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If you let them out unsupervised, I’m calling the cops!
kids don’t play outside because they don’t want their last moments on this earth to be recorded with this in the corner
SUV, Truck, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV, sedan, SUV, SUV, SUV, SUV.
The culture problem around big vehicles we’ve created with bad regulation and aggressive marketing is depressing.
It isn’t just a culture problem, it’s a tragedy of the commons.
When you’re surrounded by giant vehicles, the only way to
befeel safe and see the road is to have a giant vehicle.The only way to feel safe. The really big ego-support vehicles are no safer than a subcompact to be inside of, but they are far more likely to kill your own family.
Well sure, though not being able to see anything around you when deep in truck/suv traffic is pretty scary in a sedan.
That’s a feeling, not a lack of safety. Intimidating people into buying big cars on purpose is still vile, but the people who cave are giving in to irrationality and putting their feelings above the safety of their kids and of others. Tragedy of the commons is when defecting improves your utility. The SUV/emotional support truck arms race is only decreases the utility of others in exchange for feelings of power.
Reduced visibility while driving is absolutely a lack of safety.
Which does not override the lack of safety of a tall heavy vehicle. Small cars are not less safe than emotional support trucks and full sized SUVs, because the latter get specific exemptions from safety regulations.
“I’m going to increase the probability of killing my kid, innocent hystanders because of this one specific critereon i’ve cherry picked” is an emotional argument.
The feeling of power and safety, itself, has utility. Feelings matter.
No argument that there’s been an active propaganda campaign to make people in smaller cars feel less safe, but propaganda works. You can’t just dismiss it.
I can object to it being used to justify killing kids for a feeling though. Which is what you were doing by suggesting it’s a prisoner’s dilemma.
Object all you like? It doesn’t change the actual reality of what is happening and why people drive murder machines.
Physics says that in a collision, the heavier vehicle will always come out better. Higher mass means more resistance to acceleration, so it will take longer to change speed and impart less force on the occupants. This is one reason why buses sometimes don’t have seatbelts, when the bus collides with much lighter cars it will be largely unaffected.
If everyone has a heavy vehicle, it’s worse overall because of higher kinetic energy causing more dramatic collisions. And obviously significantly worse for everyone outside a car.
Hence the arms race.
Which is offset by the lack of safety regulation, high center of mass, heavier weight to crush the cabin in a rollover, and much higher likelihood of running over your own kids.
Stop spreading propaganda by cherry picking,
Which is offset by the lack of safety regulation
Citation needed. SUVs tend to be modern which would generally have stricter safety regulations
high center of mass, heavier weight to crush the cabin in a rollover
I wouldn’t have though that rollovers are a common cause of deaths or serious injuries in cars. The higher center of gravity is going to be offset by the wider wheel base, so it depends on the car.
Traction seems like a much bigger problem, although many SUVs solve this with bigger wheels.
and much higher likelihood of running over your own kids.
Agree 100%
Stop spreading propaganda by cherry picking,
Look, fuck SUVs, obviously. If you aren’t a psychopath you should not feel safe driving those things. My point was specifically about the physics of collisions. What you’re bringing up can’t be answered with physics because it depends on the details of the car, we need real world statistics to continue this conversation.
“Buy a new big car because it will be later year than a new small car and thus have newer safety features” is an incredibly wild way of drawing the exact opposite conclusion to the one you should have from that data.
Citation needed. SUVs tend to be modern which would generally have stricter safety regulations
what? that makes no sense. SUVs in the US are generally regulated as light trucks, which have historically had laxer safety requirements for a given model year
That’s not the tragedy of the commons, and that’s not why everyone drives turboencabulators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
It is, I shit you not, a cold war tariff on fucking chickens. There’s some other shit that’s glommed on over the centuries, but the mad-science breeding program to create a pickup truck big enough to swallow the sun started with a stupid trade dispute over chickens between the krauts, the frogs, and the yanks.
it’s a tragedy of the commons.
A gentle heads up that the guy who coined that term was a huge piece of shit, and was almost certainly wrong.
Dead link
The basic notion regarding the exploitation of limited, unregulated public resources leading to depletion is significantly older than that term or the essay with that title..
The notion is echoed by a lot of thinkers, including that of Karl Marx in his deconstruction of capitalism. We need to make a society aware of this tendency much the way we have to be mindful, as a society, of prejudice divisionism.
Otherwise, overexploitation of common resources is going to kill us if we can’t find a way to circumvent the problem, such as by reaching out into space as local resources become dire.
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It’s funny too that SUVs and trucks also have themselves gotten bigger. I own an 11 year old SUV and I feel dwarfed on the road by every other new SUV I see. Trucks are insane too, some are so big they don’t fit in regular parking spots. Compare that to older pickups with the same bed space that are smaller than some sedans.
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True too. There’s one guy at my apartment complex who drives a Ford F350 Super Duty. The monstrosity juts out like 1/4 of an entire parking space into the already tight road we have. Makes navigating into nearby spots a nightmare.
https://xkcd.com/562/, but with the back!
Failed state which retains cold war revenge tax.
So glad they put that thick protective white line there so I know I won’t be hit 🥰
It’ll be super protective when it snows!
Ironically enough, this is how the pavements are in the ski resort I live in. It’s a “shared zone”, pedestrians have the same rights as vehicles. It slows everyone down because nobody knows when the next braying snowboarder trust-fund baby is going to stagger out in front of you.
