https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/01/higher-vehicle-hoods-significantly-increase-pedestrian-deaths-study-finds/
Single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crash data for 2016-2021 finds hoods a problem.
There needs to be regulations on the size of personal vehicles for a shit ton of reasons...
But this one by itself should be enough.
There are… but there are loopholes. Which is why the vehicles get bigger every year. They’re all using loopholes to continue not bothering to meet the standards the regulations set forth.
Loopholes are always going to happen...
But if you close them, then the problem is fixed.
Currently we just ignore them, instead of passing regulations that close the loophole and clarify
We could even go a step further and require plans to be approved by a regulatory agency before mass production can start.
Boom, problem solved forever.
Even better would be if the US switched from "letter of the law" to "spirit of the law" because as it stands, there's a lot of lawmakers just throwing their hands in the air and saying "well they're not breaking the letter of the law, so there's nothing we can do" while completely ignoring that it's clear that the person in question is breaking the spirit of the law when it was written.
It allows for laws to be endlessly re-interpreted, and at this point even the Supreme Court has tossed out the idea of previous decisions actually mattering. They'll just re-interpret every law to be beneficial to their purposes every time they need to re-interpret it.
At a certain point you have to stop and admit the loopholes are being left open on purpose.
If you think law has too much room for interpretation when we care about it says, what makes you think anything would improve if we instead cared only about what it meant to say?
The spirit of the law is important in American jurisprudence, but there's a reason that no serious legal academic advocates for abandoning black-letter interpretation: a cornerstone of jurisprudence is predictability. In order to be justly bound by the law, a reasonable person must be able to understand its borders. This gives rise to principles in US law concerning vagueness (vague laws are void ab initio) and due process. We can't always ascertain what the "spirit of the law" is, should be, or was intended to be, but we can always ascertain what the law is. Even in common law and case law, standards must be articulated, and the state must give effect to what is actually said, and not what it wishes had been said. Abandoning this principle in order to "close loopholes" is just inviting bad actors who currently exploit oversights to instead wield unbridled power against ordinary people who could never have even anticipated the danger.
That loopholes are left open deliberately is not a failure of legal interpretation. It's a direct consequence of corruption and regulatory capture. Rewriting American jurisprudence won't solve those problems. Hanging oil magnates and cheaply purchased bureaucrats will.
The law meant that it’s not a crime if you’re of a certain race, gender, economic status, or sexual orientation.
I mean, the “spirit of the law” itself is extremely vague and allows for even more interpretation than the letter of the law.
You can easily fix the letter of the law by just changing what it says. You can’t fix when the Supreme Court decides that the spirit of the law is contrary to the letter, which they have done repeatedly.
In other words, you’re arguing that we shouldn’t care what the law says, and instead should govern on what we feel the law means.
Following the spirit of the law would be extremely dangerous as one's interpretation of the spirit of the law maybe comply differently from another. There's also the issue of being punished for following what is written in the law only to be unjustly punished for something that's not written anywhere in the law. How are you supposed to trust the law if you cannot rely upon that law to be accurate? The real issue is lawmakers not covering all of every edge case either that be out of ignorance or malice and allowing those loopholes to exist in the first place.
"loophole" implies that regulators are trying to restrict them, but manufacturers are finding ways to work around those restrictions. There is no "loophole" here: CAFE standards are specifically driving manufacturers to produce larger cars.
CAFE standards gradually tighten emissions standards. The problem is that they tighten the standards on smaller cars faster than on larger cars. CAFE are making it harder and harder to make small, compliant vehicles, and easier to produce larger compliant vehicles.
This isn't a loophole. This is incompetent, counter-productive regulation.
There needs to be a social cost of owning these abominations. If we make it more expensive or more regulated, they'll still find the people who want to drive them. If we make them embarrassing, shameful, or otherwise costly in social standing, the market for them will soon collapse.
Other countries require a special license for vehicles that big.
It costs more, and requires frequent tests, written and driving. The large vehicles are also prohibited from driving down small side streets and using normal parking spaces.
Because at this size, they're only needed as commercial vehicles.
If the only reason people have them is for social status, you'd have a point. But, that fails as soon as anyone actually uses one for their intended purpose.
