Key missing component: CAFE needs a rewrite. US emissions laws have a cutout so that larger vehicles have less stringent emissions requirements. The problem is that this is no longer a gap it's a chasm. Slight hyperbole but a Japanese kei car many Americans would love town own muat do closer to 50mpg, while a monster pickup can do 15mpg. It ends up that a small car can cost $15,000 and the giant pickup costs... $15,000. Many consumers compare the two and wonder if the econobox is really a good choice.
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
People keep repeating this but isn’t the case. The smallest cars from budget automakers are their cheapest cars and they’ve almost all been discontinued for lack of sales. I know, I drive one. And people look at it as a joke, they’d never buy one, and they think it’s hilarious I do. I’d buy another for my commute vehicle when this one diesbecause I do like it but Honda discontinued it for miserable sales numbers.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
Because the small car is the same cost as an SUV but worse utility wise. I actually go the other way, I bet the back row of an SUV (or tall hatchback like the Honda Fit) gets more use carrying people or large items than the back row of your average sedan. During growing season I'm constantly schlepping dirt and mulch home. I can fit 5 humans and all our camping supplies no problem. Fit a whole assembled grill in the back we got from FB marketplace.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
I used to own a Fit, and a friend of mine asked me out of everybody with pickups, minivans, SUVs, etc. to borrow my car to pick up a pinball machine a few hours away. It's ridiculous how much stuff you can put in the back of that thing.
It's like Honda makes them bigger on the inside than on the outside.
At some point i had a Fit and a slightly larger Suzuki SX4. I got to carry 30 folding chairs in the Fit once. I could maybe have fit 20 of them in the Suzuki.
I had a trailer hitch on my Fit, and would show up to moving parties and embarrass all the pickup trucks with how much stuff I could haul. Their trucks had tiny 6 foot beds, my trailer was 8 feet long, plus all the crap I could fit in the back of the car itself.
It's a real shame they don't make the Fit anymore here in the US. Instead we get that shitty crossover HRC in it's place that doesn't have nearly the storage space in it, because it has to look like it's higher off the ground to satisfy buyers.
We had a small cheap sedan that was rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic while waiting to turn when my wife was driving. Since she's been hit thrice in sedans and not once in our minivan, she's come to the conclusion that she needs a bigger vehicle just to be seen. It's not an argument I buy, but I understand how she has reached that conclusion.
Americans "want" big SUVs because they're cheaper than mid-sized sedans. Unfortunately, they pollute more and they're less safe.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Beyond personal needs people want what others have, what they see in films, and what they see marketing for. The price and general availability impacts all of those things. Car companies will push what makes most economic sense and consumers will to, which helps create trends people hop on to.
I disagree. At least where I'm at, small cars don't serve any better purpose. We have plenty of space and gas is relatively inexpensive.
So I'd rather spend a few thousand more for a midsize or large car/suv than a mini or compact car. It has nothing to do with neighbors, or signaling. Larger cars are usually just better.
Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Bro, it's our illogical measurement system and we'll be as illogical as we want with how we notate it. Go compare cubic centimeters to milliliters or whatever.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
There are two models with full-size four-door crew cabs and 8' beds, and they can work in most US suburbs. I think it's less about whether it's manageable and more about the aesthetics. The front-rear proportions on 8' trucks just aren't great.
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
A big problem with the idea that “people don’t want small cars” is that that sort of statement comes from the car manufacturer looking at new car sales. People who want large trucks and SUVs are willing to buy new. People who want a small car have the option to buy a new 2024 Honda Civic, or they could spend significantly less to get a used Honda Civic (in normal economic conditions). Since the manufacturer only profits of of new cars, they have little incentive to sell any cheap or small cars since they compete so heavily against last year’s model at the used car lot.
> Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
> Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
I get so tired of people mindlessly citing CAFE laws.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People want big cars and people want everyone else to pay for them. Build big parking spaces for free. Widen roads for free. Not cover costs of accidents or otherwise the insurance would be too much. Not pay for all the polluting either.
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
Huh? We tolerate it pretty much everywhere else. You can buy a 2,000 sq ft home, even though you could live in a 500 sq ft condo. You can buy a computer more powerful than needed for work. You can buy Apple instead of Dell, even though the extra money would be spent better on helping the homeless or preventing malaria in the developing world.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
A computer or a home that uses more energy has externalities for others that certainly aren't covered by your electricity bills alone. Taxpayers pay for new power plants, everybody pays for emissions, etc. Almost everything has externalities that aren't fully accounted for in the sticker price, because it would be insanely complicated to do that kind of accounting, let alone do it in a way we can all agree on.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
I think electric trucks/SUVs are a major reason changing CAFE standards won't actually solve the problem though since they are at least just as big and dangerous to other road users as gas powered vehicles and are often much faster and heavier. Changing the CAFE standards 20 years ago would have helped avoid the trend of increasing vehicle size, but here on the cusp of widespread electric vehicles I'm not sure it would have the same impact.
What we really need and would never do is to put a pedestrian collision rating in NCAP, which Euro-NCAP already does. (NCAP is the system used to give safety ratings to cars.)
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
Unless it's a total stripper meant for something like a highway maintenance department fleet vehicle, a "giant pickup" will cost 3 or 4 times that amount.
They'll just move to EV trucks. We need taxes for car sizes (wider lanes needed = money, bigger parking spots needed = money, etc), pedestrian/cyclist safety ratings (more dangerous to pedestrians/cyclists, higher taxes), noise levels and weight (more road wear and tear plus particulate production).
The key to this implementing this sort of policy without hurting poor people is to introduce a corresponding tax credit or stimulus payment (potentially means tested) such that driving a normal vehicle a normal amount comes out even and poor people can actually come out ahead if they make more responsible choices. You want people to feel it at the pump so it affects their decision making without having it be punitive.
Sounds like it’d hurt poor people unless they make what you call more responsible choices. A difficult part about being poor is you often don’t have as many options. There is a lot of reasons why that turns up, but it’s there all the same.
The ability to buy a car with a loan is very widespread. It's easier than cash if you're poor, isn't it? And with a loan you can balance vehicle cost against gas cost easily.
The key to an inefficient government is taking money and redistributing it.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
The solution is to stop classifying cars as trucks by invoking a more stringent definition of a truck. The PT Cruiser should never have been a truck. None of the XUVs should be trucks.
Yeah whenever I'm in an SUV I try to compare mileage. They'll get ~30% worse mpg than me in the same situation and I'm just a gas sedan, not even a hybrid
Yeah I see it now lol. I love that car. It holds all the stuff I need, 5 people comfortably, great safety (blind spot monitor, Lane keep, a backup camera [which I know is standard now but it's my first one]). When I got it I immediately drove/slept in it 1500 miles back home. So kind of instant bonding.
I did an internship for Mercedes and I was able to drive our mid-sized R&D bus as my (routine) American driver's license allowed me to drive vehicles and vehicle combinations up to 26000 lbs GVWR/GCWR. Several of my German colleagues did not have a license permitting them to drive it.
I think this is the uncomfortable truth. I love tiny sports cars, but even I have steadily shifted my attention to larger & larger vehicles. (A family of tall bicyclists has an objectively easier time in an Outback than a Samurai)
The only real downsides to larger vehicles are cost and exterior size, but with subsidy, wide lanes, and big parking spots those pains are removed. Small cars mostly are mostly popular where lanes are narrow, parking spots are tiny, costs are high, and so forth.
Happily, this is mostly orthogonal to safe road design (aside from the towering height of today’s truck grilles)
Plus those giant vehicles have additional features not as often found on the small ones like 360 cameras and auto parallel park systems, so don’t expect crappy parking situations to stop these drivers from taking up every square inch of your cities parking infrastructure.
The “big vehicle = more features” thing is also an independent reason for the success and popularity of big vehicles in America.
Good summary. No idea why it gets downvoted. People want big cars for selfish and arm-race reasons. They don't pay for the consequences so it's rational as well. When it's rational to engage in an arm race we need regulation but we are not getting any.
Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. What makes this so hypocritical is that hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened. There were no studies on how wide, fast roads would negatively impact neighborhoods. How they would make it dangerous just to walk around, or increase the local pollution (air and particulates ending up in streams). They didn’t study how these widened roads might negatively impact downtowns, etc. All of this car investment happened as though it was for the greater good, and many people still believe this.
> hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened
Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built. US cities weren't destroyed because the people that lived there voted on it. For the most part you had a bureaucratic elite come in over the top and simply create laws and change the regulation.
> This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built.
I guess that depends a bit on how far back still includes 'now'. Portland is the nearest big(ish) city to me, and they absolutely killed road expansion about 40 years ago; that is when most of the freeways and major arterials in the area were being built out. There have been a few small extensions built since, a bit of widening now and then, but they are the exception and they take many years to get buy-in.
US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best. In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city, lets people efficiently get around, and so on. It helps the economic value of a city and also improves quality of life. If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base. But there hasn't been. At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
Yeah and more and more people are fat and die or get sick from air pollution. Truly a win for car based infrastructure.
Your argument doesn't work because people are terrible at making good choices as individuals. Public enjoys smoking too, especially when pushed by advertising. Yet we somehow managed to push back on it a bit and people are now die less frequently from lung cancer and you can now breath in many cases you couldn't before.
That is a weird comparison. Smoking has no objective upsides, unless you count pleasure or the stimulant effect of nicotine. Driving, on the other hand, has a huge utilitarian aspect that is impossible to ignore. There are many things you cannot accomplish using public transit, and many of the counter arguments are transparently made by young healthy individuals with a lot of stamina, plenty of spare time, and no children. And probably no house. That may seem like utopia to some folks but it completely ignores reality, so the argument is dead on arrival.
Driving bigger cars which are often only bigger outside has very little utility or even negative one if you don't count pleasure people get from driving dangerously. Minivans beat SUVs in almost all use cases and are safer for others as well but here we are.
I am not saying cars don't have utility but the problem is that you can buy a more dangerous, more polluting, bigger one and not pay the costs you incur on others. It's like smokers blowing the smoke into other people faces and then disposing of the cigarette butt on the street without paying anything.
Just make drivers pay the costs they incur on others and then let people choose. Right now it's a giant subsidy for driving at every step.
> US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best.
The damage US policies did to US cities is worse then what allied bombers ever did to Europe.
> In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city
First of all, car infrastructure is literally the single most inefficient way to get people to a city.
In order to do it you need to basically destroy half of the city and give gigantic amount of space to roads and parking. To the point where in the US, much of the things people used to go to the city for is just gone.
And the few people that do get to the city, is LITERALLY the expense of the people who actually live there. But fuck them I guess. All the people who were Red Lined, unable to invest and impoverished, and then when their houses lost value, getting paid nothing and torn down.
And those places now had a horrible highway threw the city, making the land on both sides be worth even less.
But at least the subburban white people can still drive to the office tower.
> It helps the economic value of a city
US cities were much more valuable before the drive to build highways. And in Europe, cities that didn't build massive highways tend to be much more valuable. And many of the worst example of urban decay are those cities with the most complete highway programs.
Your assertion simply not backup by any data, there is tons of research on this. Gigantic amount of property value was lost. Countless beautiful old building that could still produce economic value to this day (and for the next 100 years) were ripped down to build parking lots.
And the worst part is, despite the dilapidated state of the cities, the cities were still producing more taxes, subsidizing the suburbs.
Literally destroying cities, pulling all the wealth out of it, to subsidize the subburban infrastructure.
> If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base.
Please do yourself a favor and actually read up on the history of how these things happened.
> At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People back then didn't all understand the long term effect of these policies. And hidden subsidizes were used to hide the actual cost.
You act like the US in the 50/60 was some perfectly democratic society where if its impossible to even imagine that one group of people would support policy to exploit another group of people that was much less able to fight back politically. Must be nice to live in a imaginary world all the time.
If you didn't get it in school, if it doesn't fit the narrative it didn't exist.
> But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People for the most part don't enjoy it. 'Road rage' is literally an incredibly common thing. People are sad by the terrible state of roads. The Netherlands and other European countries consistently outrank the US in driver satisfaction index. And that is only looking at drivers.
And many people have had people die, many people had accidents, many people had cars drive into their homes. Many people have lung issues. The list goes on an on and on.
The reality is people don't have another option, and most people today in the US have never even thought about or considered any other kind of system.
You can't say 'see after we invested countless billions in System A and gave it every advantage over decades and decades and abused System B for just as long', people use System A more. That's prove that system A is better.
Its an idiotic line of argument and its truly sad to see that even on HN people make those kind of basic mistakes.
In the Netherlands people actually have options, trains, trams, bikes, cars. And turns out, yes some people like driving. And driver satisfaction is much higher there then it is in the US. But many people clearly use bikes and trains. And just FYI, the investment that was put into bike infrastructure in the last 40 years is a absolute drop in the bucket compared to 100+ years of road investment.
If you actually gave all the modes the same amount of city space, and the same amount of investment, and actually prioritized by both energy efficiency and and people threwput, things would be far more tilted then it even is in the Netherlands.
Perhaps you live somewhere were everyone is content? My neighborhood is full of people (admittedly, many older) who mobilize at the slightest rumor of change anywhere in our vicinity. Bigger road? No way, that means more traffic. More houses? No way, that means more traffic. The neighborhood associate is quite active about staying on top of anything planned for this region of the city so they can light up our inboxes with information.
Probably the one thing they wouldn't really be bothered by is expanding that cul-de-sac, as long as it will still be a dead end and not a new connection that traffic might choose to use to transit across the neighborhood.
> Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc.
I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.
Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality.
The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.
If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.
Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.
On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them.
As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.
None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else.
You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
And isn't it really about how people are driving? In my state, we drive like maniacs, constantly speeding at least ten MPH over the limit. The term, "drive friendly" is scoffed at. Slowing down to let someone on the highway is unseen.
On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?
