> Maybe rent a big vehicle when you need it and use a regular size on when you don't.

I buy things specifically so I don’t have to compete with other people during times of scarcity, such as the last 18 months that just happened.

Renting sucks if you do anything regularly or like to put work into improving anything (like your car or house).

I don’t want to live a life of peonage where I don’t own anything and am at the mercy of other people’s resource allocation decisions whenever I want to do anything.

You're taking this weirdly personally, and ignoring the contextual point about large numbers of pickups that are never used for any kind of work, as well as the other point about older pickups having equivalent amounts of bed space without being so massive.

I’m speaking from the first person, not taking it personally. I’m just explaining why ownership is often superior to rentership. Otoh, your comment seemed very personal and emotive:

> Maybe rent a big vehicle when you need it and use a regular size on when you don't. I'm tired of being menaced by extremely clean and pristine pickups

This sounds like you feel persecuted by truck drivers.

I’m not sure the observation about bed space is really true, except maybe insofar as modern safety regulations require more empty crumple space in the front of the car.

I don't feel persecuted by truck drivers, I just have an unpleasant number of close encounters with such vehicles as a pedestrian. Far from thinking they're persecuting me, I think they are simply not paying attention.

Is this unique to truck drivers? In my experience, the worst and most unsafe drivers usually drive cheap commuters, not pickups.

Also, to preempt a repeat, last time there was a thread on HN about saving pedestrians by banning pickup trucks, I ran the numbers and a very optimistic estimate for number of pedestrian lives saved by replacing every single pickup with a commuter car was like 200 people per year.

By no means, SUV drivers and boy racers are also serial hazards where I live. What's a bit different with those is it's easier to make eye contact with drivers in SUVs and sedans. Many modern pickups tend to be elevated to the same height as vans (especially if the suspension is lifted), but unlike vans and minibuses they still have a long front hood, which offsets any benefit from the increased elevation while still making it hard for pedestrians to make eye contact with the driver.

This is a worry factor for people with kids, walking a dog etc., because while the pickup driver may well notice people of adult height, anything below shoulder level is effectively invisible in close-up situations. Most unpleasant close encounters don't come from a speeding vehicle but going in a straight line, but drivers turning right on red or at a stop sign and focused on traffic coming to their left, while ignoring the existence of people trying to cross the street to their right (and sometimes to their left too, because they're gazing into the middle distance and literally overlooking people nearby even though the pedestrians have the right of way).

200 pedestrian lives a year seems like a lot to me, even 100 seems like an excess loss. If you factor in cyclists (though many cyclists are their own worst enemies) I think the number might swell.

> 200 pedestrian lives a year seems like a lot to me

Not if you do a population-normalized utilitarian comparison. 200 people is vanishingly small. There are a million other things to focus on first.

Parallel > serial