I've been saying for years that driving a large SUV or truck without a legitimate need for its capabilities is an antisocial act, for precisely this reason and also the fact that, all other things being equal, a vehicle (and its occupants) colliding with another vehicle will fare worse the larger that other vehicle is. Whether my own assumptions were right or wrong, I'm glad we're finally starting to talk about this. For a long time, it seemed to be a huge blind spot in existing analyses of injurious/fatal road accidents.
It makes me absolutely livid when I walk past a shiny new lifted pickup with an empty bed and my head is just about level with the front of the hood. How have we grown to accept these things driving around on public roads with no higher bar to entry than that required to drive a Geo Metro?
Why not just reduce the tonnage to 4,000lbs for example? Easy. You want to drive a Humvee, go get a CDL first.
Obligatory MMM article:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/04/28/what-does-your-wor...
However, in practice, she backed into a couple poles in her old SUV and said she didn't see them. Hm.
She now drives a car instead of an SUV and not once has complained about being unable to see, and I don't think it has raisable seats, so I think she may have simply convinced herself of something that was untrue.
The condition of a truck's bed, i.e. is it dusty and marked up by loads carried, is it full of gear, etc., serves as a proxy for whether the operator of the vehicle has been or is currently making use of the capabilities it offers beyond e.g. a compact hatchback. If they are not, I see that as a signal that they belong to the category of truck owners who own them for vanity and/or personal expression reasons rather than because they need the carrying capacity. This sort of ownership is, I believe (as I said) an antisocial act.
This signal is not perfect, but as I keep it to myself in every case I don't feel that I'm harming anybody by making these judgments, and if someone could demonstrate to me that e.g. the majority of F-series truck (the most popular "car" in America, last I checked) owners need that capacity, as in they use it on a regular basis to the extent that a smaller vehicle would not suffice, I'd be happy to change my thinking.
Regardless, all this fixation on my "empty bed" comment is totally missing the point. We should look at the data, at how many human lives are lost each year because of the proliferation of these vehicles, and on that basis we should decide whether further regulation and/or transit engineering is needed to protect the public. People are, evidently, dying because of said proliferation, and that's just totally unacceptable to me.
Maybe I just don't understand the mindset that I should be able to do whatever I want, for my own vanity/amusement/whatever, at any cost to my fellow humans up to and including the loss of their lives.
The only wrecks (only fender benders) I've ever been in were when I had a heavily loaded bed or was pulling a trailer. Not only does stopping distance increase, but weight is sometimes taken off of the front tires, meaning ability to steer/swerve is also impaired.
This is one of those rules that not only would have the opposite of the desired, but also increase the severity of accidents that do occur.
What's the "empty bed idea"?
> This is one of those rules
Which rule?
This topic always devolves into someone suggesting "there ought to be a law..." And some variation suggesting tickets be given to people driving vehicles bigger than what's required for any particular trip, with an empty bed being evidence of guilt.
Do I think the massive proliferation of obviously-underutilized pickup trucks in America is a symptom of a particularly destructive and vapid brand of consumerism? Yes, I do.
There's a subset of people that seem to like big, heavy, noisy soot belching vehicles, perhaps because they imagine it projects power to drive them.
And remember that embedded energy is a thing. It's almost always more efficient to drive a single vehicle that meets all of your needs than to purchase a second one just for occasional use. For trucks specifically, rentals usually don't make sense.
I've rented many trucks in my life, at times when my car at the time wasn't big enough. In each case it made perfect sense.
They even make the point in the article- that the rise in fatalities corresponds more with pedestrian safety features than anything else, but we're not blaming them.
The 1st company I worked for was hyper vigilant in preventing accidents, to a point that kept me from returning. Their data is quite solid, however. With both forward and inner facing cameras, they are able to analyze their drivers extensively, notably where accidents occur. It isn't only because of the mandatory $10,000 federal fine[1] for having a cellphone placed near a driver's ear, it's the observed tendency of the phone as a factor in many events. So strict was the company, that if the camera sensors detected a driver's hand near a cellphone, a safety meeting was held and the driver reprimanded, or terminated. Their means I find intolerable, but their motivation well founded.
1. FMCSA
Edit: I ought take the opportunity to mention the training that occurs in some of these companies, regardless of driver experience. There can be no refutation that such additional education makes a better driver, of any motor vehicle. The prevalent attitude and reception (even among trucker types) is open-minded, sincere and earnest. I view this as strong evidence that education can indeed improve what many appear to think of as incorrigible drivers. The required education for a standard driver's licenses is wholly inadequate considering the stakes. I stubbornly hold that up to a majority of accidents are highly and practically preventable. Our priorities are grotesque.
People just not paying attention to traffic lights and walking onto streets. Actually, from what I can tell, very few pedestrians actually pay attention to the car traffic lights.
I've watched people countless times walk onto the street while playing with their phones and not even looking up. I've seen people walking in the dark with headphones on crossing streets without paying the slightest bit of attention.