The solution is easy, I just saw it implemented in a nearby town (8k people): make the road curb a little, never fully straight, add bollards everywhere on the side of the road, and narrow the road at every crossing (with metal/concrete bollards). Bollards are great: they protect pedestrian and are intimidating it seems. According to the mayor (I ate with him, friend of my mother) the architect who gave him the idea was a nudge expert, and they tested it first with thin, plastic bollards around the town (it worked, but wasn't protective enough). The city is halfway between two economic 'centers' (28k and 50k population) and see a lot of traffic as those cities grow. No pedestrian death in the last two years AFAIK, when pre-covid you had half a dozen injuries every year and a mortal accident every other year.
So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!
Absolutely this. If people are maniacs and can't control their speed themselves, design the roads so they can't drive at insane speeds on them. I live right across the street from a school. During school times, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. The road is perfectly straight with clear sight lines and the lanes are literally as wide as freeway lanes (12') with bike lanes on both sides making it feel even wider. If you had no context of the road and what was off of it, you'd comfortably cruise at 55+ because the road is designed for that.
Throw in some strategically placed bollards or chicanes to change the geometry of the road and people will be forced to slow down.
Yes, people in general are terrible at driving. Teaching them is hopeless that's why we need solutions that works. There are two right now: infrastructure that makes it hard and very inconvenient to go fast and heavy handed enforcement. The latter option only works in very well developed civilised societes like Switzerland or Nordic countries have. Most others are stuck with traffic calling measures as their population has too little too lose to care about safety.
We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies.
You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.
Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?
Have you EVER tried to bike for commuting, grocery shopping, transportation in general, on those bike lanes?
If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.
There is a bike lane going to a popular trail and crossing multiple major streets, also with bike lanes, as well as passing by multiple apartment complexes near my house. A two way lane with curbs and bollards, no cars parked there, with bike traffic lights and many side streets with 2 way stops (no stop on the street with the lane) or, at least, 4 way stops. I do drive on the same street from/to work as well as ride on the same lane to the trails. There are not many cyclists on it, orders of magnitude fewer than there are cars on the same street.
"Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.
Facts cannot be "debunked", your can keep living your fantasy though. And, speaking of google search - go ahead, open google maps, select "biking" layer and check the streets with bike lanes in any city in the US by dropping into street view on them. See if there are going to be more cyclists or cars on them. Try to debunk that.
The US has pitiful and dangerous bike infrastructure. Wherever in the world bike infrastructure is pleasant and safe to use, people use it. En masse. For the same size street more people bike than drive a car, per hour. Virtue of bikes being much smaller and more nimble.
That's what I call "a fact".
Throwing a bunch of paint shaped like a bike on what are basically freeways does not make it infrastructure.
That's why people don't bike in the US.
You're basically arguing that bike "infrastructure" that doesn't actually connect anything useful end to end, worth say, $5 million for a city can't compete with multi decade car infrastructure, a complete network that can take you from everywhere to everywhere else, that cost $40 billion over that period.
Gee... I wonder why? What could it possibly be? I guess we'll never know.
You first posted that the bike lane near my house, which I observe daily is "debunked". Then you doubled up saying that whenever there's bike infrastructure people use it more than cars with 0 evidence (and contrary to what everyone in the US who leaves one's house regularly can observe). Yeah, those are "facts", in quotes
You, sir, are an American provincial that's absolutely refusing to read everything I've written.
Have a nice day and I hope you have the chance, within your lifetime, to visit Tokyo, Utrech or at least Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oolu, Paris more recently.
Your eyes do not a trend make. Entire cities across the world cannot be discounted because you never left Alabama.
Even smaller cities and towns can have good bike infrastructure. But it requires good interconnected infrastructure which largely doesn't exist in the US or Canada.
No, they also carry people on trikes, in motorized wheel chairs, scooters, joggers, people on those mono wheel things. Bikes might be the most popular choice, but many people are starting to refer to these lanes as “mobility-lanes” because they improve the lives of more than just bicyclists.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.
What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.
The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.
> And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone
Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.
For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).
This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.
But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.
2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.
For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.
Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.
I just want to thank you for this effort post. It looks like the general thrust of 'pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are increasing' may be true, even if the particular examples given are not
Here's something [1]. Data on the car market makeup by year is from here [2]. I only used the data for every 5 years because it is in a stacked line chart and I had to turn it into a table by measuring the heights of the various sections and lack the patience to do it for every year [3].
I omitted pickups and vans/minivans because the pickup share hasn't varied much and vans/minivans have a small share and including them made the graph too hard to read. Here are the shares in table form so you can mentally add them back if you wish.
[3] Yes, I first tried ChatGPT. It was able to turn the chart into a table, but it too only did every 5th year, and some of its numbers were quite a bit off.
There's data that suggests that the increases in vehicle/pedestrian collision is mostly due to the in car displays that require you to take your eyes off of the road to do anything. Most excess collisions since around 2010 collisions have been at night, when peripheral vision is less likely to catch movement, and when the screens will mess up your night vision.
Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.
This was a huge problem in a car I rented recently. There was so much light coming off the dash I could hardly see the road, and there was no obvious way to dim it (all my older cars have a dedicated knob or wheel to control the dashboard brightness).
This is another issue that plagues a lot of modern cars. Lack of physical buttons and moving a bunch of functionality into the touchscreen which increases distractions and causes the driver to get flustered.
Mine has increase/decrease buttons but once the headlights go on it gets a lot dimmer. I like that except for when I'm going through a tunnel or something and it gets a bit distracting having so much change brightness at once
Check out 'cycling mikey' on youtube. He has all the convictions that prove you are correct.
One area where i do congratulate the british plods is they will convict using gopro footage.
Strangely unhelpful and aggressive when confronted by an auditor, though.
What you mention implies that the US government should mandate HUDs in all vehicles, so that drivers are not incentivized to take their eyes off the road to check speed or directions.
I 10000% support this and I think a good 5% of what makes Elon a bad person was him going on twitter and saying that HUDs are stupid and that teslas will never get one.
There is overwhelming evidence against the increase of dependency on car centric transportation. Yet people just don't get it until it impacts them personally (ie, death of loved one, loss of limbs of friends, paralysis, DUI).
I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".
Maybe those safety rating systems should include the things SUVs are bad at. I think there's one tester who does a body roll test and most SUVs fail to swerve out of the way of something without rolling. Unsure if that's still true. But with that and like a "how likely is your child to be squished dead" rating, maybe people will think twice
The vehicle purchaser’s child will be safely in their third row seat watching the inbuilt Netflix on their personal entertainment display so why should they care?
Some time ago, I read all of the published data on the safety of traffic circles, as I had often seen them recommended as a safer alternative to traffic lights.
I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.
Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)
Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.
The city replaced a 4 way stop with a traffic circle and ever since there’s been a car-totaling collision at least every other month. One leg of the circle is fed from a highway off-ramp, with a good portion of folks entering the circle at 150% of the legal limit. Another leg is from a 4 lane road that feeds the highway on-ramp, and those folks are getting amped for highway driving. I’m always nervous in the circle as I can’t count the times I’ve had to quickly brake to avoid being t-boned by some moron who doesn’t understand what a yield sign means.
Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
I'm curious how you get car totaling crashes in a traffic circle. Generally the traffic circles that have been installed around me are all relatively small and greatly cut down on speed going through the intersection. I could absolutely see an increase in fender bender style accidents here, because for some reason how to operate a traffic circle is an impossible mystery to Iowa drivers. But how are cars being totaled?
I remember when driving in SoCal, there was a massive traffic circle that I could see people maintaining fairly high speeds through and could see major accidents happening. But everything I see locally would be low speed collisions.
> Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
This is why proper driver's licensing & training is so important - in my city & country (Wellington, New Zealand) roundabouts (as well call them) are so common that in some tight intersections they are nothing more than a circle painted on the ground. Everyone knows how to use them, and they end up being very effective.
Until the US government isn't deadlocked and is able to pass new laws, this isn't going to get better at all.
The huge hoods/bonnets on SUVs and trucks need to be regulated to make future cars smaller. I'm not an expert (I'll pontificate anyway) but could external airbags help at all?
One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.
The difference between Europe and the US is fairly simple. Euro NCAP has a pedestrian collision test as part of the safety rating and NCAP does not, only pedestrian avoidance.
If you could not get a five star safety rating because your car mangles somebody when hitting them at 30mph the tune would change pretty quickly. See all the things tested in Euro NCAP in section 2.2. https://www.euroncap.com/media/80156/euro-ncap-aeb-lss-vru-t...
5 star safety rating only matters inasmuch as it impacts insurance costs. And pedestrian risk should already be priced into insurance costs, independent of whether it’s in the safety rating tests.
If they change the standards and a truck doesn’t get a five star rating, the manufacturer will just not mention the safety rating in their marketing materials, and astroturf online forums with opinions undermining the value of the safety rating (‘they changed it specifically to mark down trucks’; ‘it doesn’t test the safety conditions that really matter anyway’; etc… heck you already see people raise these talking points about NCAP) so customers can rationalize themselves into ignoring that the truck they want to buy only scored 3.5 stars.
What's weird is IIHS (a non-government nonprofit) is publishing articles like this [1] and yet AFAIK doesn't incorporate pedestrian safety into its new-car ratings. One would think insurance companies would also be interested in the safety of the people whom their insured collide with.
I don't know of anyone who's written about it, unfortunately; I discovered it in the course of my own analysis of Euro-NCAP standards as part of a work project.
I used to be very excited about Euro-NCAP but when I actually researched it, I became fairly critical. It only measures AEB, and leg impact and head impact against the car, with very little consideration put into how the general profile of the car affects the collision kinematics. Whether the car pushes pedestrians onto the ground or throws them up in the air, it doesn't matter -- only the initial contact between the car and pedestrian is measured. (And while representing the pedestrian by a disembodied leg and a disembodied head).
It's had a good influence in some ways, most importantly by testing head impact at various points on the hood, which has forced automakers to reduce stiffness and add more space for deflection between the hood and the engine block. I think in other ways, it's helped accelerate a trend towards brick-shaped vehicle fronts, because they perform better on the leg impact tests. I personally believe this will result in fewer leg injuries but more deaths.
> One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.
There are school busses--need to penalize people driving children to school as long as there are busses. The 'school run' needlessly increases traffic and danger and causes expensive decisions in school design.
To be fair, I used to live like two or three miles from school, and we would've had to pay for the bus because I was "too close". So mom dropped me off at like 6:00 AM because we were poor as shit. If we cared about education at all, we wouldn't make families pay for something that I'm pretty sure used to just be free.
The problem is that there is a whole generation of road engineers taught to use federal interstate standards on local roads, but there isn’t a more appropriate local road guideline.
When people use these standards for local roads it’s because it’s the same mindset as “no one ever got fired for picking IBM.”
Except road funding, huge chunks of which come from the federal government (because, big surprise, cities and states can't afford thousands of miles of stroads and highways without invoking a government that can print its own reserve currency).
The road standards do actually allow for quite a bit of freedom. Its harder if the state DoT (Department of Highway building) is not on board. But fundamentally nothing stops engineers from doing better work. Its a matter of education and political cover.
Political will alone goes a long way, engineers are capable of self educating quite well.
A simple example is the town in Indiana that has lots of roundabouts. They are operating under the same standards but is much better in lots of way.
Engineers can do a lot by themselves and with local political cover they can do much more. If the state DoT is onboard, there is a lot of freedom.
The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.
Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. The city spent millions in planning and engineering, and then right before paving was about to start, a local councilmember blocked it and canceled the whole project on the half of the road that runs through their neighborhood. So half of the road was narrowed to two lanes and has no speeding, no fatalities, and generally sane driver behavior. The other half is a reckless free-for-all that’s exhausting to drive on and terrifying for pedestrians and cyclists.
Millions in taxpayer dollars and the political will of a majority of citizens were wasted because our system allows one NIMBY to stop everything. A year later, there has already been a cyclist fatality on the road.
>why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate?
Because, as every engineer knows, everything is a tradeoff and good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.
I can't comment on your specific case, but obviously any measure that wants to improve safety needs to be evaluated based on whether it is actually effective, whether it is cost effective and whether there are negative consequences.
That tracks, south broad at that height is also pretty bad and only gets worse the more south you go and the same way north as you get further away from center city.
> The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.
In my opinion, this isn't a great point, but a naive one. Literally anything can be argued for or against on the grounds of safety, and the fact that a safety-based argument exists isn't grounds to remove it from public debate. Also, blindly putting safety above all other concerns is just "safetyism", rather than a balanced argument. In the case of the railing, apart from a minor expense, there isn't impact to others. In the case of anti-car road diets, an attempt to create more safety will cause most users of that road to lose lots of time (to reduced speed limits, increased traffic). To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure.
> Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it.
Mind linking to the poll? I find it hard to believe since the reality is that most people favor roads that are wide and have high speed limits, so they can get around quickly. A small but loud minority tends to argue, often successfully, for road diets. But most people aren't in favor of a war on cars because they get a lot of use from cars.
Additionally, what you're claiming about the poll being ignored is the opposite of what I've seen in west coast cities. Here, anti-car activists get into the transportation department positions and then try to implement their ideological plan regardless of polls or studies. Usually, they run dishonest polls that provide justification to whatever view they already have - for example, an online poll that only activist groups are aware of, which lets them get whatever numbers they want. If a poll disagrees, they don't talk about it or act against it anyways (example: https://crosscut.com/2018/04/seattle-city-hall-listen-consti...).
i think safetyism would be one thing if there was no safety problem to speak of, but road fatalities in the US are increasing again, and that is being driven by a 68% increase in pedestrian and cycling fatalities since 2011. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/pedestrian-fatalities-at-hist...
> To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure.
Especially if they get to kill poor people in bad neighborhoods on their way from suburbs to CBDs.
> why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate
Because of political culture and human nature; everything is driven by FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) so you can basically spin anything to scare people or to line your own pockets, living standards be damned.
>Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose
That's kind of the problem with urban planning in many cities in the USA -- the "primary purpose" of roads is assumed to be to serve cars, rather than to serve people.
>You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.
Happens all the time in my city for construction projects - an entire sidewalk will be shut down for years for construction, forcing pedestrians to the other side of the street (which means 2 extra waits for stop lights). Often the closed sidewalk is used for nothing at all except to hold a construction fence.. a more pedestrian friendly solution would require a covered walkway.