What's the intended purpose of the higher hood? Cars exist that are safer for pedestrians, we should stigmatise those who choose not to opt for them.
Effective crumple zones, larger engine, higher engine increasing ground clearance necessary for longer vehicles. Driver and passenger safety: lower hoods throw deer, elk, and moose into the passenger compartment.
How often are pedestrians involved in collisions? How often are they seriously injured? How often are driver and passenger involved in collisions, and seriously injured? Because there is always at least one occupant present and there is rarely a pedestrian involved, occupant safety is a far more important consideration than pedestrian safety. We can justify removing sharp, penetrating contours from the front of the vehicle, but we can't justify anything that increases risks to occupants.
I haul 6 customers, 3 crew members, and a 5000lb trailer with a Suburban on up to 9 trips a week. Ideally, I'd have a 4th crew member to help out, but I already have to throw one of the crewmembers in the back, in a jump seat behind the 3rd row, because a suburban only seats 8.
No amount of social stigma against SUVs is going to convince me to go with something smaller.
Mate you need a fucking bus. In your specific case this fugly piece of shit might actually make sense.
I live in Basel, Switzerland, lovely old city, very unfriendly to cars, which is fine due to the great public transit. There is this one dickhead who has a bright, shiny red Dodge Ram. It's monstrous. And it doesn't fuckin' fit in the streets, I'd love to see how much in fines that idiot has had for blocking trams, traffic, and all the other nonsense I've seen it do, was actually stuck in traffic once because it got stuck on a corner, took 30 mins to get it backed up and out of the way.
The conservative Supreme Court is about to make that a lot harder in a few days. Get ready for the Canonaro to be real.
The Dobbs case of this session is Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo, and it’s looking like the court is going to side with the conservatives.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1224939610/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine
Right now Congress gives regulatory agencies general guidelines, and the agencies work out the finer details. Soon it will likely be left to Congress and the courts to iron out those finer details. And both of those bodies are slow, and courts are fragmented across states.
There will still be a degree of deference, it just won't be absolute like Chevron requires. Agencies will still be presumed valid, but that assumption will become rebuttable.
Everyone likes to point at the EPA with respect to Chevron deference. We need to look at the FCC under Ajit Pai. Chevron deference should not have protected the FCC when they decided to suspend Net Neutrality in 2017.
We should also be able to challenge NHTSA's CAFE standards, which are driving manufacturers to make larger cars because it's harder to make small cars compliant than larger. But, because of Chevron deference, we can't: the agency knows best.
It's actually a few different cases, but they all hinge on whether the Executive branch has a legal standing to create Federal agencies that can create and execute regulation.
There's a good chance we could soon be in a USA where experts don't have a voice, and the courts suddenly are in charge of the regulatory state.
There are lots of little cases, but the nuclear bomb is Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo.
Loper will be to regulation as Dobbs was to abortion.
Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo.
As Ghostalmedia pointed out, this case is specifically the one where the Supreme Court has been specifically asked to rule on whether the Chevron defense (the bedrock case that allows the US administrative state to functionally exist) should be overruled outright, or at least limited in scope.
Chevron Defense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc.
Current Major Case In Question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo#Supreme_Court
, I felt physically threatened just standing next to some of the products
Yes, that’s why they make them like that.
Road taxes should increase after certain dimensions and weights. Bonnet/hood height should be one.
Also, safety ratings should give equal weighting to the a vehicle's impact absorbtion and impact contribution. It's insane that something is considered safe solely because the occupant is protected.
Agreed. They should but there are these Cafe Standards that need to be dealt with. The cars have to be larger to be exempt because we're using wheel base to help determine fuel economy (it should be weight not wheelbase) These exemptions need to go away.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
I think places that aren't America tend to do that, taxing by engine size. It's not a perfect solution considering sports cars and such, but you're not gonna find a 6L engine in a Kia
No shit? I forget where I saw the comparison but the length of the view that is blocked when being in a big ass truck is absolutely insane. There could be a gaggle of kids in front of you and you would never know until you hit them.
