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Innovation makes useful things smaller - overconsumption makes them bigger and more meaningless
(norden.social)
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9992203
this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
316 points (92.9% liked)
Fuck Cars
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Safety standards caused passenger cars to get larger more than anything else (trucks got bigger because of weird fuel economy regulations).
Roll back safety standards and we can have small cars again. It’s probably worth the amount of excess deaths it will create, but someone should do a study.
Dpn't forget the fact that most car safety only applies to people in the car. For others it may or may not make it in fact less safe.
Actually pedestrian safety standards are a thing and explains a lot of design choices and why many cars have a very similar profile.
Absolutely true, it’s why there aren’t any more fun pop up headlights, or hood ornaments.
Were already at an all-time high of vehicle related deaths. We'd actually probably see a decrease in fatalities if we made cars smaller.
Proportional to the number of km driven or just raw number?
Both. More weight of a car = more danger to everyone.
Source on that?
Literally physics
Source on the deaths
Give us numbers, prove that deaths have gone up when taking the increase in annual mileage, cars on the road and increase in general population into consideration.
The only thing I know as someone not in the business is that many of the experts are saying larger vehicles are nearly half of all fatalities.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/14/1212737005/cars-trucks-pedestrian-deaths-increase-crash-data
Do note that these are numbers for the US, and may not correspond with other countries.
They're also half of the vehicles sold though...
Also bigger vehicles result in more dangerous pedestrian impacts isn't the first point you were making and isn't the point being discussed here.
Answer the question, where did you get the info about accidents being at an all time high? Where did you get the info that it's at an all time high in proportion to mileage covered, number of cars on the road and increase in population?
You said it's at an all time high for "both" gross number and in proportion, you must be able to provide a source if you're so confident, right?
https://lemmy.ml/comment/11316810
You have me confused for someone else. Lemmy is a big place with multiple users, someone else said that it's both.
But sure, here you go:
Pedestrian fatalities are correlated with two major factors: speed and vehicle size. In North America, streets are designed to make driving easier and faster: lanes are made wider, and obstacles are removed to reduce visual clutter. This results in everything in NA looking flat and being spread out.
Vehicle sizes are goibg up because of the "size wars": the EPA made limits on fuel emissions barring vehicle size, so auto manufacturers decided to make larger vehicles to get around the limitations. Consumers wanted bigger, "safer" vehicles to make it more likely to survive a crash, so there's become an arms race for vehicle size. As these vehicles get bigger, pedestrians become harder to see, and if a pedestrian is hit, the grill is so high, the pedesteian will be thrown under the vehicle as opposed to over it.
As North America grows, we expand into suburbs, which are residential only, requiring residents to commute into the city to get groceries or go to work. More driving means more km driven.
And if you want my sources, here are a few to get you started:
Pedestrian deaths all-time high - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car
And https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7317a1.htm
Vehicle size: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/more-and-more-american-pedestrians-are-dying-because-larger-vehicles-incorporating-data-safety-regulations-can-help
And https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-safety.html
And https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33147075/
Lane width and speeding correlation: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/review_lane_width_and_speed_parsons.pdf
And https://narrowlanes.americanhealth.jhu.edu/report/JHU-2023-Narrowing-Travel-Lanes-Report.pdf
I hope these provide the answers you're looking for.
Numbers
Proportions
Source
Without adjustment based on proportions this means nothing.
Did you know that there's more car related deaths now than there ever was in the 1800s? 😱
Yeah, because there were no cars on the road.
I just linked you 6 articles and a peer reviewed paper on the subject, but if you're still not going to believe me, I'm not going to spoonfeed you. This is my last reply to your motonormative idiocy.
None of them adjust the numbers for proportions and a bunch of articles are about vehicle size and lane width and its impact on speed, which isn't what I'm asking about.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813458
7837 in 1981 (which is more than the number you shared), there was much less cars on the road, average annual mileage was lower, total population was nearly a third less at the time, so no, it's not at an all time high (these are your words) even the gross number isn't.
Adjusted for population it's 11 244 deaths in 1981, pretty far from current numbers am I right?
Try.
Harder.
Safety standards is the stated reason, but the actual reason is that weight is unregulated and can always be increased in pursuit of any more profitable dimension. If weight was the taxable dimension, we'd live in a much better world.
Smaller cars still exist though?
yeah in europe (obviosly it varies a lot cross-country and rural/urban) but lots of places with high safety standards , and high emissions taxes. Still lots of small cars around .
Mostly due to parking in big-dense-cities though probably.
US does come out badly on deaths per billion pax-km: 8 ish vs 3-5 for most euro countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
So on the face of it small cars dont sem to correlate - but these data look a bit hodge podge, so not sure to read too much into it without knowing the underlying sources.
Other factors like the "stroad" thing might be an issue.
And a lot of European municipalities give the elderly free public transport, and have ok bus service, so many doddery old coots have a viable option.
I remember that southpark episode about senior drivers, with the jaws music . . .
Maybe not as funny when you look at that US death rate. To quoe Father Maxi: "No god needs complex irony and subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me, all that we can hope for is that god got his laughs . . ."