> That's kind of the problem with urban planning in many cities in the USA -- the "primary purpose" of roads is assumed to be to serve cars, rather than to serve people.
Serving cars is serving people. Who do you think is driving the cars or being driven in them?
As an aside, I am surprised that this exceedingly shallow point is still being made in 2024. Let's be honest - it never made sense, and was only ever brought up as an empty slogan to dishonestly dismiss those who depend on and benefit from cars (which is most of the public in most cities).
If you have a budget of $x, do you want to move more or fewer people? Because private auto transportation ("cars") moves the lowest volume.
Further, cars interfere with things that may not have alternatives, like trucks that make deliveries. There tend to all sorts of options for individuals (and the average occupancy of a car is like 1.0) to move hither and thither and yon, but if you want to deliver a refrigerator or a sofa, that's a lot harder to do on public transit—though not unheard of:
So is better transit, and biking, and even shutting off entire streets to cars and making them into pedestrian-only districts - and those can often serve more people than when it was just a road for cars.
Insane argument. Serving giant death mechas is serving people. Serving Houthi raiders is serving people. Serving Adolf Hitler is serving people - he's a person, right?
I get it, we like public transport. It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.
Cars are great. I like cars. I like driving as a mode of transport.
But there's a lot of potential ways to use space other than cars. The problem is, in seeking to accommodate cars at the expense of all else, we've made all other forms of transport -- like walking through a cute downtown on a spring day -- less practicable and common. In turn we drive more, spread businesses out for more parking, and created a never-ending feedback loop for more driving infrastructure.
In turn, the infrastructure has grown to a point that we can't really afford it from tax revenues, and where the mixed use of a thoroughfare for accessing businesses and going long distances does well at neither.
Unfortunately, getting us out of this loop is going to make things less convenient for some people for awhile before we can get to something better. There's no avoiding that, but continuing to make the same decision and hope it gets to a better outcome would be nuts.
> It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.
Useful for what? More useful than what? Less useful than what?
How many people does private car transportation move? How much can a car lane move per hour? How about a bicycle lane? Bus lane? [0] What do private cars interfere with? Goods transportation / delivery perhaps? People's health (through pollution and/or lack of active mobility)?
It's not that cars cannot be useful, but are they more or less useful than other options? What does leaning towards cars inhibit?
Is there any city that's done that and has completely banned cars to replace with transit? I haven't seen any except in very small pedestrian-only districts.
But I've seen a lot of fighting in my city anytime any transit or biking project reduces road space dedicated to cars, even if just removing on-street parking.
>People are in cars.
All too often, a "person" is in a car, which is a pretty poor use of space.
The entirety of the Netherlands used to look like the US in the '60s and '70s, albeit not at Super Sized(TM) scale. Look up their urban design in 2024, it's quite pleasant and human-friendly.
Private automobiles and in some cases other motorised vehicles are banned in Mackinac Island, MI, and Halibut Cove, AK, in the US, Giethoorn, Netherlands, and Lamu, Kenya (possibly old town only). And a number of others. Several seem to be vacation spots or resorts, so have unusual usage and aesthetic patterns.
> A good two lane street can have similar or better average speed than a bad four lane stroad.
Can you provide a more specific argument or evidence? To me, it seems obvious that two lanes has less capacity than four lanes. Therefore, a two lane road will have worse traffic, all other things held equal.
It also doesn't matter that the other two lanes might be repurposed for something else like bike lanes. In my experience, when bike lane projects are forced onto a city by activists, without authentic support from the general public, it ends up just creating a lot of underutilized infrastructure. In many west coast cities it is common to see clogged up car lanes next to permanently empty bike lanes. So even if in theory you could pack those bike lanes with more people (although moving at low speeds), it's never true in practice. The real throughput only gets worse.
> Can you provide a more specific argument or evidence? To me, it seems obvious that two lanes has less capacity than four lanes. Therefore, a two lane road will have worse traffic, all other things held equal.
While it's true that two lanes have less capacity than four, it's also measuring the wrong value - throughput is what you want to optimize for. This means you have to take a bunch of additional factors into account, for example:
- How many lanes do the connections to other roads have? Any time you're reducing the number of lanes, you're creating potential bottlenecks. If you have one lane, then widen up to four, and narrow back to one, you'll most likely have worse throughput than if you'd just kept one lane.
- How much space do you have for switching lanes? The more lanes, the more time people need to get into the correct one for their destination. You need to telegraph exits etc. much earlier.
- Do surrounding roads have space for the additional induced traffic? Time and time again, extra lanes have made traffic problems worse instead of better.
There are of course also disadvantages, e.g. the impact of any single lane being blocked. It's a complex and fascinating topic, especially considering the similarity to other networks (e.g. computer, biological).
the common diet is from four to three (a left turn lane), which is actually better for traffic flow, since left turners now have a dedicated pocket and don't block traffic, fewer people get rear ended, etc.
the problem with how the US does bike planning is that the payoff doesn't happen unless you have a bike network; biking is so unsafe on regular roads that a partial journey on bike lanes doesn't cut it. so often bike lanes get poor usage than they would otherwise get due to lack of connectivity.
Even if we make the tenuous assumption that the bike lanes are implemented correctly, you cannot expect that people that have lived with car-only infrastructure their whole lives will change their habits overnight. It's going to take some time to reach cycling volumes of even the less developed european cities.
https://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer... says one lane peaks around 1,900 vehicles per hour. Even if we assume each vehicle only carries one driver, we need 38 busses per hour (one every 95 seconds!) to match that capacity. In practice we're lucky to see two busses per hour scheduled.
Drivers need the freedom of plowing through pedestrians without consequences to their lives or their cars. It still puzzles me my whole neighborhood is full of stroads with large interesections and bollars are nowhere to be seen. Every single one of these intersections should be fully surrounded by bollards to provide safety to pedestrians but who cares about pedestrians, right?
> Putting up a railing is the equivalent to putting up a guardrail next to a road.
Which people do object to:
> In a twist that could only happen in the world of cycling politics, a city councillor in the New Zealand town of New Plymouth is making headlines for an eyebrow-raising reason — he’s worried about his beloved sports car. Murray Chong, owner of a Chevrolet Corvette just 160mm off the ground, has raised concerns that a proposed $14 million protected cycle lane might wreak havoc on his precious ride.
> Chong’s main gripe? The 100mm-high concrete separation barriers, meant to keep cyclists safe, apparently pose a dire threat to the underbelly of his sleek sports car. In an extraordinary meeting, despite Chong’s objections, the council voted in favor of the cycle lane plan, sending shockwaves through the world of low-riding vehicle enthusiasts.
If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists. You’d also ban them on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to, since dV is a major driver of accidents and lethality.
Expecting a 15MPH ~250lb bike with none of those features to interface safely with 55MPH 5,000+lb traffic is moronic. You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
> If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists.
I've crashed on a bicycle, more than once. I've crashed even on a motorcycle (on a racetrack). The damage that is caused to myself, to my machine, and the surrounds, is tiny compared to the damage that is caused by an automobile with (at least) an order of magnitude more mass: a friend of mine had a car go through the front of his house, and the physical carnage was impressive (no person was injured thankfully).
And every time licensing has been looked at for cyclists, it has found to be a dumb idea:
The problem is that roads are now practically monopolized for private vehicle use to the exclusion of everyone else, and the costs are not fully paid for by drivers. Higher density areas subsidize lower density ones, and road infrastructure is a big part of that:
> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
I think it's worth talking about taxation here. Roads are generally in the top 3 costs for most municipalities along with police and firefighting.
Even when you add together tolls, gas tax, vehicle excise taxes, it doesn't cover the costs of road maintenance, and needs to be supplemented by sales tax, building property tax, etc.
If bike infrastructure reduces the number of cars, SUVs, and pickups that are on the road just to carry one person around, the reduction on road wear means it's a total cost savings.
(For what it's worth, I think the same argument applies also to buses.)
My smallish town budgets less than $14M/year for streets and $300M/year for K-12 education. I would not be surprised to find that ratio generally repeated anywhere in the US.
250lb bike? Wtf are you talking about. The heaviest e-bikes are like 50lb. Bikes are so safe that they require none of these extra steps that cars require, because cars are much more dangerous. It’s simple physics. There have been dozens of pedestrians and cyclists killed by cars in my city this year, and none by bicycles ever, to my knowledge. More evidence that cars require more strict licensing and safety measures.
Not safely interfacing on existing roads — that’s 100% true. And cyclists would love parallel infrastructure. Problem is, in the US, it’s seen as anti-car (and therefore anti-american), and so is much less common than it should be. But in the Netherlands, this is how they make biking one of the primary transport modes.
> You’d also ban them [bikes] on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to ... You’re better off building parallel infrastructure
They are and we do? You know those signs when you get on a highway that say things like pedestrians/bicycles/horses/etc prohibited? That's what those are for.
If you're proposing that the rest of the roads' speed limits be lowered to what's achievable by the average cyclist, then why not just advocate for that directly? Personally I don't appreciate the oversigning trend, generally preferring to drive at a decent clip as conditions permit most of the time, but also being content to follow the rare bicycle at that vehicle's speed until an opportunity to pass with a wide berth and clear oncoming visibility.
The real problem here is drivers who expect to be able to continue driving at whatever speed they want regardless of who else is using the road. Apart from when I was cycling myself, I used to experience this pretty harshly while shoveling snow. Half the drivers would treat me as a human being and slow and go mostly into the other lane. The other half would continue their speed right at me, ostensibly thinking it was acceptable to create close call danger for fun and spray me with shit from their tires (ie not just assault but outright battery). Similar situation with a dinky ride on lawnmower. It's funny how the ratio changed when I started doing the snow/grass along the road with a compact farm tractor - apparently the prospect of assholes' cars being significantly damaged effects their ability to see!
As far as taxes, municipal real estate taxes more than pay for the meager wear bicycles cause to the road. And as a general proponent of freedom I certainly wouldn't want to implement multiple new draconian papers please mandates just to assign taxes a few percent more accurately.
> "You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing."
yes, a parallel infrastructure would be welcomed by current cyclists and by many of those who now abstain from cycling because of persecution and threat of death on the roads.
If everyone can agree that a parallel infrastructure is needed, the funding question is trivial. The overall costs could even be negative due to the reduced need to subsidize car usage (also health benefits of cycling, etc.). If it makes you happy, we can let little kids slap a sticker on their bike to take of the "licensing".
Because the solution to a housing shortage caused by overly restrictive zoning is urban sprawl. To support urban sprawl we have cars and long commutes. Cars create problems for other cars so we need bigger cars for crash worthiness. In response to traffic jams caused by too many cars we double down on cars. This effectively turns valuable urban land into de facto highways: 45 MPH 6-8 lane wide stroads that heavily deprioritize alternative traffic modes and safety. Don't worry citizen, we'll widen the road even if we have to bulldoze some homes that are in the way of our SUVs getting downtown 1 min faster. For a few months before more people drive.
> The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving
Funnily enough, my first major bike accident as a kid involved me running into a parked pickup truck and ended up with a tooth going through my lip. Definitely my fault and not the truck's for just sitting there. But I thought it humorous that there are indeed people injured by non-moving vehicles.
It's a dramatic article likely intended to help sell his book (with an equally dramatic title).
Missing from all of this is, well, data. He squarely blames large vehicles, SUV's. Now, I have no horse in this race, I prefer small vehicles for practical every-day driving. For moving family, dogs, camping trips, etc., a minivan is great.
Yet, at a very basic level, some of what he is saying makes no sense to me. Take this introductory statement:
"As a country, we hit the threshold of 1 million cumulative deaths in 1953, 2 million in 1975 and 3 million in 1998. While the past several years of data have not yet been released, I estimate that the U.S. topped 4 million total road deaths sometime in the spring of 2024."
So, 4 million by 2024. Fully half of that by 1975. Care to guess how many SUV's existed in 1975? Also, I am going to guess average speeds where likely lower.
He is blaming SUV's and claiming that making them 10 cm lower would have a dramatic impact on results. OK, well, if the data up until 1975 is any indication, this is nonsense.
How about distractions, drunk driving and, yes, pedestrians and cyclists. Accidents are not always attributable to one side or a single variable. The world is a complex multivariate problem. This guy is trying to sell books by hating on everything and only blaming one or two variables: SUV's bad, wide roads, bad.
And then there's are the circumstances of each accident. He gives the example of an SUV losing control, jumping a curb and killing a father and his kid. Well, not every accident is like that. And, no, life isn't going to be perfectly safe. You are not going to go down to zero accidents and zero fatalities, no matter how hard you might try.
Which brings me to the last point: He offers not data whatsoever on how things would improve if his world view were to be adopted. If we ripped-up and modified every road and shrunk every vehicle by 10 cm.
You see, it is easy to be critical of anything when you don't have to be accountable for any of it. Happens all the time with "experts". As an example, the financial world is full of economists who just "know" all there is to know about finance...yet none of them are billionaires and few (none?) run successful businesses at scale.
Yes, of course, road safety is important. I just think that the solutions include far more variables than what this guy trying to sell a book seems to be focusing on in this article. In a few decades, self-driving cars might solve this problem nicely. Don't know.
you've got a good point about experts being critical with no accountability.
However, when studying a complex, multivariate problem, if you find one or two variables that can easily affect the outcome (lower hood heights), it does seem sensible to optimize it, while obviously keeping in mind that you can optimize for other things.
The point may have been lost: Fully 50% of deaths occurred during the pre-SUV era. That's 2 million out of 4 million, not a trivial number. If we go out to 1998 and call that a less intense SUV era, that's 3 million deaths, of 75% of all deaths since the beginning of time.
This, to me, on first inspection, is pretty strong evidence indicating that the 10 cm prediction is very close to nonsense.
The prediction is no different from saying TSLA will go to $1000 because of some randomly-picked variable that will never be tested. Sounds fantastic and cam make me look very intelligent, yet, I would not have any accountability at all in making such a prediction.
Now, if I wanted to sell a book about how to make a billion dollars trading Tesla, I would write a bunch of blog posts explaining how this could happen and feature a nice picture of myself holding the book along with an Amazon link. Which is what this article is about.