I mentioned this is another comment, but the crazy thing is that's the driver's view from M1 Abrams. Typically, in hatches open operation you'd either have a Crew Commander (and/or gunner) standing with their torso out of the turret for better visibility (and a second set of eyes), or a ground guide watching where you go.
Perhaps we should introduce a commander's hatch to help large pickup trucks safely navigate around neighborhoods.
Ooh, we should introduce Maritime Pilots to cars!
Just pick up a spotter who knows the territory when you enter a town and they can safely navigate your massive ego truck around the tricky streets.
Was seriously considering a pickup as my next car until my partner pointed me to similar research a while back.
They also seriously injure the people they do hit.
A car tends to hit low and send people onto the hood. A truck hits high (head and torso injuries) and knocks people to the ground where they get run over.
There could be a gaggle of kids in front of you and you would never know until you hit them.
Republicans: As long as they're not white...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo&t=559s
There is a good visualization in this video (These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us by Not Just Bikes) at the timestamp I linked (roughly 9 minutes 19 seconds), cited from KidsAndCars.org
Modern trucks have shitty visibility all the way around. I borrow my dad's Colorado and my boss's F-150 frequently and I always feel like I'm driving a school bus and feel like I can't see shit. They have backup cameras but it's not that great(and the idea that a backup camera should be required to operate a vehicle safely in the first place is abhorrent to me anyway). I never had any issues with my S10 back in the day and I could fit more shit in the bed.
There's another extreme, when a friend of mine took me for a ride in a two-seat convertible BMW X2 it felt like I was barely above ground. When one of the SUVs was near us at a traffic light it felt like it was going to run over us without even noticing
It is honestly a major failure of US society (comedians I am looking at you) that people aren’t made fun of for driving these trucks so mercilessly that most people feel too ashamed to drive them.
I mean lots of other failures too, it shouldn’t be legal especially because there is zero reason for the high hood height from a vehicle function perspective. Unless of course you consider your vehicle being more efficient at killing pedestrians a reason to have them that way. I suppose we have entered that stage of things here in the US haven’t we.
Definitely. Builders and contractors in Europe drive vans; same as everyone else on the planet except the insecure yanks. If you pulled up to a site in one of these in any other country, I fuckin guarantee remarks will be made about your penis size and your penchant for the cock
I fuckin guarantee remarks will be made about your penis size and your penchant for the cock
Every country on the planet other than the US will call someone gay for driving a large truck?
There are plenty of things vans aren't suitable for--towing fifth wheels or holding oversized power equipment, for instance. Nor are vans any better for visibility than the trucks on OP's list. Many start as the same truck frames and then have a different body placed on top.
So you're saying that contractors in other countries can't do the same stuff that US contractors do, because they don't have access to tiny-penis trucks?
Because that's what you're saying
I am now genuinely curious as to the logistics at play for construction companies across the pond.
I'm saying they do have those trucks. You may not see them as much because these use cases tend to have them driven to a job site and then stay there until the work is done, which may be weeks or months.
There are also some farming needs that Europe just doesn't have. You can go for miles and still be on the same farm in the US. Sometimes, the land is rented and isn't contiguously connected. Hauling equipment and livestock across all that is the job of a fifth wheel, and you can't use a van for that.
Literally every livestock farmer owns one of these
You're just trying to justify your tiny-penis truck when there is zero justification for it whatsoever
I don't own a truck. I do know people who do and have some familiarity with farm operations.
That truck is not adaquate for the number of livestock or equipment an American farmer has. It would force multiple trips over dirt roads. Again, American farms are just plain bigger, and there might be a few changes that are needed to support that.
Also, I'm not sure why you think that truck is better than any American truck. It simply swaps a bed for a box. Edit: I believe that's a somewhat older model Man TGL, which has a GVWR of 7.5-12 tons. That puts it in the same ballpark as an F350, so again, I don't know why you think this is an improvement.
Also, I'm not sure why you think that truck is better than any American truck. It simply swaps a bed for a box.
Look at where the window of that cab is positioned. Is there anything in front of it blocking its view? It's the same difference between an American and European semi-truck. The engine is under or behind the cab, so the view out of the front is unobstructed.
