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 haven’t given it much thought before but you’re right, that is insane.
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
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
There’s less clean up if you have bad aim though.
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.
And even worse to do it with a boner
That’s what the shower is for.
Or sink
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!
Only a man could have known that such a thing is possible. I see you, brother.
If you clean your toilet less often than once a week, then yes.
But I get your point.
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.
Try the all new Dodge Pedestrian Rammer.
Ford F-150… the best selling child mulcher in the United States.
Now with optional add on to munch 20% more child per child!
Trucks like this are like having a huge gut, where you haven’t seen your …uhhh feet for years.
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.
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.
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 felt like it was going to run over us without even noticing
Yeah that’s because they have shitty visibility. Also the reason I’ll never ride a motorcycle in traffic.
Yeah, my friend noted exactly the same about visibility that time 😅
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
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.
Pedestrian infrastructure is not typically great either
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
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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.
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’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.
Pedestrians need to duck, not jump.
that would not end well
Worst game of Temple Run ever.
But i Like sITTinG uP hIGhEr
That’s what unicycles are for.
Who would have thunk?
I see what you did there, and I appreciate it.
This according to a study published in the journal “No Shit Quarterly”.
So cool. I’m gonna get an aftermarket hood height riser on my Ferd Fteenthousand
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.