For those of you that want small vehicles, they exist for the buying. For those of you who want big vehicles, you’re in luck, they also exist for the buying. Anyone that wants to limit people’s choices can shove it up your arse!
The idea that squishy humans can move about safely near 1500kg+ moving vehicles traveling at even average speed is a fallacy. The first cycling/car fatality happened in 1896. I guarantee you that vehicle size and weight was much less than what we have today.
Okay. So the two choices come into conflict. How does that old adage goes? "Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"? How does it differ when you are not swinging your fist but using a multi ton vehicle to move people down?
If I take your comment at face value it seems you are arguing that we should ban all cars not just the very heavy ones?
<< These are the sorts of systemic conditions that lead to many so-called road user errors.
There is certainly an argument to be made that we are all outcomes of the system in which we operate. That is to say, we all victims of circumstance. Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?
Both examples are admittedly anecdotal, but very recent and both from recent trip downtown.
At the end of the day, it is the user error. Having a tank to drive just happens to be re-assurance that whatever happens, the other user will bear the brunt of their bad decision.. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
Cars systematically break laws so often that it is simply not commented on. And the reality is the waste majority of bicyclist do not do borderline suicidal rides. Research shows overwhelmingly that most people on get on bikes if there are safe ways to bike.
The evidence is obviously anecdotal because and comment on it because its exceptional, while people not properly stopping at stop signs or going to fast is literally no even worth commenting about.
> I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
You seem to indicate that you understand what a systematic issue is but then completely throw it out with this comment.
The reason only 'aggressive drivers' ride bikes (if this is even remotely true, more likely its just those you notice) is because most normal people rationally decide that these places are to dangerous to ride the bike in.
> .. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
Given how few people bike in the US, it clearly is.
> Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?
In my anecdotal experience driving all over the country, aggressive bike riding tends to pair with poor bicycling infrastructure.
Where infrastructure is designed for bikes and following the rules is safe and makes sense, then compliance also goes up. This is much of the point that the article was making.
There are always going to be bad drivers cars and bikes included. The deterrence or responsibility of driving a large vehicle is ignored by the bad driver The deterrence or responsibility of driving a large vehicle is ignored by the bad driver. The point of the article is that we can set an upper limit to the total damage done in a accident by having better roads and cars.
Cyclists just don't see themselves as normal road traffic, so they don't see themselves as having the same responsibilities or held to the same standard, which is something I'm guilty of myself. I've ridden against traffic for short periods or ran red lights on a bike before (where it's clearly safe to do so), since I feel "semi-pedestrian"
Bikes don’t kill entire families when they crash. They don’t need to follow the same rules as cars. Forcing them to follow rules meant for cars makes the roads more dangerous.
In the US side walk are already hilariously under designed and roads are already hilariously over designed. In many places side walks are barley large enough for pedestrians and bikes to cross.
And pedestrian infrastructure is just horrible designed for wheeled vehicles in the first place. As people with kid strollers and wheel chairs find out quickly.
The actual solution, that pretty much every other first world country in the world has recognized is to start to build proper safe infrastructure for bikes (and the US overwhelmingly has plenty of space for that). Or to lower car traffic speed such that sharing can be done safely.
If the US had huge sidewalks everywhere and fantastic design for access of wheeled vehicle, your suggestion might make sense, in the actual world, it doesn't, it just makes the world worse for people that walk and those that cycle.
This is literally already all figured out and backed up with plenty of research but somehow people have to come up with their own 'solutions'.
> In the US side walk are already hilariously under designed and roads are already hilariously over designed.
So many people jog in the streets exactly for this reason. Sidewalks are often poorly maintained and falling apart. I'm not sure how anyone handicapped is supposed to get around.
In a previous life, during heavy winter storms, I would commonly walk in the streets because they were maintained while the sidewalks were covered in ice. The city once changed its plowing algorithm due to angry drivers but for sidewalk maintenance they act almost powerless.
Years ago I visited Amsterdam and the pedestrian experience was incredible. It was like walking around a theme park. Ever since that experience I can't unsee the hell we've created in the states with our cars-first mentality.
That's a terrible idea. Biking on the sidewalk should be illegal for everyone except young kids. Sharing the sidewalks is dangerous when the speed difference between the average cyclist and the average pedestrian is something like 10 mph.
That can work by widening sidewalks and designing them so that bicycles can cruise safely at full speed, protected from and prioritized over cars, and also clearly separated from the walking sidewalk so there are no unpleasant interactions. The bonus is that if one acquires the space for this by removing car lanes, then the city becomes a little bit nicer for everyone.
My favorite unsubstantiated theory about anti cyclist sentiment is that exposes the radically car centric nature of US society and people don't like noticing that.
You seem to misunderstand the founding principles on this country, which, among other thing favor private property and individual over society as a whole. Most people do not suggest everyone but them has to sacrifice. Me, for example, am saying 'apply rules across the board', which in this case means liceses for bikes if they want to drive on the road with everyone else, who is licensed.
Is that narcissist to ask that the same standard is applied?
Licenses aren't for road use. They're for motor vehicle operation. You are also free to use a road without a license if you use a vehicle that doesn't require a license. Or your feet.
<< Licenses aren't for road use. They're for motor vehicle operation
I am talking about what could be. You are arguing for what is currently in play in US ( in old country, for example, we did have bicycle licenses ).
Otoh, your argument suggests that I could drive the following[1] on the street and expect that the cops won't stop me, because, after all, just like a bike, it does not require a license. As you can see, the argument breaks down easily.
The issue is, a lot of the rules of the road depend on some common sense. Not an insignificant part of what bicycles are doing on US roads is not common sense. Hence my argument: "you want to be on the road, be subject to the same rules". I do not think it is unreasonable.
> As you can see, the argument breaks down easily.
I'm not following. I'm definitely not seeing any such thing. Do you think someone should be allowed to drive this [1] on a public road as long as they have a driver's license? Obviously (I hope) not. The vehicles that are allowed to be used on a road are already regulated separately.
> Not an insignificant part of what bicycles are doing on US roads is not common sense.
One of the problems with appealing to "common sense" is that no one agrees on which things are common sense. It's common sense to me that bicycles should be ridden on the road, and rarely ever on the sidewalk. Yet there are people that I think honestly believe that common sense should dictate the opposite. Where does that leave us?
A lot of bicyclists run stop signs and ride the wrong way. That bothers me. A lot of motor vehicle drivers exceed the speed limit and use cell phones while driving. That also bothers me.
More traffic calming measures? Commercial licenses for those giant pickups SUVs? Less "free" parking? Require 100 miles of transportation cycling to get a drivers' license, for those physically able? Higher gas taxes?
Different modes of transport have different capabilities, dangers, and responsibilities. Horses, bikes, cars, HGVs, pedestrians—all different, actually there's no real shame in ignoring car laws when you're not driving a car. You have to use your brain and accept the fact that these laws were only made with cars in mind.
I don't think this is controversial but HGVs tend to have even more stringent traffic laws, ones that cars don't have to follow. In my country HGVs have lower speed limits than cars, for example. I don't think this is controversial but it would be strange for cars to follow rules that only apply to HGVs.
"Against traffic" is different as a bike or led though. Sometimes when lanes are very narrow and visibility isn't good, you need to go against traffic (on the shoulder) so that the driver sees your face and responds faster. And you can see to bail if someone hasn't made room.
But if it's a Chicago intersection and you just said I'm on a bike all 12 lanes have to yield to me and you zoom diagonal in front of cars... the Darwin Awards are never short of applicants.
E-bikes and scooters and stuff have made this 1,000 times worse. The number of drunk kids who think they can go max speed down a hill through intersections and cars will just magically make way for them... Terrifying.
Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Lane splitting is for air cooled engines stuck in traffic, where they literally need to move or shut down. (It is technically illegal to park the vehicle with engine shut off in case you can't restart). It has absolutely never been legal for anyone to shoot through gaps in traffic because of erectile dysfunction compensation. It is only in the absolute emergency that you need to walk your bike around to keep it from melting.
In general I do agree. Campaigns to "see motorcycles" just end up with 80yo biker gangs thinking it's okay yo blast their engines in residential. Campaigns to "share the road" lead to bicyclists who will absolutely charge an SUV just to get on the news. I'm all for road safety but it absolutely requires bike clubs of all types to stop being twits.
California passed AB 51 in 2016 which codified lane splitting under California law. There is no mention of "air cooling". There are guidelines that say you should not go more than 10 mph faster than traffic and not faster than 50 mph total.
> Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Maybe in the United States of America. There are a great many developed countries where lane splitting by motorcycles and bicycles is not only legal, but even expected and encouraged.
I'm piling on at this point, but I appreciate that this got me to go read and learn a few more things (that the internet says are true, anyways).
Lane splitting has never been illegal in CA, but is apparently illegal in all other US states. (Having been in CA for about 10 years, I've gotten used to it, but think it's still crazy. Definitely have seen it on highways in the midwest before that, too)
Basically, not illegal; the 2016 law passed just said, "CA Highway Patrol can make guidelines", which was in response to a previous attempt by the CHP to give those guidelines. Helpfully the article includes those guidelines, too.
No one is charging your SUV on a bike to "get on the news" that's borderline delusional. If you seriously think this is real my advice is to try biking on a shared road. Survival instincts will show you the truth of that concept.
Key missing component: CAFE needs a rewrite. US emissions laws have a cutout so that larger vehicles have less stringent emissions requirements. The problem is that this is no longer a gap it's a chasm. Slight hyperbole but a Japanese kei car many Americans would love town own muat do closer to 50mpg, while a monster pickup can do 15mpg. It ends up that a small car can cost $15,000 and the giant pickup costs... $15,000. Many consumers compare the two and wonder if the econobox is really a good choice.
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
People keep repeating this but isn’t the case. The smallest cars from budget automakers are their cheapest cars and they’ve almost all been discontinued for lack of sales. I know, I drive one. And people look at it as a joke, they’d never buy one, and they think it’s hilarious I do. I’d buy another for my commute vehicle when this one diesbecause I do like it but Honda discontinued it for miserable sales numbers.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
> Most Americans do not want these big cars
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
Because the small car is the same cost as an SUV but worse utility wise. I actually go the other way, I bet the back row of an SUV (or tall hatchback like the Honda Fit) gets more use carrying people or large items than the back row of your average sedan. During growing season I'm constantly schlepping dirt and mulch home. I can fit 5 humans and all our camping supplies no problem. Fit a whole assembled grill in the back we got from FB marketplace.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
I used to own a Fit, and a friend of mine asked me out of everybody with pickups, minivans, SUVs, etc. to borrow my car to pick up a pinball machine a few hours away. It's ridiculous how much stuff you can put in the back of that thing.
It's like Honda makes them bigger on the inside than on the outside.
At some point i had a Fit and a slightly larger Suzuki SX4. I got to carry 30 folding chairs in the Fit once. I could maybe have fit 20 of them in the Suzuki.
I had a trailer hitch on my Fit, and would show up to moving parties and embarrass all the pickup trucks with how much stuff I could haul. Their trucks had tiny 6 foot beds, my trailer was 8 feet long, plus all the crap I could fit in the back of the car itself.
It's a real shame they don't make the Fit anymore here in the US. Instead we get that shitty crossover HRC in it's place that doesn't have nearly the storage space in it, because it has to look like it's higher off the ground to satisfy buyers.
The CVT Fits expressly forbid towing in the owners manual, at least for the first few model years.
If I ever came to power in a Stalinist dictator sort of way, and I had to choose “the car” everyone would get, it would be the Honda Fit.
Just a preposterously useful car without being conspicuous at all.
Freckin' love my Fit. I don't know what Honda's engineers paid the devil for its reliability but we thank them for their sacrifice.
We had a small cheap sedan that was rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic while waiting to turn when my wife was driving. Since she's been hit thrice in sedans and not once in our minivan, she's come to the conclusion that she needs a bigger vehicle just to be seen. It's not an argument I buy, but I understand how she has reached that conclusion.
I’ve been sharing this video from NotJustBikes - “These SUV’s are literally killing us”.
Makes a pretty convincing case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
Americans "want" big SUVs because they're cheaper than mid-sized sedans. Unfortunately, they pollute more and they're less safe.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Beyond personal needs people want what others have, what they see in films, and what they see marketing for. The price and general availability impacts all of those things. Car companies will push what makes most economic sense and consumers will to, which helps create trends people hop on to.
I disagree. At least where I'm at, small cars don't serve any better purpose. We have plenty of space and gas is relatively inexpensive.
So I'd rather spend a few thousand more for a midsize or large car/suv than a mini or compact car. It has nothing to do with neighbors, or signaling. Larger cars are usually just better.
Parent is a propaganda account, comment history shows the account making the same duplicated pro car comments repeatedly in different threads.
This article is clearly on the money.
Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Bro, it's our illogical measurement system and we'll be as illogical as we want with how we notate it. Go compare cubic centimeters to milliliters or whatever.
> That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
Which could also reasonably be called a pretty big car.
It's big, almost 5m long. In Europe it would definitely be classified as a big car, most people have family cars under that, probably around 4.6-4.8m
... and if you have a 4-4.3 m long car your parking spot options increase by like 30% :)
there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
There are two models with full-size four-door crew cabs and 8' beds, and they can work in most US suburbs. I think it's less about whether it's manageable and more about the aesthetics. The front-rear proportions on 8' trucks just aren't great.
> And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth.
Yeah…
* https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-civic-2021-se...
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
A big problem with the idea that “people don’t want small cars” is that that sort of statement comes from the car manufacturer looking at new car sales. People who want large trucks and SUVs are willing to buy new. People who want a small car have the option to buy a new 2024 Honda Civic, or they could spend significantly less to get a used Honda Civic (in normal economic conditions). Since the manufacturer only profits of of new cars, they have little incentive to sell any cheap or small cars since they compete so heavily against last year’s model at the used car lot.
> Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
> Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
I get so tired of people mindlessly citing CAFE laws.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People just want big cars
People want big cars and people want everyone else to pay for them. Build big parking spaces for free. Widen roads for free. Not cover costs of accidents or otherwise the insurance would be too much. Not pay for all the polluting either.