As for farming needs, US farmers used much smaller trucks for decades. These massive trucks are actually worse for many/most hauling needs. Consider how much extra effort it takes to load cargo into the bed when it's 5' up, rather than when it's only 2' or so off the ground. It's just plain worse, except for making someone feel tough for some reason.
Depends on the model. Ford Transits are probably better, but an E250 is just an F250 with a different body, and isn't any better.
It's been shown time and again that Americans get their news from comedy shows and their comedy from news broadcasts.
A truck has to have a nose that looks like a big slab of concrete to oncoming traffic. If it doesn't men will be forced to wear dresses, sing show tunes while sitting to pee. Thems the rules.
I sit to pee because I'm lazy. The dresses I wear while belting out ballads from Skykid shows are just to assert my dominance in the workplace.
I sit to pee because I'm lazy
But it takes slightly more work though the make the deed sitting
Clearly you've never had a half-asleep sit-down pee session where your little fireman played "find the crack" with your pee stream and the toilet seat. Nothing like sleepily pulling up your pants to find your underwear cold and wet.
You mean you don't bend your dick down as far as it will go before hurting, hunched over the toilet like you're on fentanyl, and let er rip?
Sleep naked. Now instead of wet underwear for sleepy you to deal with, you have a puddle for awake you to deal with!
Refer to them as Gender Affirming Care, and watch the fragile pavement princesses lose their minds. Why do you drive the truck? Cuz you feel like it’s what a real man would drive? Congrats, that’s gender affirming care.
This is a legitimate desire, I think. Being able to see more of what’s ahead is really luxurious and makes the whole driving experience feel safer (for drivers, anyway.) That said, now that every car on the street is a damned SUV, you’d need a damned semi truck to gain any real visibility advantage. Driving a “normal” car is like being the only dwarf in the NBA.
Sitting up higher only makes you feel safer. A taller car (especially a hatchback on stilts like most crossovers are) makes you more likely to roll over, and less able to make defensive maneuvers.
And sitting higher doesn't necessitate a ridiculously high hood; look at any van ever.
!okay there are probably exceptions but you get my point!<
That said, now that every car on the street is a damned SUV, you’d need a damned semi truck to gain any real visibility advantage.
Get one of those Google Street View cars with the 360 degree cameras on a pole and wear VR goggles or something.
The seats keep creeping up higher but so do the windows. And the windows are farther and farther away from the driver. If we continue the current trend, soon there will be no more than slits on eye level.
If you remember older cars like Mr Beans Mini, the windows went down to the elbows and were right up to the driver. Of course that's less comfortable, but I prefer the all around view of older cars to the "elevated position" with firing holes for windows.
The windows-down-to-elbows cars were rolling coffins, safety-wise. I think once self-driving is ubiquitous, car designs can be completely reimagined.
I’d love a periscope, personally. Larry David was on to something, but it’s not exactly “cool”…
My 5 year old son loves Monster Trucks. We walked past one of these behemoth in stock form and he thought it was a monster truck. He wasn't far off.
I just biked home and cars were in the bike lane for 90% of it. The plows pulled all the reflectors off the road and now drivers can't tell where the lanes are. Even though that entire lane is the dedicated right turn lane, they go in the bike lane. When we had snow a few days ago, pedestrians were in the road because the snow was plowed into the bike lane and sidewalk. Fuck 99.9% of US and Canadian infrastructure
The main downtown area where I live, that's supposed to be walkable, just has sidewalks vanish halfway down some streets so you end up walking in the street for a few blocks. It's so bad lol
In the US that is. In many other western countries, pedestrian infrastructure is awesome and advanced. On the other hand, they usually also don't have many of these trucks. Double whammy for US pedestrians.
Trucks like this are like having a huge gut, where you haven't seen your ...uhhh feet for years.
It's ok though, in about 30 years after 2 million children are dead, we'll make a law that limits the height of hoods, effective 5 years from then.
We’ll also add exclusions for cars above a certain wheel well distance, which will only further incentivize carmakers to make bigger cars.
