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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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So it would've been fine and dandy if the cyclist had been killed by someone driving a Prius?
'Cause that's what you imply by placing this bullshit emphasis trying to single out big trucks in particular. Comments like yours reek of implied small-car apologism, and I, for one, am getting sick and hired of it!
There's a reason this community is called "fuck cars," and not "fuck big trucks" or something. it's because the problem is cars — all of them!
Any car, even the smallest, can turn a pedestrian or cyclist into a red smear when driven negligently.
Every car, even the smallest, takes up an entire lane on the street and an entire parking space.
Every car, even the smallest, contributes to car-dependent urban design.
Singling out big trucks as if they're materially worse than all the other death machines is nothing but a distraction from the real problem at best, and an active disinformation campaign at worst. Our goals should be to get people out of cars entirely, not just into smaller ones!
No, it probably wouldn't have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
They are last time I checked "prohibitively expensive" but people are dumb enough to pay $100k over 8 year financing. These things are also no better for "industrial/ag" then a truck from 30 years ago that was 4 feet less tall, had an 8 foot bed and a similar towing capacity at a fraction of the price.
These things are the crystallization of our hubris.
Part of "prohibitively expensive" would mean that such financing arrangements would not be legal.
[X] doubt
If big trucks were banned, muderous MAGA psychopaths would just mow down cyclists using Dodge Chargers or whatever instead.
I'm pretty fucking far as anti-car sentiment goes but to think that a meaningful amount of cyclists killed via cars is people doing it intentionally is insane. You can kill a man dead in a Smart ForTwo easily but let's not pretend the giant driving blind spots and especially the cultural messaging that goes along with HUGE ANGY TRUCK (/ CAR) doesn't help
The thing is, they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles. They do all the bad things but more, and their normalization makes it all worse for everyone -- have you seen the size of parking spaces in Europe?
Not in the way that actually matters, which is their effect on low-density zoning and minimum parking requirements. A parking space is a parking space is a parking space — they're all (roughly) the same size!
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
2023 Dodge ram 3500 shortest length is 232", longest is 260.8". 2023 VW golf is 168.9".
That's over 5 feet longer at minimum and over 7.5 feet longer at worst. That's a huge amount of wasted space.
They're wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked).
There's no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than "I like them" and that's fine, you're allowed to like them. Leave it at that. They're objectively terrible for the safety of everyone around them and are a complete waste of space.
I drove a Jeep Comanche for years and that's as big a pickup as 99% of pickup owners would ever actually need.
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? (See, two can play the "bad-faith compound question" game.) Now fuck off with the childish insults.
A lane is a lane! The narrowest car and the widest car both take up one whole lane each. Unless it's narrow enough to split the lane two abreast, it doesn't fucking matter how wide it is!
Get some reading comprehension skills! The claim that I'm defending compensation-mobiles is a goddamn lie. I'm not defending large automobiles; I'm attacking all automobiles and questioning why others are not.
What's actually happening here is that others are trying to conjure up some artificial distinction between big trucks and the rest of the automotive infestation, most likely in order to deflect blame for their own still shitty and car-dependent midsize sedan (or whatever) lifestyle, and are butthurt that I'm not uncritically accepting it.
The bottom line is that cars ruin cities. All cars, without exception! Anybody who denies that — i.e. anybody who tries to only complain about only a subset of the cars — is part of the problem.
no they arent lol, you try parking one of those american cars in this city...
you can get away with owning one in the suburbs, but just parking on the side of the street like most people do? forgetaboutit
i do agree with the wider point though. get rid of all of them, nobody needs private cars. in fact, life on earth desperately needs us to ban private cars.
There is evidence that these shit wagons are largely responsible for a major increase in pedestrian fatalities.
EVs are also a cause, because of their heavy batteries. It's like getting hit by a tank.
You know what causes pedestrian fatalities? The presence of cars of any size.
You know what eliminates pedestrian fatalities? Deleting parking lots and pedestrianizing streets.
I'd like to see more streets limited to people. I guess it's hard to pull off due to politics/economics. But you can hope.
And there is data showing that bigger cars have driven up rates of pedestrian fatalities. I can get info on that.
Classic
You know what increases pedestrian fatalities? Vehicles that are too tall to reasonably see pedestrians immediately in front of you. Make better arguments instead of "trucks don't kill people, all cars do" because it's absolutely not equal, and there's real reasoning as to why.
No, not all cars are created equally. Some require much more public space and some are also much more efficient at killing.
My truck is a good boy, he wouldn't harm a fly. It's all about upbringing, genetics has nothing to do with it.
Bullshit. A subcompact takes up exactly the same "one parking space" as a truck, and is therefore just as bad.
Yes, short term that is absolutely correct. What the other person meant makes more sense long term.
When parking lots are built, or design specifications are layed out, the size of cars in use is taken into account. If average car size increases, average parking lot size follows. Just recently I heard that parking lot size has to increase due to the increase in car sizes, driven by SUV popularity.
There are also parking situations where there are no discrete parking spaces, but one continuous space to park, for example along a street. In these situations, bigger cars directly translate to more space being occupied.
Who cares if the parking spaces are 8x18 or 10x20 or whatever? That doesn't matter. What matters is dipshits continuing to insist on building fifty of them when they ought to be building zero!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they're still fucking driving. That means, for example, you're still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Very true, you have the correct long-term vision. If we compare the two "strategies" (smaller cars vs urban design), the latter clearly has the bigger impact, big time.
But it's also more costly to reach. It requires much more time, more political effort, infrastructure changes, ...
Opting for smaller cars has none of these strings attached. And they aren't mutually exclusive.
It requires different strategies that efforts toward smaller cars (or electric cars, or autonomous cars, for that matter) do not contribute to and could in fact distract or detract from.
After all, folks might think "why keep trying to make me change my car centric lifestyle when we've 'already solved' the pedestrian safety problem (or the environmental problem or whatever)," not realizing there are so many more interconnected problems that only a change in development patterns can address.
"one parking space" is not a universal measurement unit, they come in many different sizes.
Fuck cars but trucks and SUVs are more dangerous than cars to pedestrians, and to argue otherwise just makes you look silly
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?t=521
Relax
This community is so fucking funny.
Yes, it is funny that folks here apparently just want to circlejerk scapegoating big trucks while downvoting any actual urbanist who dares to point out that they're focusing on the wrong problem.
I just wish that those of you with actually good points were capable to conveying it without coming across as a fucking insane person.
That's fair. My frustration about the truck circlejerking has been building for a while, and I was venting.
I find as cars get either bigger or more expensive or both, the driver's get proportionally more reckless, ignorant, and entitled. It's always the big trucks, bmw's, and teslas that seem intent on running me off the road or flat when I'm biking to work. I don't know about the more recent ones but the early Prius I rented on a vacation before had shit visibility so I wouldn't give that one a free pass at least. All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
Sidewalks and bike lanes don't get used unless (a) destinations are packed closely enough together for enough trips to be in reasonable walking or cycling distance, and (b) the experience is reasonably pleasant (i.e., not a no-man's-land sandwiched between a stroad and a bunch of parking lots).
In other words, it's the zoning that has to be fixed first, by increasing density and removing minimum parking requirements.
https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/