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
Huh? We tolerate it pretty much everywhere else. You can buy a 2,000 sq ft home, even though you could live in a 500 sq ft condo. You can buy a computer more powerful than needed for work. You can buy Apple instead of Dell, even though the extra money would be spent better on helping the homeless or preventing malaria in the developing world.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
None of your examples require other people to pay for your choices, like giant trucks needing wider roads do.
Which giant trucks “need” wider roads? I see pickup trucks in the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 ton range drive on standard roads around me every day.
I don't know of any place that is creating larger roads just for these huge (personal) trucks.
Do you also have a problem with commercial trucks or just the people that chose personal trucks because they don't agree with your ideology?
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A computer or a home that uses more energy has externalities for others that certainly aren't covered by your electricity bills alone. Taxpayers pay for new power plants, everybody pays for emissions, etc. Almost everything has externalities that aren't fully accounted for in the sticker price, because it would be insanely complicated to do that kind of accounting, let alone do it in a way we can all agree on.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
>big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
Moving more mass will always use more fuel than using less mass.
That is assuming a constant efficiency ratio which has never existed.
No matter how efficient a system is, doing more is still harder than doing less.
I think electric trucks/SUVs are a major reason changing CAFE standards won't actually solve the problem though since they are at least just as big and dangerous to other road users as gas powered vehicles and are often much faster and heavier. Changing the CAFE standards 20 years ago would have helped avoid the trend of increasing vehicle size, but here on the cusp of widespread electric vehicles I'm not sure it would have the same impact.
What we really need and would never do is to put a pedestrian collision rating in NCAP, which Euro-NCAP already does. (NCAP is the system used to give safety ratings to cars.)
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
Euro-NCAP would do virtually nothing to alter the design of a Ford F-150 or Dodge Ram, unfortunately. It's a very weak testing protocol.
However the US regulator is already floating a proposal to include similar pedestrian testing in its requirements.
Unless it's a total stripper meant for something like a highway maintenance department fleet vehicle, a "giant pickup" will cost 3 or 4 times that amount.
The most popular F-150 trim level runs about $50k. It’s not stripped out by any means.
A simple change would be to raise taxes on petrol, but usually no politician wants to touch that one with a 10 ft pole.
They'll just move to EV trucks. We need taxes for car sizes (wider lanes needed = money, bigger parking spots needed = money, etc), pedestrian/cyclist safety ratings (more dangerous to pedestrians/cyclists, higher taxes), noise levels and weight (more road wear and tear plus particulate production).
You must hate poor people as that's who it's going to affect the most.
The key to this implementing this sort of policy without hurting poor people is to introduce a corresponding tax credit or stimulus payment (potentially means tested) such that driving a normal vehicle a normal amount comes out even and poor people can actually come out ahead if they make more responsible choices. You want people to feel it at the pump so it affects their decision making without having it be punitive.
Sounds like it’d hurt poor people unless they make what you call more responsible choices. A difficult part about being poor is you often don’t have as many options. There is a lot of reasons why that turns up, but it’s there all the same.
The ability to buy a car with a loan is very widespread. It's easier than cash if you're poor, isn't it? And with a loan you can balance vehicle cost against gas cost easily.
The key to an inefficient government is taking money and redistributing it.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
>Most Americans do not want these big cars.
That's patently false.
The solution is to stop classifying cars as trucks by invoking a more stringent definition of a truck. The PT Cruiser should never have been a truck. None of the XUVs should be trucks.
All of the SUVs I’ve owned are classified as wagons for insurance.
Yeah whenever I'm in an SUV I try to compare mileage. They'll get ~30% worse mpg than me in the same situation and I'm just a gas sedan, not even a hybrid
> I'm just a gas sedan
We are trully living in the future. :) I heard that cars are getting smarter but you are the first i have the pleasure to chat with.
Joking asside, i don’t know if I have ever seen a more succint example of how people identify with their cars.
Yeah I see it now lol. I love that car. It holds all the stuff I need, 5 people comfortably, great safety (blind spot monitor, Lane keep, a backup camera [which I know is standard now but it's my first one]). When I got it I immediately drove/slept in it 1500 miles back home. So kind of instant bonding.
Or change the licensing laws to be similar to other countries where a "regular" car driver's license only allows for a smaller weight vehicle.
In Europe regular B license for cars only allow up to 3500 kg gross weight. For car or combination. That is already lot of car.
I did an internship for Mercedes and I was able to drive our mid-sized R&D bus as my (routine) American driver's license allowed me to drive vehicles and vehicle combinations up to 26000 lbs GVWR/GCWR. Several of my German colleagues did not have a license permitting them to drive it.
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I think this is the uncomfortable truth. I love tiny sports cars, but even I have steadily shifted my attention to larger & larger vehicles. (A family of tall bicyclists has an objectively easier time in an Outback than a Samurai)
The only real downsides to larger vehicles are cost and exterior size, but with subsidy, wide lanes, and big parking spots those pains are removed. Small cars mostly are mostly popular where lanes are narrow, parking spots are tiny, costs are high, and so forth.
Happily, this is mostly orthogonal to safe road design (aside from the towering height of today’s truck grilles)
Plus those giant vehicles have additional features not as often found on the small ones like 360 cameras and auto parallel park systems, so don’t expect crappy parking situations to stop these drivers from taking up every square inch of your cities parking infrastructure.
The “big vehicle = more features” thing is also an independent reason for the success and popularity of big vehicles in America.
Good summary. No idea why it gets downvoted. People want big cars for selfish and arm-race reasons. They don't pay for the consequences so it's rational as well. When it's rational to engage in an arm race we need regulation but we are not getting any.
Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. What makes this so hypocritical is that hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened. There were no studies on how wide, fast roads would negatively impact neighborhoods. How they would make it dangerous just to walk around, or increase the local pollution (air and particulates ending up in streams). They didn’t study how these widened roads might negatively impact downtowns, etc. All of this car investment happened as though it was for the greater good, and many people still believe this.
> hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened
Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built. US cities weren't destroyed because the people that lived there voted on it. For the most part you had a bureaucratic elite come in over the top and simply create laws and change the regulation.
> This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built.
I guess that depends a bit on how far back still includes 'now'. Portland is the nearest big(ish) city to me, and they absolutely killed road expansion about 40 years ago; that is when most of the freeways and major arterials in the area were being built out. There have been a few small extensions built since, a bit of widening now and then, but they are the exception and they take many years to get buy-in.
> US cities weren't destroyed
US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best. In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city, lets people efficiently get around, and so on. It helps the economic value of a city and also improves quality of life. If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base. But there hasn't been. At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
They enjoy it when it's not in their neighborhood. Notice the cul de sacs everyone loves.
Man I wrote a long comment and that's a point I didn't address.
Of course non of those cul-de-sacs pay their own taxes, they are all subsidized by the often poorer people who live in denser neighborhoods.
Yeah and more and more people are fat and die or get sick from air pollution. Truly a win for car based infrastructure.
Your argument doesn't work because people are terrible at making good choices as individuals. Public enjoys smoking too, especially when pushed by advertising. Yet we somehow managed to push back on it a bit and people are now die less frequently from lung cancer and you can now breath in many cases you couldn't before.
Driving is like smoking only much worse.
> Driving is like smoking only much worse.
That is a weird comparison. Smoking has no objective upsides, unless you count pleasure or the stimulant effect of nicotine. Driving, on the other hand, has a huge utilitarian aspect that is impossible to ignore. There are many things you cannot accomplish using public transit, and many of the counter arguments are transparently made by young healthy individuals with a lot of stamina, plenty of spare time, and no children. And probably no house. That may seem like utopia to some folks but it completely ignores reality, so the argument is dead on arrival.
Driving bigger cars which are often only bigger outside has very little utility or even negative one if you don't count pleasure people get from driving dangerously. Minivans beat SUVs in almost all use cases and are safer for others as well but here we are.
I am not saying cars don't have utility but the problem is that you can buy a more dangerous, more polluting, bigger one and not pay the costs you incur on others. It's like smokers blowing the smoke into other people faces and then disposing of the cigarette butt on the street without paying anything.
Just make drivers pay the costs they incur on others and then let people choose. Right now it's a giant subsidy for driving at every step.
> US cities were not destroyed, and this is just misinformation, or hyperbole at best.
The damage US policies did to US cities is worse then what allied bombers ever did to Europe.
> In fact virtually all cities benefited from car infrastructure, since it brings people and things to the city
First of all, car infrastructure is literally the single most inefficient way to get people to a city.
In order to do it you need to basically destroy half of the city and give gigantic amount of space to roads and parking. To the point where in the US, much of the things people used to go to the city for is just gone.
And the few people that do get to the city, is LITERALLY the expense of the people who actually live there. But fuck them I guess. All the people who were Red Lined, unable to invest and impoverished, and then when their houses lost value, getting paid nothing and torn down.
And those places now had a horrible highway threw the city, making the land on both sides be worth even less.
But at least the subburban white people can still drive to the office tower.
> It helps the economic value of a city
US cities were much more valuable before the drive to build highways. And in Europe, cities that didn't build massive highways tend to be much more valuable. And many of the worst example of urban decay are those cities with the most complete highway programs.
Your assertion simply not backup by any data, there is tons of research on this. Gigantic amount of property value was lost. Countless beautiful old building that could still produce economic value to this day (and for the next 100 years) were ripped down to build parking lots.
And the worst part is, despite the dilapidated state of the cities, the cities were still producing more taxes, subsidizing the suburbs.
Literally destroying cities, pulling all the wealth out of it, to subsidize the subburban infrastructure.
> If this wasn't true, there would have been a response with a broad political base.
Please do yourself a favor and actually read up on the history of how these things happened.
> At best, a tiny minority of residents gets upset about roads and organizes into activist groups that make such claims. But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People back then didn't all understand the long term effect of these policies. And hidden subsidizes were used to hide the actual cost.
You act like the US in the 50/60 was some perfectly democratic society where if its impossible to even imagine that one group of people would support policy to exploit another group of people that was much less able to fight back politically. Must be nice to live in a imaginary world all the time.
If you didn't get it in school, if it doesn't fit the narrative it didn't exist.
> But the majority of the public enjoys and utilizes driving infrastructure.
People for the most part don't enjoy it. 'Road rage' is literally an incredibly common thing. People are sad by the terrible state of roads. The Netherlands and other European countries consistently outrank the US in driver satisfaction index. And that is only looking at drivers.
And many people have had people die, many people had accidents, many people had cars drive into their homes. Many people have lung issues. The list goes on an on and on.
The reality is people don't have another option, and most people today in the US have never even thought about or considered any other kind of system.
You can't say 'see after we invested countless billions in System A and gave it every advantage over decades and decades and abused System B for just as long', people use System A more. That's prove that system A is better.
Its an idiotic line of argument and its truly sad to see that even on HN people make those kind of basic mistakes.
In the Netherlands people actually have options, trains, trams, bikes, cars. And turns out, yes some people like driving. And driver satisfaction is much higher there then it is in the US. But many people clearly use bikes and trains. And just FYI, the investment that was put into bike infrastructure in the last 40 years is a absolute drop in the bucket compared to 100+ years of road investment.
If you actually gave all the modes the same amount of city space, and the same amount of investment, and actually prioritized by both energy efficiency and and people threwput, things would be far more tilted then it even is in the Netherlands.
only when someone speaks up. The worst roads are in nobodies backyard (who likes on a stroad - nobody, they all live on cul-de-sacs off the stroad)
Perhaps you live somewhere were everyone is content? My neighborhood is full of people (admittedly, many older) who mobilize at the slightest rumor of change anywhere in our vicinity. Bigger road? No way, that means more traffic. More houses? No way, that means more traffic. The neighborhood associate is quite active about staying on top of anything planned for this region of the city so they can light up our inboxes with information.
Probably the one thing they wouldn't really be bothered by is expanding that cul-de-sac, as long as it will still be a dead end and not a new connection that traffic might choose to use to transit across the neighborhood.
> Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc.
I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.
Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality.
The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.
If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.
Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.
On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them.
As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.
None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else.
You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
And isn't it really about how people are driving? In my state, we drive like maniacs, constantly speeding at least ten MPH over the limit. The term, "drive friendly" is scoffed at. Slowing down to let someone on the highway is unseen.
On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?
The solution is easy, I just saw it implemented in a nearby town (8k people): make the road curb a little, never fully straight, add bollards everywhere on the side of the road, and narrow the road at every crossing (with metal/concrete bollards). Bollards are great: they protect pedestrian and are intimidating it seems. According to the mayor (I ate with him, friend of my mother) the architect who gave him the idea was a nudge expert, and they tested it first with thin, plastic bollards around the town (it worked, but wasn't protective enough). The city is halfway between two economic 'centers' (28k and 50k population) and see a lot of traffic as those cities grow. No pedestrian death in the last two years AFAIK, when pre-covid you had half a dozen injuries every year and a mortal accident every other year.
So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!
Absolutely this. If people are maniacs and can't control their speed themselves, design the roads so they can't drive at insane speeds on them. I live right across the street from a school. During school times, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. The road is perfectly straight with clear sight lines and the lanes are literally as wide as freeway lanes (12') with bike lanes on both sides making it feel even wider. If you had no context of the road and what was off of it, you'd comfortably cruise at 55+ because the road is designed for that.
Throw in some strategically placed bollards or chicanes to change the geometry of the road and people will be forced to slow down.
http://www.thinkstreetsmart.org/uploads/1/2/7/4/127450599/ed...
Yes, people in general are terrible at driving. Teaching them is hopeless that's why we need solutions that works. There are two right now: infrastructure that makes it hard and very inconvenient to go fast and heavy handed enforcement. The latter option only works in very well developed civilised societes like Switzerland or Nordic countries have. Most others are stuck with traffic calling measures as their population has too little too lose to care about safety.
We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies.
You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
Bike lanes success are well measured and will often carry more people than a car lanes will.
> Bike lanes success are well measured
Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.
Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?
Have you EVER tried to bike for commuting, grocery shopping, transportation in general, on those bike lanes?
If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.