/s but not really, because this is literally how emissions regulations work. Emissions regulations are less strict as wheel well distance increases, so larger cars can be less efficient. Which is why car makers have heavily pushed for larger cars via marketing, astroturfing, etc, because it means regulatory compliance is easier.
yeah. you really can't, the cab over semi isn't coming back. They were cold in winter, too hot in summer, uncomfortable and killed the drivers in a moose hit. Sure anything you hit with a semi dies anyways, but doesn't so often take the driver too with a conventional.
We got rid of pop-up headlights because they were causing pedestrian deaths, but I don't think we'll do anything about these monstrosities because not only are they deadly, they're not fun. And our regulators want to prevent fun more than they want to prevent death.
A pedestrian’s body doesn’t slide up the hood obstruction-free. It gets mangled by a sconce.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's 1998 Global Technical Regulation Number 9 deals with pedestrian safety sets out how countries should test the pedestrian safety of vehicle exteriors. The U.K.'s Individual Vehicle Approval framework, which is based on the aforementioned Global Technical Regulation, limits the size and presence of sharp edges on any surface where a pedestrian or cyclist is likely to impact in the event of a collision. According to the U.K. regulation, protrusions greater than 5 mm (0.195 inches) must have a radius of at least 2.5 mm (0.098 inches), and further rules prohibit protrusions on which pedestrians could get caught in the event on an impact. These and other regional E.U. laws made it prohibitively difficult to engineer pop-up headlights into a vehicle.
They weren't killing people, I don't think, but they were unnecessarily sharp protrusions. They can still be used, but you have to make them roundish and smooth, which is tougher to accomplish with a flush-with-hood-look. It's more that to meet EU regulations, they would look uglier.
I think the bigger issue isn't death but simply that you can get caught on them, instead of rolling over the vehicle, which causes less harm.
Not quite right. They became common due to a combination of aerodynamics and lamp height restrictions. Especially in the US, which used to require one of a small list of sealed beam designs which weren't at all aerodynamic. They are still technically legal, but difficult to integrate with protrusion restrictions. The US also dropped the sealed beam restriction decades ago, so there wad no point in trying.
I thought we ditched popup headlights because having a piece of critical illumination on a moveable body panel was a bad idea?
The automotive industry must be jealous of firearms killing so many Americans and beating the annual death toll of vehicles, so they're upping their game to really push us into an increasingly dystopian and dangerous world. How dare you walk or ride a bike!?
They really just want us to actually be living in Mad Max world, all guns and cars and "guzzoline." They all fancy themselves an Immortan Joe.
Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
I'm fairly confident the folks over at !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml, !fuck_cars@lemmy.world, and !fuck_cars@lemmy.ca, could have told anyone that.
Yeah but who cares what those nutjobs think?
There's nothing wrong with cars, especially when they're backed by a good public transit system and plenty of pedestrian-only paths. It's the trucks (edit: and SUVs) that are the problem.
The thing wrong with cars was the psyop the oil companies played on North Americans in the 50s that it was the ultimate symbol of freedom, before designing entire metropolises around them and causing everyone to have to sit in their car for 2 hours a day needlessly.
I'd argue there's nothing wrong with trucks, either. Some folk have a legitimate use for them: fitting construction material and lumber in the back; towing a trailer.
The problem is two fold, I figure: we've got a bunch of folk driving trucks (and SUVs) around that never have a legitimate use for them other than a status symbol. Then there's the folk that have a partial need for them, but can't afford to keep multiple vehicles around, so they're stuck driving the truck they need a fraction of the time.
I'm in the latter category. If i could reliably rent a truck to haul/tow with, I'd replace my family's Tacoma with a sedan, and save a bunch of money in the process.
Last time I was visiting family in Toronto, I noticed the speed limit on major streets had been lowered to 40 kph (25 mph). So the same as residential streets, in other words.
I asked my brother about this. He said that in spite of measures taken by the city to improve infrastructure, pedestrian and cyclist fatalities were on the way up due to the heavier and higher off the ground vehicles people drive today. The city admitted they did not expect people to drive that slow, but if they could start ticketing people doing over 60, that might save some lives? It's pretty sad.
They know. And those vehicle owners like to bully people and other cars with that.
Tax it hard like a luxury tax or vice tax.
Call it a Bully Tax so that we can look at them for what they are.
