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Re:Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful Than Exhaust, Study Finds by AnthonyMouse on Saturday February 15, 2025 @01:40PM (#43060957)
> Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.

That's the point. Diligence won't save you but crumple zones might have.

It's also not obvious that most collisions being with cars isn't just because most other vehicles are cars. If two motorcycles collide with each other at high speed, the damage they do to each other isn't your problem, it's the resulting loss of control and the damage to your body when you impact the pavement.

> Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).

But then you're stuck between three bad options: You have separate roads specifically for e-bikes (implausible), you put high speed e-bikes in pedestrian zones, or you limit the top speed of e-bikes to something safe for pedestrians and then people go back to buying cars because e-bikes are too slow.

Re:Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful Than Exhaust, Study Finds by dijit on Saturday February 15, 2025 @01:45PM (#43061015)
My point is cars don’t necessarily deserve the deference society affords them, they’re utility vehicles, needed by fewer people than we think (but still needed). The paths we reserve for car use should be diminished.

If every person was driving an articulated truck then there would be more deaths, caused not just by collisions and poor driving but by emissions too. We’d need bigger roads too- its unnecessary for everyone to do this.

Re:Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful Than Exhaust, Study Finds by AnthonyMouse on Saturday February 15, 2025 @02:08PM (#43061266)
The general problem is that it's not that fewer people need them, it's that most people need them on fewer occasions, but they're not going to buy, register and insure separate vehicles for different uses. So they get one that does everything and use it for everything, and then they're driving an SUV even when they're traveling alone with no cargo.

To get away from this you'd have to completely redesign US cities to have people living in them instead of significant numbers commuting in from the suburbs. To begin with you'd need a massive amount of new higher density housing, the construction of which is currently inhibited by building codes where not outright prohibited by zoning. Trying to solve the rest of it before you do that is going to face massive opposition, because you'll be trying to make it harder to have a car to people who still can't realistically avoid having a car.