There is a bike lane going to a popular trail and crossing multiple major streets, also with bike lanes, as well as passing by multiple apartment complexes near my house. A two way lane with curbs and bollards, no cars parked there, with bike traffic lights and many side streets with 2 way stops (no stop on the street with the lane) or, at least, 4 way stops. I do drive on the same street from/to work as well as ride on the same lane to the trails. There are not many cyclists on it, orders of magnitude fewer than there are cars on the same street.
"Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.
Wherever the cycling infrastructure is developed, people bike en masse. Your point can be debunked with a 5 minute Google search.
Also, nobody wants to evaporate ALL cars from existence.
People want OPTIONS, how hard is it to understand?
Facts cannot be "debunked", your can keep living your fantasy though. And, speaking of google search - go ahead, open google maps, select "biking" layer and check the streets with bike lanes in any city in the US by dropping into street view on them. See if there are going to be more cyclists or cars on them. Try to debunk that.
The US has pitiful and dangerous bike infrastructure. Wherever in the world bike infrastructure is pleasant and safe to use, people use it. En masse. For the same size street more people bike than drive a car, per hour. Virtue of bikes being much smaller and more nimble.
That's what I call "a fact".
Throwing a bunch of paint shaped like a bike on what are basically freeways does not make it infrastructure.
That's why people don't bike in the US.
You're basically arguing that bike "infrastructure" that doesn't actually connect anything useful end to end, worth say, $5 million for a city can't compete with multi decade car infrastructure, a complete network that can take you from everywhere to everywhere else, that cost $40 billion over that period.
Gee... I wonder why? What could it possibly be? I guess we'll never know.
You first posted that the bike lane near my house, which I observe daily is "debunked". Then you doubled up saying that whenever there's bike infrastructure people use it more than cars with 0 evidence (and contrary to what everyone in the US who leaves one's house regularly can observe). Yeah, those are "facts", in quotes
You, sir, are an American provincial that's absolutely refusing to read everything I've written.
Have a nice day and I hope you have the chance, within your lifetime, to visit Tokyo, Utrech or at least Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oolu, Paris more recently.
Your eyes do not a trend make. Entire cities across the world cannot be discounted because you never left Alabama.
Even smaller cities and towns can have good bike infrastructure. But it requires good interconnected infrastructure which largely doesn't exist in the US or Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
They carry more bicyclists, you mean.
/s
No, they also carry people on trikes, in motorized wheel chairs, scooters, joggers, people on those mono wheel things. Bikes might be the most popular choice, but many people are starting to refer to these lanes as “mobility-lanes” because they improve the lives of more than just bicyclists.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.
What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.
The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.
> And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone
It links to https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... for that 7500 pedestrians in 2022 figure.
Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.
For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).
This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.
But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.
2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.
For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.
Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/BJ2h9o9
I just want to thank you for this effort post. It looks like the general thrust of 'pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are increasing' may be true, even if the particular examples given are not
Can you do a correlation plot or a comparison plot with the percentage of SUVs being sold/on the road?
Edit: Mmm.. Possibly correlates more with smartphone usage..
Here's something [1]. Data on the car market makeup by year is from here [2]. I only used the data for every 5 years because it is in a stacked line chart and I had to turn it into a table by measuring the heights of the various sections and lack the patience to do it for every year [3].
I omitted pickups and vans/minivans because the pickup share hasn't varied much and vans/minivans have a small share and including them made the graph too hard to read. Here are the shares in table form so you can mentally add them back if you wish.
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/pedestrian-death-rates-car-market-...[2] https://www.theautopian.com/heres-the-exact-year-suv-sales-o...
[3] Yes, I first tried ChatGPT. It was able to turn the chart into a table, but it too only did every 5th year, and some of its numbers were quite a bit off.
There's data that suggests that the increases in vehicle/pedestrian collision is mostly due to the in car displays that require you to take your eyes off of the road to do anything. Most excess collisions since around 2010 collisions have been at night, when peripheral vision is less likely to catch movement, and when the screens will mess up your night vision.
Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.
> the screens will mess up your night vision
This was a huge problem in a car I rented recently. There was so much light coming off the dash I could hardly see the road, and there was no obvious way to dim it (all my older cars have a dedicated knob or wheel to control the dashboard brightness).
> and there was no obvious way to dim it
This is another issue that plagues a lot of modern cars. Lack of physical buttons and moving a bunch of functionality into the touchscreen which increases distractions and causes the driver to get flustered.
They should at least have a monochromatic red mode set by default. The color that mess the least with night vision.
Mine has increase/decrease buttons but once the headlights go on it gets a lot dimmer. I like that except for when I'm going through a tunnel or something and it gets a bit distracting having so much change brightness at once
Check out 'cycling mikey' on youtube. He has all the convictions that prove you are correct. One area where i do congratulate the british plods is they will convict using gopro footage. Strangely unhelpful and aggressive when confronted by an auditor, though.
What you mention implies that the US government should mandate HUDs in all vehicles, so that drivers are not incentivized to take their eyes off the road to check speed or directions.
I 10000% support this and I think a good 5% of what makes Elon a bad person was him going on twitter and saying that HUDs are stupid and that teslas will never get one.
Literally in the article.
Oh god the shame.
There is overwhelming evidence against the increase of dependency on car centric transportation. Yet people just don't get it until it impacts them personally (ie, death of loved one, loss of limbs of friends, paralysis, DUI).
I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".
Maybe those safety rating systems should include the things SUVs are bad at. I think there's one tester who does a body roll test and most SUVs fail to swerve out of the way of something without rolling. Unsure if that's still true. But with that and like a "how likely is your child to be squished dead" rating, maybe people will think twice
The vehicle purchaser’s child will be safely in their third row seat watching the inbuilt Netflix on their personal entertainment display so why should they care?
True. Feels hard for me to come up with a way to make people like these care.
Some time ago, I read all of the published data on the safety of traffic circles, as I had often seen them recommended as a safer alternative to traffic lights.
I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.
Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)
Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.
The city replaced a 4 way stop with a traffic circle and ever since there’s been a car-totaling collision at least every other month. One leg of the circle is fed from a highway off-ramp, with a good portion of folks entering the circle at 150% of the legal limit. Another leg is from a 4 lane road that feeds the highway on-ramp, and those folks are getting amped for highway driving. I’m always nervous in the circle as I can’t count the times I’ve had to quickly brake to avoid being t-boned by some moron who doesn’t understand what a yield sign means.
Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
I'm curious how you get car totaling crashes in a traffic circle. Generally the traffic circles that have been installed around me are all relatively small and greatly cut down on speed going through the intersection. I could absolutely see an increase in fender bender style accidents here, because for some reason how to operate a traffic circle is an impossible mystery to Iowa drivers. But how are cars being totaled?
I remember when driving in SoCal, there was a massive traffic circle that I could see people maintaining fairly high speeds through and could see major accidents happening. But everything I see locally would be low speed collisions.
> Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
This is why proper driver's licensing & training is so important - in my city & country (Wellington, New Zealand) roundabouts (as well call them) are so common that in some tight intersections they are nothing more than a circle painted on the ground. Everyone knows how to use them, and they end up being very effective.
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These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us by Not Just Bikes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
Until the US government isn't deadlocked and is able to pass new laws, this isn't going to get better at all.
The huge hoods/bonnets on SUVs and trucks need to be regulated to make future cars smaller. I'm not an expert (I'll pontificate anyway) but could external airbags help at all?
One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.
The difference between Europe and the US is fairly simple. Euro NCAP has a pedestrian collision test as part of the safety rating and NCAP does not, only pedestrian avoidance.
If you could not get a five star safety rating because your car mangles somebody when hitting them at 30mph the tune would change pretty quickly. See all the things tested in Euro NCAP in section 2.2. https://www.euroncap.com/media/80156/euro-ncap-aeb-lss-vru-t...
5 star safety rating only matters inasmuch as it impacts insurance costs. And pedestrian risk should already be priced into insurance costs, independent of whether it’s in the safety rating tests.
If they change the standards and a truck doesn’t get a five star rating, the manufacturer will just not mention the safety rating in their marketing materials, and astroturf online forums with opinions undermining the value of the safety rating (‘they changed it specifically to mark down trucks’; ‘it doesn’t test the safety conditions that really matter anyway’; etc… heck you already see people raise these talking points about NCAP) so customers can rationalize themselves into ignoring that the truck they want to buy only scored 3.5 stars.
What's weird is IIHS (a non-government nonprofit) is publishing articles like this [1] and yet AFAIK doesn't incorporate pedestrian safety into its new-car ratings. One would think insurance companies would also be interested in the safety of the people whom their insured collide with.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/designers-must-make-vehicle...
Changes are coming, although I'm skeptical of their impact.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-cras...
Unfortunately, Euro-NCAP ignores some of the most important factors, such as ground contact.
Oh does it? Where can I read up on that?
I don't know of anyone who's written about it, unfortunately; I discovered it in the course of my own analysis of Euro-NCAP standards as part of a work project.
The test protocol is here:
https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab...
I used to be very excited about Euro-NCAP but when I actually researched it, I became fairly critical. It only measures AEB, and leg impact and head impact against the car, with very little consideration put into how the general profile of the car affects the collision kinematics. Whether the car pushes pedestrians onto the ground or throws them up in the air, it doesn't matter -- only the initial contact between the car and pedestrian is measured. (And while representing the pedestrian by a disembodied leg and a disembodied head).
It's had a good influence in some ways, most importantly by testing head impact at various points on the hood, which has forced automakers to reduce stiffness and add more space for deflection between the hood and the engine block. I think in other ways, it's helped accelerate a trend towards brick-shaped vehicle fronts, because they perform better on the leg impact tests. I personally believe this will result in fewer leg injuries but more deaths.
> One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.
There are school busses--need to penalize people driving children to school as long as there are busses. The 'school run' needlessly increases traffic and danger and causes expensive decisions in school design.
Most districts have actually done the reverse because school buses are really expensive.
If anything we need to bring walking to school back to historic levels. In 1969, 48% of children did so, but in 2009 that had declined to 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
To be fair, I used to live like two or three miles from school, and we would've had to pay for the bus because I was "too close". So mom dropped me off at like 6:00 AM because we were poor as shit. If we cared about education at all, we wouldn't make families pay for something that I'm pretty sure used to just be free.
Smart school districts make each school's main driveway bus only.
There's a parallel between driving behavior and internet behavior. Both isolated, inspiring recklessness.
All the most important issues are local and state and have nothing to do with US federal government.
The problem is that there is a whole generation of road engineers taught to use federal interstate standards on local roads, but there isn’t a more appropriate local road guideline.
When people use these standards for local roads it’s because it’s the same mindset as “no one ever got fired for picking IBM.”
Except road funding, huge chunks of which come from the federal government (because, big surprise, cities and states can't afford thousands of miles of stroads and highways without invoking a government that can print its own reserve currency).
The road standards do actually allow for quite a bit of freedom. Its harder if the state DoT (Department of Highway building) is not on board. But fundamentally nothing stops engineers from doing better work. Its a matter of education and political cover.
Political will alone goes a long way, engineers are capable of self educating quite well.
A simple example is the town in Indiana that has lots of roundabouts. They are operating under the same standards but is much better in lots of way.
Engineers can do a lot by themselves and with local political cover they can do much more. If the state DoT is onboard, there is a lot of freedom.
The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.
Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. The city spent millions in planning and engineering, and then right before paving was about to start, a local councilmember blocked it and canceled the whole project on the half of the road that runs through their neighborhood. So half of the road was narrowed to two lanes and has no speeding, no fatalities, and generally sane driver behavior. The other half is a reckless free-for-all that’s exhausting to drive on and terrifying for pedestrians and cyclists.
Millions in taxpayer dollars and the political will of a majority of citizens were wasted because our system allows one NIMBY to stop everything. A year later, there has already been a cyclist fatality on the road.
>why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate?
Because, as every engineer knows, everything is a tradeoff and good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.
I can't comment on your specific case, but obviously any measure that wants to improve safety needs to be evaluated based on whether it is actually effective, whether it is cost effective and whether there are negative consequences.
Mind saying which one it was?
There are so many I can't even say I have a good candidate for it :(
Sounds like Washington Ave
That tracks, south broad at that height is also pretty bad and only gets worse the more south you go and the same way north as you get further away from center city.
Could be Girard as well.
> The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.
In my opinion, this isn't a great point, but a naive one. Literally anything can be argued for or against on the grounds of safety, and the fact that a safety-based argument exists isn't grounds to remove it from public debate. Also, blindly putting safety above all other concerns is just "safetyism", rather than a balanced argument. In the case of the railing, apart from a minor expense, there isn't impact to others. In the case of anti-car road diets, an attempt to create more safety will cause most users of that road to lose lots of time (to reduced speed limits, increased traffic). To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure.
> Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it.
Mind linking to the poll? I find it hard to believe since the reality is that most people favor roads that are wide and have high speed limits, so they can get around quickly. A small but loud minority tends to argue, often successfully, for road diets. But most people aren't in favor of a war on cars because they get a lot of use from cars.
Additionally, what you're claiming about the poll being ignored is the opposite of what I've seen in west coast cities. Here, anti-car activists get into the transportation department positions and then try to implement their ideological plan regardless of polls or studies. Usually, they run dishonest polls that provide justification to whatever view they already have - for example, an online poll that only activist groups are aware of, which lets them get whatever numbers they want. If a poll disagrees, they don't talk about it or act against it anyways (example: https://crosscut.com/2018/04/seattle-city-hall-listen-consti...).
i think safetyism would be one thing if there was no safety problem to speak of, but road fatalities in the US are increasing again, and that is being driven by a 68% increase in pedestrian and cycling fatalities since 2011. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/pedestrian-fatalities-at-hist...
The original argument is that there shouldn't be debate about safety improvements, not that there shouldn't be safety improvements.
> To most people, a few road fatalities a year simply does not matter in the grand scheme of things - it's a minor cost compared to the huge time savings of fast and convenient driving infrastructure.
Especially if they get to kill poor people in bad neighborhoods on their way from suburbs to CBDs.
> why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate
Because of political culture and human nature; everything is driven by FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) so you can basically spin anything to scare people or to line your own pockets, living standards be damned.
Pride, selfishness and stubbornness are there as well.
