safety claims, for that reason alone, I don't see it as a politically viable issue.
I can't tell if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing that men use big trucks to compensate for a masculine sense of inadequacy. But I think this is a good point, and I think we need to fight against it.
I don't think it's politically impossible. These things are killing children (among many other people). "Giant trucks and SUVs are killing children" seems like a pretty powerful line.
> These are gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men.
I think people simply do find SUVs (which I don't like) convenient. Many women, including a huge number of moms, do happen to just love SUVs. Both in the US and in the EU.
In the EU SUVs are now approaching 60% of all cars sold (59.25% or so, latest numbers). You don't get such a market share by being mostly cars sold to men needing to "gender-affirm".
"SUV" is too broad a category. A RAV4 is an SUV. It's similarly sized to most of the SUVs I've seen in Europe. And a pedestrian getting hit by one would have a similar experience to getting hit by a sedan. It's nothing like the big Rams, GMCs or F250s with the high front grilles that are becoming more popular while also being far deadlier to pedestrians.
A RAV4 in Europe is just a "SUV" (and one on the larger side). In the US, it's a "compact SUV"...
I drive an SUV. It's convenient!
A Ford F150 is fucking ridiculous in comparison, and larger than any truck I remember seeing growing up, and there's people with F350s for personal use.
One of them ran over and killed a kid outside a nearby children's museum. Those things are not safe.
What are the benefits of an SUV over a minivan though? They seem objectively worse in practically all regards: worse fuel efficiency, worse doors, less cargo space, worse visibility.
I noticed that your home is a little bit bigger than it absolutely needs to be to sustain your life.
Not all "SUVs" are equivalent. The best ones have AWD and are basically just a beefier sedan/wagon.
They more or less have the capabilities of a small pickup truck, but exchange the bed for more passenger space and inside cargo room. A minivan does have more space, but cannot tow and would immediately get stuck in the first mud patch it sees.
I have no idea why people in the city buy them though (other than snowy regions).
Sure, people can love SUVs, and trucks can be gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men. Both can be true.
Watch a US truck commercial. The market and the motivating themes are immediately obvious. Besides, drivers literally adorn trucks with prosthetic testicles. That's something that cannot be unseen.
You might be the one saying this right now, but how old is this comment?
I don't think I've ever heard any man ever say that in real life, but even online it's probably been almost a decade since this was memed into the ground.
> I don't think I've ever heard any man ever say that in real life
Um, because men get weird when you point out the gender-affirming actions they do? Try it irl and see what the reactions are. There's a reason the only place free of physical intimidation is where this can be safely said.
Besides, how old is the privacy comment or the "parents should parent" comment we see dragged out on every kid's social media ban? It's almost like the age of the sentiment doesn't have any bearing on its relevancy.
I exhaled through my nose when I thought of reversing your upset sexism. Let's start calling cosmetics "gender-affirming" and mock women who use them.
You're right, I don't know why you're getting down voted. You e got my admiration for being brave enough to write this on HN
I have 360 degree cameras (at toddler height), auto braking, every conceivable safety mechanism. I really think that once these are implemented, any hatred of large vehicles is just jealousy.
My normal sized car is at a significant disadvantage in a collision with a full-sized SUV. This creates higher injury risk for me and my family.
Larger vehicles also cause more road damage over time, which raises my taxes or reduces the quality of roads I drive on.
For those reasons, I think vehicles should be taxed by weight, to encourage more smaller, lighter vehicles.
>For those reasons, I think vehicles should be taxed by weight, to encourage more smaller, lighter vehicles.
I pay higher insurance and registration fees already, I think its covered where I am.
Jealous of what exactly? Sounds like you are trying to justify your needlessly large/heavy vehicle. Plenty of accidents still occur with vehicles that have all those features. And accidents involving large/heavy vehicles are deadlier. It’s not rocket science. On top of that they have other downsides, like increased pollution and road degradation.
>Jealous of what exactly?
Wish I knew.
>Sounds like you are trying to justify your needlessly large/heavy vehicle.
I drove a Honda Jazz until I literally couldn't fit everything in anymore. I found I could carry 4 1.2 meter galvanised steel poles at an angle before I ran out of capacity. Which worked fine for me, I wouldn't be anxious unless they were literally scraping the windshield. I could carry half a rack of servers in the back with the seats folded down, before the back of the thing would start to scrape pavement. I needed something that could do better than that when I upgraded. Most hatches and sedans were a backwards step, and Honda stopped selling the Jazz in Aus. But for whatever reason, people feel the need to comment on the large vehicle.
>Plenty of accidents still occur with vehicles that have all those features.
With reduced impact.
>like increased pollution and road degradation.