Personally, as a pedestrian I understand most people driving are fairly terrible at it and honestly when you're driving, most of the time you see pedestrians for about 20-30 seconds before you've passed them and their gone.
When I'm walking around traffic, I always stay concious of this, because I understand that if a ton of metal flying at 60km/h hits me, I'm gonna be seriously hurt or dead and there's not always time for a car to stop if I'm being unsafe as much as they should stop. I really think a lot of people don't understand or appreciate this enough.
1 out of 3 pedestrian deaths involve drunk pedestrians.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/pedestrian_safety/ind...
The major difference is that the consequence of being a bad pedestrian isn't death in most countries due to slower speeds and lower prevalence of SUVs.
I often see people arguing that US speed limits being high is fine, because the major killer is speed differential in a crash. The problem is, pedestrians walk at 3mph, so even a speed limit of 40mph on a road with pedestrians leads to a quite high speed differential between a car and a human.
Also in Europe people text less; I never understood the US preference for texting, in Europe we simply talk (many countries have affordable or unlimited voice plans). When I drive a car (10-20% of the time) I have a headset in my ear, when I ride the motorcycle I have a helmet headset turned on on auto-answer. I don't talk too often while driving, but it is less distracting than texting, I never have to touch the phone while driving (on the bike it is not even possible).
There was an America before cars where walking was the norm, and then it was mostly systematically destroyed and is gone outside of a few metropolitan areas.
But to me it doesn't seem like people are more distracted than 10 years ago, so I'm not sure how that would increase pedestrian deaths.
In the UK, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Austria and Iceland, maybe distracted driving and cellphone use is better enforced. Many of the stats I see show that distracted driving is more common in the US vs. other countries: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/comment/texting-driving-tab...
Owning a smartphone and using it while driving aren't the same thing. I think work culture differences my contribute more than mere smartphone ownership.
However, where this starts to break down is highway miles. Shifting into overdrive and having no lights for miles, coupled with the always connected to work ethic might have different results.
I do think it ultimately comes down to culture and conditions on the road.
Drivers in Europe tend to be better because they have more training, and plenty to lose. Simply holding a phone will get you fined and points.
Given the prevalence of manual cars there, yes I am actually.
It's a hell of a lot harder to get a license in those countries than in the US. And if you hit a pedestrian in those countries it is assumed you are at fault. Unlike the US, where it is assumed the pedestrian must have done something irrational, like cross a street, and the driver is innocent as snow.
Collectively, Americans are terrible drivers, so the reasons compound. Whether it's fatigue, phones, makeup, food, drinking, or poor judgement we feel safe in our cars and fuck anyone else.
Wikipedia says that in 2008 we were one of the best in the world for that but have been overtaken by Holland and Sweden. Also that we could drop deaths 30% more by fixing stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_United_Kingdom#Ro...
From my experience, yes.
My perception is that texting while driving just wasn't a thing in Germany at the time it was commonly happening in the US. Maybe nobody was talking about it, but I suspect people just didn't consider it a thing you could do while driving.
Tfa addresses reasons cell phone use may not be as explanatory as we think. If you want to argue against that, great, but bring some evidence. Anything else is just hot air.
> Here is what the frustrated safety experts will tell you: Americans are driving more than ever, more than residents of any other country. More of them than ever are living in cities and out in urban sprawl; a growing number of pedestrian fatalities occur on the fringes of cities, where high-volume, high-speed roads exist in close proximity to the places where people live, work, and shop. Speed limits have increased across the country over the past 20 years, despite robust evidence that even slight increases in speed dramatically increase the likelihood of killing pedestrians (car passengers, too – but the increase is not as steep, thanks to improvements in the design of car frames, airbags and seatbelts). American road engineers tend to assume people will speed, and so design roads to accommodate speeding; this, in turn, facilitates more speeding, which soon enough makes higher speed limits feel reasonable. And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. [emphasis added]
From other statistics I've seen, the massive increase in SUV's is mentioned as the single largest factor.
Indeed, the article directly refutes your theory:
> Ask a room full of safety experts about smartphones and you will get a mix of resignation, bemusement and contempt. “I tend not to buy the smartphone distraction stuff,” says Garrick, echoing nearly identical comments from just about everyone I talked to. “To me, it reads as shoving aside actually dealing with the relevant issues.” What particularly bothers him, he says, is how poorly thought out the distraction discourse tends to be. In the UK, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Austria and Iceland, for example, pedestrian deaths occur at a per capita rate roughly half of America’s, or lower. Are we really to believe that the citizens of these countries are 50% less susceptible than Americans to distraction, by their phones or anything else? ... “All this talk about pedestrian distraction, driver distraction? It’s such a distraction,” says Ben Welle of the World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities. “It puts all the responsibility on individuals, and none on the environment they operate in.” [emphasis added]