1. "why should I care about pedestrians? they should get a car!" 2. "there's no way I'm driving without 4 lanes... that's gonna be slow!" (it isn't)
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Putting up a railing has no cost other than financial.
Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose.
You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.
>Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose
That's kind of the problem with urban planning in many cities in the USA -- the "primary purpose" of roads is assumed to be to serve cars, rather than to serve people.
>You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.
Happens all the time in my city for construction projects - an entire sidewalk will be shut down for years for construction, forcing pedestrians to the other side of the street (which means 2 extra waits for stop lights). Often the closed sidewalk is used for nothing at all except to hold a construction fence.. a more pedestrian friendly solution would require a covered walkway.
> That's kind of the problem with urban planning in many cities in the USA -- the "primary purpose" of roads is assumed to be to serve cars, rather than to serve people.
Serving cars is serving people. Who do you think is driving the cars or being driven in them?
As an aside, I am surprised that this exceedingly shallow point is still being made in 2024. Let's be honest - it never made sense, and was only ever brought up as an empty slogan to dishonestly dismiss those who depend on and benefit from cars (which is most of the public in most cities).
> Serving cars is serving people. Who do you think is driving the cars or being driven in them?
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, you can serve more people in the same land space by other forms of transportation:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
If you have a budget of $x, do you want to move more or fewer people? Because private auto transportation ("cars") moves the lowest volume.
Further, cars interfere with things that may not have alternatives, like trucks that make deliveries. There tend to all sorts of options for individuals (and the average occupancy of a car is like 1.0) to move hither and thither and yon, but if you want to deliver a refrigerator or a sofa, that's a lot harder to do on public transit—though not unheard of:
* https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/01/couch-toronto-subway/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/5erltx/apparently_...
>Serving cars is serving people
So is better transit, and biking, and even shutting off entire streets to cars and making them into pedestrian-only districts - and those can often serve more people than when it was just a road for cars.
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Insane argument. Serving giant death mechas is serving people. Serving Houthi raiders is serving people. Serving Adolf Hitler is serving people - he's a person, right?
People are in cars.
I get it, we like public transport. It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.
Cars are great. I like cars. I like driving as a mode of transport.
But there's a lot of potential ways to use space other than cars. The problem is, in seeking to accommodate cars at the expense of all else, we've made all other forms of transport -- like walking through a cute downtown on a spring day -- less practicable and common. In turn we drive more, spread businesses out for more parking, and created a never-ending feedback loop for more driving infrastructure.
In turn, the infrastructure has grown to a point that we can't really afford it from tax revenues, and where the mixed use of a thoroughfare for accessing businesses and going long distances does well at neither.
Unfortunately, getting us out of this loop is going to make things less convenient for some people for awhile before we can get to something better. There's no avoiding that, but continuing to make the same decision and hope it gets to a better outcome would be nuts.
> It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.
Useful for what? More useful than what? Less useful than what?
How many people does private car transportation move? How much can a car lane move per hour? How about a bicycle lane? Bus lane? [0] What do private cars interfere with? Goods transportation / delivery perhaps? People's health (through pollution and/or lack of active mobility)?
It's not that cars cannot be useful, but are they more or less useful than other options? What does leaning towards cars inhibit?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
Is there any city that's done that and has completely banned cars to replace with transit? I haven't seen any except in very small pedestrian-only districts.
But I've seen a lot of fighting in my city anytime any transit or biking project reduces road space dedicated to cars, even if just removing on-street parking.
>People are in cars.
All too often, a "person" is in a car, which is a pretty poor use of space.
The entirety of the Netherlands used to look like the US in the '60s and '70s, albeit not at Super Sized(TM) scale. Look up their urban design in 2024, it's quite pleasant and human-friendly.
Private automobiles and in some cases other motorised vehicles are banned in Mackinac Island, MI, and Halibut Cove, AK, in the US, Giethoorn, Netherlands, and Lamu, Kenya (possibly old town only). And a number of others. Several seem to be vacation spots or resorts, so have unusual usage and aesthetic patterns.
<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/16-places-around-the-world...>
People don't have to be in cars, and most cities have way more people in cars than necessary.
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> Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose.
The worst thing is, this isn’t always true. A good two lane street can have similar or better average speed than a bad four lane stroad.
> A good two lane street can have similar or better average speed than a bad four lane stroad.
Can you provide a more specific argument or evidence? To me, it seems obvious that two lanes has less capacity than four lanes. Therefore, a two lane road will have worse traffic, all other things held equal.
It also doesn't matter that the other two lanes might be repurposed for something else like bike lanes. In my experience, when bike lane projects are forced onto a city by activists, without authentic support from the general public, it ends up just creating a lot of underutilized infrastructure. In many west coast cities it is common to see clogged up car lanes next to permanently empty bike lanes. So even if in theory you could pack those bike lanes with more people (although moving at low speeds), it's never true in practice. The real throughput only gets worse.
> Can you provide a more specific argument or evidence? To me, it seems obvious that two lanes has less capacity than four lanes. Therefore, a two lane road will have worse traffic, all other things held equal.
While it's true that two lanes have less capacity than four, it's also measuring the wrong value - throughput is what you want to optimize for. This means you have to take a bunch of additional factors into account, for example:
- How many lanes do the connections to other roads have? Any time you're reducing the number of lanes, you're creating potential bottlenecks. If you have one lane, then widen up to four, and narrow back to one, you'll most likely have worse throughput than if you'd just kept one lane.
- How much space do you have for switching lanes? The more lanes, the more time people need to get into the correct one for their destination. You need to telegraph exits etc. much earlier.
- Do surrounding roads have space for the additional induced traffic? Time and time again, extra lanes have made traffic problems worse instead of better.
There are of course also disadvantages, e.g. the impact of any single lane being blocked. It's a complex and fascinating topic, especially considering the similarity to other networks (e.g. computer, biological).
the common diet is from four to three (a left turn lane), which is actually better for traffic flow, since left turners now have a dedicated pocket and don't block traffic, fewer people get rear ended, etc.
the problem with how the US does bike planning is that the payoff doesn't happen unless you have a bike network; biking is so unsafe on regular roads that a partial journey on bike lanes doesn't cut it. so often bike lanes get poor usage than they would otherwise get due to lack of connectivity.
Even if we make the tenuous assumption that the bike lanes are implemented correctly, you cannot expect that people that have lived with car-only infrastructure their whole lives will change their habits overnight. It's going to take some time to reach cycling volumes of even the less developed european cities.
Which has higher throughput?
For moving people? It's laughably easy: the one with bike lanes, sidewalks, public transport.
Cars are the least efficient form of transportation if you REALLY care about throughput.
> Which has higher throughput?
For a 3.5m / 12' lane, you can move 6-8x more people via bicycle, and 7-10x more pedestrians, per hour, than via private motorized vehicles ("cars"):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...
You can fit like 50 people on a bus, and maybe 10 in the equivalent space taken up by two SUVs. Seriously, how is this a question?
https://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer... says one lane peaks around 1,900 vehicles per hour. Even if we assume each vehicle only carries one driver, we need 38 busses per hour (one every 95 seconds!) to match that capacity. In practice we're lucky to see two busses per hour scheduled.
> A good two lane street can have similar or better average speed than a bad four lane stroad.
Average speed isn't the goal. Bandwidth is.
And, in case you're thinking about talking about "induced demand", that's fallacy.
The demand is/was there. More bandwidth means that more people try to satisfy it.
Putting up a railing is the equivalent to putting up a guardrail next to a road.
The primary function is already in place. Adding a railing/guardrail should have absolutely no negative impact on the primary or secondary functions.
Drivers need the freedom of plowing through pedestrians without consequences to their lives or their cars. It still puzzles me my whole neighborhood is full of stroads with large interesections and bollars are nowhere to be seen. Every single one of these intersections should be fully surrounded by bollards to provide safety to pedestrians but who cares about pedestrians, right?
> Putting up a railing is the equivalent to putting up a guardrail next to a road.
Which people do object to:
> In a twist that could only happen in the world of cycling politics, a city councillor in the New Zealand town of New Plymouth is making headlines for an eyebrow-raising reason — he’s worried about his beloved sports car. Murray Chong, owner of a Chevrolet Corvette just 160mm off the ground, has raised concerns that a proposed $14 million protected cycle lane might wreak havoc on his precious ride.
> Chong’s main gripe? The 100mm-high concrete separation barriers, meant to keep cyclists safe, apparently pose a dire threat to the underbelly of his sleek sports car. In an extraordinary meeting, despite Chong’s objections, the council voted in favor of the cycle lane plan, sending shockwaves through the world of low-riding vehicle enthusiasts.
* https://momentummag.com/a-new-zealand-councillor-objected-to...
"Won't someone please think of the safety of the cars!" /clutches-pearls
If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists. You’d also ban them on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to, since dV is a major driver of accidents and lethality.
Expecting a 15MPH ~250lb bike with none of those features to interface safely with 55MPH 5,000+lb traffic is moronic. You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
> If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists.
I've crashed on a bicycle, more than once. I've crashed even on a motorcycle (on a racetrack). The damage that is caused to myself, to my machine, and the surrounds, is tiny compared to the damage that is caused by an automobile with (at least) an order of magnitude more mass: a friend of mine had a car go through the front of his house, and the physical carnage was impressive (no person was injured thankfully).
And every time licensing has been looked at for cyclists, it has found to be a dumb idea:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj47qJ-UUno
> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
Cars cause much more damage to roads than bicyclists, and they should pay proportionally:
* https://www.investopedia.com/gas-taxes-and-what-you-need-to-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
And bicyclists already pay for local roads through local property taxes:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjv8WQu92c0
The problem is that roads are now practically monopolized for private vehicle use to the exclusion of everyone else, and the costs are not fully paid for by drivers. Higher density areas subsidize lower density ones, and road infrastructure is a big part of that:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.
I think it's worth talking about taxation here. Roads are generally in the top 3 costs for most municipalities along with police and firefighting.
Even when you add together tolls, gas tax, vehicle excise taxes, it doesn't cover the costs of road maintenance, and needs to be supplemented by sales tax, building property tax, etc.
If bike infrastructure reduces the number of cars, SUVs, and pickups that are on the road just to carry one person around, the reduction on road wear means it's a total cost savings.
(For what it's worth, I think the same argument applies also to buses.)
My smallish town budgets less than $14M/year for streets and $300M/year for K-12 education. I would not be surprised to find that ratio generally repeated anywhere in the US.
250lb bike? Wtf are you talking about. The heaviest e-bikes are like 50lb. Bikes are so safe that they require none of these extra steps that cars require, because cars are much more dangerous. It’s simple physics. There have been dozens of pedestrians and cyclists killed by cars in my city this year, and none by bicycles ever, to my knowledge. More evidence that cars require more strict licensing and safety measures.
Not safely interfacing on existing roads — that’s 100% true. And cyclists would love parallel infrastructure. Problem is, in the US, it’s seen as anti-car (and therefore anti-american), and so is much less common than it should be. But in the Netherlands, this is how they make biking one of the primary transport modes.
> You’d also ban them [bikes] on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to ... You’re better off building parallel infrastructure
They are and we do? You know those signs when you get on a highway that say things like pedestrians/bicycles/horses/etc prohibited? That's what those are for.
If you're proposing that the rest of the roads' speed limits be lowered to what's achievable by the average cyclist, then why not just advocate for that directly? Personally I don't appreciate the oversigning trend, generally preferring to drive at a decent clip as conditions permit most of the time, but also being content to follow the rare bicycle at that vehicle's speed until an opportunity to pass with a wide berth and clear oncoming visibility.
The real problem here is drivers who expect to be able to continue driving at whatever speed they want regardless of who else is using the road. Apart from when I was cycling myself, I used to experience this pretty harshly while shoveling snow. Half the drivers would treat me as a human being and slow and go mostly into the other lane. The other half would continue their speed right at me, ostensibly thinking it was acceptable to create close call danger for fun and spray me with shit from their tires (ie not just assault but outright battery). Similar situation with a dinky ride on lawnmower. It's funny how the ratio changed when I started doing the snow/grass along the road with a compact farm tractor - apparently the prospect of assholes' cars being significantly damaged effects their ability to see!
As far as taxes, municipal real estate taxes more than pay for the meager wear bicycles cause to the road. And as a general proponent of freedom I certainly wouldn't want to implement multiple new draconian papers please mandates just to assign taxes a few percent more accurately.
> "You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing."
yes, a parallel infrastructure would be welcomed by current cyclists and by many of those who now abstain from cycling because of persecution and threat of death on the roads.
If everyone can agree that a parallel infrastructure is needed, the funding question is trivial. The overall costs could even be negative due to the reduced need to subsidize car usage (also health benefits of cycling, etc.). If it makes you happy, we can let little kids slap a sticker on their bike to take of the "licensing".
Why is there 55mph 5,000+lb traffic?
Because the solution to a housing shortage caused by overly restrictive zoning is urban sprawl. To support urban sprawl we have cars and long commutes. Cars create problems for other cars so we need bigger cars for crash worthiness. In response to traffic jams caused by too many cars we double down on cars. This effectively turns valuable urban land into de facto highways: 45 MPH 6-8 lane wide stroads that heavily deprioritize alternative traffic modes and safety. Don't worry citizen, we'll widen the road even if we have to bulldoze some homes that are in the way of our SUVs getting downtown 1 min faster. For a few months before more people drive.
Bikes were here first.
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No matter how you slice it, a large moving object will do severe damage to a pedestrian or bicyclist.
The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving, which is why pedestrian impact isn't a factor in safety.
> The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving
Funnily enough, my first major bike accident as a kid involved me running into a parked pickup truck and ended up with a tooth going through my lip. Definitely my fault and not the truck's for just sitting there. But I thought it humorous that there are indeed people injured by non-moving vehicles.
That’s pretty obvious if you’ve visited any major city
And they sometimes get very upset when people call them out on their BS.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jq98/man-fined-for-enginee...
https://indyweek.com/news/wake/state-engineer-files-complain...
It's a dramatic article likely intended to help sell his book (with an equally dramatic title).
