GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cadillac Models

Re:GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cad... by panick21_ on Thursday August 11, 2022 @10:45AM (#32426508)

Part of the reason is that road engineers basically adopted a standard that treated all roads the same as highways in terms of buffer zones and so on.

So they treat a 2 lane road in suburb the same as a highway. Literally.

So you end up with local roads that can fit 4 SUV next to each other despite being like a 2 lane road.

Literally everything is built to accommodate huge cars and even has safety margin for huge cars.

Its actually funny, go to google maps and compare car subburbs from the 50s with those from the 80/90s and you will see the roads being like twice the size. And then you compare it to old street car subburbs and the roads are even thinner.

Ironically those street car subburbs often have population density that make them almost city like.

This all works together to make US style sprawl such a distinctive feature.

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Re:GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cad... by porknubbins on Thursday August 11, 2022 @11:23AM (#32427139)

In my area its the 1950's and 60's suburbs that started to have enormous streets between houses, like 6 vehicles wide. I have always been curious why this was done.

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Re:GM makes $1,500 subscription mandatory on GMC, Buick, Cad... by panick21_ on Friday August 12, 2022 @12:27AM (#32434710)

You can read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town". I have not read it yet but Charles Marohn talks about this a lot.

Basically they just developed road safety principles for highways and then somehow thought it made sense for all roads no matter if there were people there.

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