I get better distance per litre out of the big one, and if its more polluting then I don't understand why I struggle so hard with the DPF which is literally designed to bring the thing down to our honestly egregious emissions standards, I literally dream about getting it illegally removed. "Road Degredation" seems marginal at best, wider tires spreading the load out further. Seems like another engineering problem if it is a problem. The poms figured out how to prevent their CVR light tanks from causing road damage, I am sure big utes aren't that much of an issue.
Doesn't fix braking distance, doesn't fix the increased chance of serious injury if a collision with a pedestrian occurs.
>auto braking
The thing literally starts braking before my brain can process whats happening.
And finishes long after a similarly-equipped lighter vehicle would.
Ok and?
My vehicle is as safe or safer than older lighter vehicles currently permitted on the road.
Why should the goalposts run off into the distance? Surely I have now met the common definition of "safe". At what point is it enough? This just brings back to Jealousy or some kind of Tall Poppy syndrome again.
A larger vehicle is more of a hazard to others than a smaller vehicle, and the safety features you describe don't change that.
But, as you're in Australia, I'm not sure your definition of "large" matches the story's or mine. North America has a whole class of huge ass vehicles that are relatively rare elsewhere in the world. Are you driving an Escalade, F-150, or similar?
None of that fixes an inattentive driver flying down the road playing with tiktok on their phone
Agreed. It definitely fixes backing over a toddler in your driveway though.
I have a newer crossover. I put a hitch mount cargo box on and went to back out of the driveway. It slammed the brakes on harder than I ever have.
>None of that fixes an inattentive driver flying down the road playing with tiktok on their phone
Automatic braking does alleviate this, but also, inattentive driving is already illegal?
no, it's the fact that in accidents (where you are not the cause), people die disproportionately under your giant vehicle. it's safer for you, but almost no one else.
and don't get me started on the environmental/political aspects.
why would someone questioning your selfish (I'm not targeting you personally, just voicing a general perspective) decision have anything to do with jealousy?
Political?
>it's safer for you, but almost no one else.
No its safe for everyone else too. It wont even let me run into a tree.
>have anything to do with jealousy
Wish I knew, its just the only thing left when driving an efficient, safe vehicle that just happens to be large.
There are many factors driving this:
1. Fuel economy regulations that scale regressively with vehicle size, that incentivize automakers to build and market larger vehicles that are easier to hit regulatory targets.
2. Rollover and crash worthiness regulations that require thicker A-pillars and more robust roof structure.
3. Towing performance. The large pickup manufacturers are in an arms race to beat each other’s power and towing capacity numbers. This requires a large, upright grille to provide adequate cooling for a large engine.
4. Consumer demand. The idea that marketing is telling people what to buy is silly. People are spending $80k+ on massive vehicles because they like them. Simple as that. The industry puts lot of marketing effort behind vehicles that are flops. They can’t make people buy a product they don’t want.
Disclaimer: I own a huge diesel pickup, along with a Tesla Model Y and a Porsche 911. Why? They’re fun! I use the pickup to tow an RV, but it’s also just fun to drive.
I have definitely noticed the visibility problem though. Forget pedestrians, sometimes entire cars are hiding behind the A-pillar! You have to move your head to the side to clear the blind spot safely.
Ban private vehicles tbh
Okay. What's the correlation coefficient?
What also happened around 2009?... Smartphones taking off in a big way.
Distracted pedestrians must be a significant factor too. Especially if they've got noise-cancelling Airpods or similar in their ears while looking at their phone.
if that was true, we'd see the same pedestrian mortality rise everywhere, which we don't.
Other countries enforced not using phones when driving.
Yeah fuck those inattentive pedestrians not leaping out of my way
> Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?
> Whap! Time’s up. What did you get hit by? If you picked small, you might be dead. If you said “large,” your odds are lower. Why? Two reasons. First, F=ma and second, P = F/A. OK, I suppose that’s really just one reason, and it’s called “physics.”
I drive a big SUV because I have a better chance of surviving if something hits me. That has to be a significant statistic somewhere too, right? How many lives were saved because of big cars?
Are you joking? Your huge SUV class kills more people than saves by easily 10x. What happens when you hit a car?
Selfish behavior is ruining our streets.
You decrease the risk to you but you dramatically increase the risk to other people, especially pedestrians. The total deaths go up.
> You decrease the risk to you
Yes, that's the point. No offense to other people, but I'm trying to not die when I drive to the store. Driving a tank with a sun roof is a good way to do that.
It's an antisocial, even solipsistic way to do that. Offense evidently intended, even if you convince yourself it's not.
Do you also run around firing bullets at random people just in case they might decide to attack you at some undetermined point in the future?
No I just safely drive my SUV to the store and then back home.