Missing from all of this is, well, data. He squarely blames large vehicles, SUV's. Now, I have no horse in this race, I prefer small vehicles for practical every-day driving. For moving family, dogs, camping trips, etc., a minivan is great.
Yet, at a very basic level, some of what he is saying makes no sense to me. Take this introductory statement:
"As a country, we hit the threshold of 1 million cumulative deaths in 1953, 2 million in 1975 and 3 million in 1998. While the past several years of data have not yet been released, I estimate that the U.S. topped 4 million total road deaths sometime in the spring of 2024."
So, 4 million by 2024. Fully half of that by 1975. Care to guess how many SUV's existed in 1975? Also, I am going to guess average speeds where likely lower.
He is blaming SUV's and claiming that making them 10 cm lower would have a dramatic impact on results. OK, well, if the data up until 1975 is any indication, this is nonsense.
How about distractions, drunk driving and, yes, pedestrians and cyclists. Accidents are not always attributable to one side or a single variable. The world is a complex multivariate problem. This guy is trying to sell books by hating on everything and only blaming one or two variables: SUV's bad, wide roads, bad.
And then there's are the circumstances of each accident. He gives the example of an SUV losing control, jumping a curb and killing a father and his kid. Well, not every accident is like that. And, no, life isn't going to be perfectly safe. You are not going to go down to zero accidents and zero fatalities, no matter how hard you might try.
Which brings me to the last point: He offers not data whatsoever on how things would improve if his world view were to be adopted. If we ripped-up and modified every road and shrunk every vehicle by 10 cm.
You see, it is easy to be critical of anything when you don't have to be accountable for any of it. Happens all the time with "experts". As an example, the financial world is full of economists who just "know" all there is to know about finance...yet none of them are billionaires and few (none?) run successful businesses at scale.
Yes, of course, road safety is important. I just think that the solutions include far more variables than what this guy trying to sell a book seems to be focusing on in this article. In a few decades, self-driving cars might solve this problem nicely. Don't know.
you've got a good point about experts being critical with no accountability.
However, when studying a complex, multivariate problem, if you find one or two variables that can easily affect the outcome (lower hood heights), it does seem sensible to optimize it, while obviously keeping in mind that you can optimize for other things.
The point may have been lost: Fully 50% of deaths occurred during the pre-SUV era. That's 2 million out of 4 million, not a trivial number. If we go out to 1998 and call that a less intense SUV era, that's 3 million deaths, of 75% of all deaths since the beginning of time.
This, to me, on first inspection, is pretty strong evidence indicating that the 10 cm prediction is very close to nonsense.
The prediction is no different from saying TSLA will go to $1000 because of some randomly-picked variable that will never be tested. Sounds fantastic and cam make me look very intelligent, yet, I would not have any accountability at all in making such a prediction.
Now, if I wanted to sell a book about how to make a billion dollars trading Tesla, I would write a bunch of blog posts explaining how this could happen and feature a nice picture of myself holding the book along with an Amazon link. Which is what this article is about.
For those of you that want small vehicles, they exist for the buying. For those of you who want big vehicles, you’re in luck, they also exist for the buying. Anyone that wants to limit people’s choices can shove it up your arse!
How about the choice to be able to walk or cycle in a safe environment?
The idea that squishy humans can move about safely near 1500kg+ moving vehicles traveling at even average speed is a fallacy. The first cycling/car fatality happened in 1896. I guarantee you that vehicle size and weight was much less than what we have today.
Okay. So the two choices come into conflict. How does that old adage goes? "Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"? How does it differ when you are not swinging your fist but using a multi ton vehicle to move people down?
If I take your comment at face value it seems you are arguing that we should ban all cars not just the very heavy ones?
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<< These are the sorts of systemic conditions that lead to many so-called road user errors.
There is certainly an argument to be made that we are all outcomes of the system in which we operate. That is to say, we all victims of circumstance. Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?
Both examples are admittedly anecdotal, but very recent and both from recent trip downtown.
At the end of the day, it is the user error. Having a tank to drive just happens to be re-assurance that whatever happens, the other user will bear the brunt of their bad decision.. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
Cars systematically break laws so often that it is simply not commented on. And the reality is the waste majority of bicyclist do not do borderline suicidal rides. Research shows overwhelmingly that most people on get on bikes if there are safe ways to bike.
The evidence is obviously anecdotal because and comment on it because its exceptional, while people not properly stopping at stop signs or going to fast is literally no even worth commenting about.
> I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.
You seem to indicate that you understand what a systematic issue is but then completely throw it out with this comment.
The reason only 'aggressive drivers' ride bikes (if this is even remotely true, more likely its just those you notice) is because most normal people rationally decide that these places are to dangerous to ride the bike in.
> .. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.
Given how few people bike in the US, it clearly is.
> Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?
In my anecdotal experience driving all over the country, aggressive bike riding tends to pair with poor bicycling infrastructure.
Where infrastructure is designed for bikes and following the rules is safe and makes sense, then compliance also goes up. This is much of the point that the article was making.
There are always going to be bad drivers cars and bikes included. The deterrence or responsibility of driving a large vehicle is ignored by the bad driver The deterrence or responsibility of driving a large vehicle is ignored by the bad driver. The point of the article is that we can set an upper limit to the total damage done in a accident by having better roads and cars.
Cyclists just don't see themselves as normal road traffic, so they don't see themselves as having the same responsibilities or held to the same standard, which is something I'm guilty of myself. I've ridden against traffic for short periods or ran red lights on a bike before (where it's clearly safe to do so), since I feel "semi-pedestrian"
Bikes don’t kill entire families when they crash. They don’t need to follow the same rules as cars. Forcing them to follow rules meant for cars makes the roads more dangerous.
That’s why they should be kept on the sidewalk where they belong. Legalize sidewalk biking, ban road biking.
The horror at this from the cyclist community is why anti-cyclist sentiment is so strong.
In the US side walk are already hilariously under designed and roads are already hilariously over designed. In many places side walks are barley large enough for pedestrians and bikes to cross.
And pedestrian infrastructure is just horrible designed for wheeled vehicles in the first place. As people with kid strollers and wheel chairs find out quickly.
The actual solution, that pretty much every other first world country in the world has recognized is to start to build proper safe infrastructure for bikes (and the US overwhelmingly has plenty of space for that). Or to lower car traffic speed such that sharing can be done safely.
If the US had huge sidewalks everywhere and fantastic design for access of wheeled vehicle, your suggestion might make sense, in the actual world, it doesn't, it just makes the world worse for people that walk and those that cycle.
This is literally already all figured out and backed up with plenty of research but somehow people have to come up with their own 'solutions'.
> In the US side walk are already hilariously under designed and roads are already hilariously over designed.
So many people jog in the streets exactly for this reason. Sidewalks are often poorly maintained and falling apart. I'm not sure how anyone handicapped is supposed to get around.
In a previous life, during heavy winter storms, I would commonly walk in the streets because they were maintained while the sidewalks were covered in ice. The city once changed its plowing algorithm due to angry drivers but for sidewalk maintenance they act almost powerless.
Years ago I visited Amsterdam and the pedestrian experience was incredible. It was like walking around a theme park. Ever since that experience I can't unsee the hell we've created in the states with our cars-first mentality.
That's a terrible idea. Biking on the sidewalk should be illegal for everyone except young kids. Sharing the sidewalks is dangerous when the speed difference between the average cyclist and the average pedestrian is something like 10 mph.
That can work by widening sidewalks and designing them so that bicycles can cruise safely at full speed, protected from and prioritized over cars, and also clearly separated from the walking sidewalk so there are no unpleasant interactions. The bonus is that if one acquires the space for this by removing car lanes, then the city becomes a little bit nicer for everyone.
Anti-cyclist sentiment is so strong because they don't want to ride on sidewalks?
That makes no sense at all, something tells me you hate cyclists and will continue to hate cyclists wherever they are.
> That’s why they should be kept on the sidewalk where they belong.
You think mixing 2 kph pedestrian traffic with 20 kph bicycle traffic is a good idea?
(Sidewalks are probably called that for a reason.)
You're victim blaming.
My favorite unsubstantiated theory about anti cyclist sentiment is that exposes the radically car centric nature of US society and people don't like noticing that.
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You seem to misunderstand the founding principles on this country, which, among other thing favor private property and individual over society as a whole. Most people do not suggest everyone but them has to sacrifice. Me, for example, am saying 'apply rules across the board', which in this case means liceses for bikes if they want to drive on the road with everyone else, who is licensed.
Is that narcissist to ask that the same standard is applied?
Licenses aren't for road use. They're for motor vehicle operation. You are also free to use a road without a license if you use a vehicle that doesn't require a license. Or your feet.
I said:
<< which in this case means liceses for bikes
you said:
<< Licenses aren't for road use. They're for motor vehicle operation
I am talking about what could be. You are arguing for what is currently in play in US ( in old country, for example, we did have bicycle licenses ).
Otoh, your argument suggests that I could drive the following[1] on the street and expect that the cops won't stop me, because, after all, just like a bike, it does not require a license. As you can see, the argument breaks down easily.
The issue is, a lot of the rules of the road depend on some common sense. Not an insignificant part of what bicycles are doing on US roads is not common sense. Hence my argument: "you want to be on the road, be subject to the same rules". I do not think it is unreasonable.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids%27-Electric-Vehicle...
> As you can see, the argument breaks down easily.
I'm not following. I'm definitely not seeing any such thing. Do you think someone should be allowed to drive this [1] on a public road as long as they have a driver's license? Obviously (I hope) not. The vehicles that are allowed to be used on a road are already regulated separately.
> Not an insignificant part of what bicycles are doing on US roads is not common sense.
One of the problems with appealing to "common sense" is that no one agrees on which things are common sense. It's common sense to me that bicycles should be ridden on the road, and rarely ever on the sidewalk. Yet there are people that I think honestly believe that common sense should dictate the opposite. Where does that leave us?
A lot of bicyclists run stop signs and ride the wrong way. That bothers me. A lot of motor vehicle drivers exceed the speed limit and use cell phones while driving. That also bothers me.
[1] https://blog.iseekplant.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Med...
So what do you propose? From my perspective, there are but few realistic options.
I don't have the answers.
More traffic calming measures? Commercial licenses for those giant pickups SUVs? Less "free" parking? Require 100 miles of transportation cycling to get a drivers' license, for those physically able? Higher gas taxes?
Interesting. Would you accept remote work as default for most non-customer facing jobs to lower the strain on roads ( calming measure )?
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Different modes of transport have different capabilities, dangers, and responsibilities. Horses, bikes, cars, HGVs, pedestrians—all different, actually there's no real shame in ignoring car laws when you're not driving a car. You have to use your brain and accept the fact that these laws were only made with cars in mind.
I don't think this is controversial but I think HGVs should obey traffic laws
I don't think this is controversial but HGVs tend to have even more stringent traffic laws, ones that cars don't have to follow. In my country HGVs have lower speed limits than cars, for example. I don't think this is controversial but it would be strange for cars to follow rules that only apply to HGVs.
"Against traffic" is different as a bike or led though. Sometimes when lanes are very narrow and visibility isn't good, you need to go against traffic (on the shoulder) so that the driver sees your face and responds faster. And you can see to bail if someone hasn't made room.
But if it's a Chicago intersection and you just said I'm on a bike all 12 lanes have to yield to me and you zoom diagonal in front of cars... the Darwin Awards are never short of applicants.
E-bikes and scooters and stuff have made this 1,000 times worse. The number of drunk kids who think they can go max speed down a hill through intersections and cars will just magically make way for them... Terrifying.
Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Lane splitting is for air cooled engines stuck in traffic, where they literally need to move or shut down. (It is technically illegal to park the vehicle with engine shut off in case you can't restart). It has absolutely never been legal for anyone to shoot through gaps in traffic because of erectile dysfunction compensation. It is only in the absolute emergency that you need to walk your bike around to keep it from melting.
In general I do agree. Campaigns to "see motorcycles" just end up with 80yo biker gangs thinking it's okay yo blast their engines in residential. Campaigns to "share the road" lead to bicyclists who will absolutely charge an SUV just to get on the news. I'm all for road safety but it absolutely requires bike clubs of all types to stop being twits.
This is false.
California passed AB 51 in 2016 which codified lane splitting under California law. There is no mention of "air cooling". There are guidelines that say you should not go more than 10 mph faster than traffic and not faster than 50 mph total.
> Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Maybe in the United States of America. There are a great many developed countries where lane splitting by motorcycles and bicycles is not only legal, but even expected and encouraged.
At least as early as 2002, the MSF in California taught that lane sharing is legal in California.
I'm piling on at this point, but I appreciate that this got me to go read and learn a few more things (that the internet says are true, anyways).
Lane splitting has never been illegal in CA, but is apparently illegal in all other US states. (Having been in CA for about 10 years, I've gotten used to it, but think it's still crazy. Definitely have seen it on highways in the midwest before that, too)
This link was informative: https://www.kqed.org/news/11680481/10-things-you-need-to-kno...
Basically, not illegal; the 2016 law passed just said, "CA Highway Patrol can make guidelines", which was in response to a previous attempt by the CHP to give those guidelines. Helpfully the article includes those guidelines, too.
> Lane splitting has never been illegal in CA, but is apparently illegal in all other US states.
Splitting and filtering are legal in other US states:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_splitting#Legal_status_in...
When traffic is really slow, lane splitting is really useful. A splitting motorcycle can easily be moving 2x to 3x the speed of cars sitting in a jam.
However, I agree that lane splitting gets more and more dangerous as traffic starts flowing faster.
> Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
The state of of California would disagree with you:
* https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/programs/california...
As would several others:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_splitting#Legal_status_in...
Lane splitting in California is legal for motorcycles
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I did read all of your sentences.
You says: “Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.”
Vs: “On August 19, 2016, California became the first state in the U.S. to declare lane splitting legal in an effort to relieve traffic jams.”https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/personal-injury/california-lane...
How do you square those two?
I guess the confusion is that you say it's always illegal then proceed to say it's sometimes allowed
No one is charging your SUV on a bike to "get on the news" that's borderline delusional. If you seriously think this is real my advice is to try biking on a shared road. Survival instincts will show you the truth of that concept.