Oh and as for the snow, we have adorable little mini snowploughs for the pedestrian bit
Edit to add pic -
Of course it uploaded upside down
And the snow will pile up on that lane, because the street needs to be free and nothing else.
If you are walking you’re either poor or up to no good, in both cases we don’t want you around these parts. Oh, your kids need to walk? Don’t be lazy and DRIVE them where they need to go!
Don’t be lazy and DRIVE
For the briefest of moments I felt a spark of blinding hot rage in my heart. Now I am left with the lingering feeling of wanting to smash my head against a rock.
Thank you for that experience.
use a bike with a baby seat or passenger seat instead of driving
Next they’ll eliminate the stripe and put up share-the-road signs with the stick figure
And the carbrains get mad about it because they don’t want to share the road because that’s communism
The presence of the paint makes this nightmare area more walkable than plenty of places in the Failed States of America. I once had the misfortune of living in a place where the presence (or much more often, absence) of sidewalk was completely up to the owner of the property the stretch of road in question abutted. The rare property owner who chose to add sidewalk created a completely useless, disconnected decoration.
There’s a storage unit near my neighborhood built on a stroad without a sidewalk, they built a sidewalk that stretches only within the bounds of the storage property.
On that regard: Storage units and hotels are so weird because if they get built in the suburbs no one will bat an eye (despite their density). But if its an apartment complex people lose their minds.
Lots of cities mandate new construction has to build sidewalks in zones without any. I think the idea is that eventually, as long as the sidewalk is up to code, new buildings will handle adding sidewalk instead of the city.
It’s a very long term plan that makes these long term idiotic stretches, but it’s not the worst way to do something that would otherwise not happen.
Wow it’s like you guys are trying as hard as possible to not put in sidewalks.
Why even allow people in this neighborhood? Just have cars and no people
Don’t worry, self driving cars will get us there eventually
Megatron, is that you?
Wow, I sure am glad that the kerb is there to protect those blades of grass!
What in the stupid is this?
Cheaper than a sidewalk, apparently.
The cost being the life of pedestrians? This is insane.
That doesn’t show up on the balance sheet 😬
Is that a pedestrian symbol or the chalk outline of a pedestrian who got hit?
Yes.
Who would use this? Wouldn’t you either walk on the grass or clearly in the middle of the street?
This is an American suburban. The petite burgerosie living in those houses would shoot your or call the cops to shoot you for walking on their lawns, or run you over with a Ford F 69,000 turbo jumbulator hepta-cab ultra-pickup if you walked in the street.
(this might not be an American suburb. It’s hard to tell. All suburbs exist in a discrete liminal hell dimension)
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they argue that parking minimum reform or bike lanes would “ruin the character of their neighborhood” like what there isn’t any and never was
I thought of this too, and then I realized that wheelchair users are completely fucked by this decision.
I’d walk on the grass, the resistance is good for the muscles.
What dystopian fuckery is this?
Idk. We have similar things around here for when they want to add more walkable spaces and less space for cars but they cannot or do not have the money for a full walkable path. Although usually they put some plastic bollards to avoid people parking or stopping on it.
They ain’t bad, usually is in town and the max speed is 20 - 30 Km/h with the exception of main roads inside the town/city which is 50 Km/h. So although a proper sidewalk would be better they ain’t bad and they are quick to install.
Except that they are bad if you consider safety and convenience of pedestrians. It is a testimonial of terrible planning in the first hand and the most ‘I don’t give a shit’ solution second hand.
Yeah, it seems like there should be something to separate the vehicle traffic from the pedestrian traffic though. Like some kind of low concrete barrier that would actually curb an errant car’s trajectory and direct it back on to the road.
Some are exaggerating a little bit how much a curb protects pedestrians… And yeah that’s the correct approach but as I said this fast to implement, the rest can be done later.
In our local case we are talking about reducing car space in benefit of extra pedestrian space, although keeping safe distanced. Not like the picture were there wasn’t pedestrian space at all to begin with.
Yeah but money though…
Where I live people will park their
tankstrucks in the driveway and block the sidewalk. At least they won’t be able to do that here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people just start parallel parking on the people gutterNo no no, I didn’t key your truck. I was simply walking on the sidewalk and swinging my key up and down in front of me. The key just ran into your truck… Multiple times.
It had it comin’
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Imagine seeing this when house hunting and still buying the house. You’d have to have worms in your brain to want one of these ugly McMansions with no sidewalk
Oh these ain’t McMansions, they’re the “missing middle” it’s basically row houses but with car centric infrastructure
That doesn’t look like middle-density housing, it’s just slightly more dense low-density housing
If the garage is used as internal space, then row houses are plenty high enough density. The occupant could have a much nicer back yard without the setback (front yards are car infrastructure), but the road is not too wide, just awful to be on.
If we assume 1.8-2.1 people per house, then these blocks are about and 300m^2 with about 100m^2 out the front in tye public spacs e per house (property boundary to middle of road]. 5000 people per km^2 for the residential area, assume 50% as much commercial/parks elsewhere (~100m^2 per resident) and you’re at over 3000 people per km^2
This is in the ideal missing middle range if a little bit low, it’s just awful missing middle (that will probably also have its density ruined hy a sea of carparks in the commercial areas and a highway, but that’s a separate issue).
Those aren’t really “rowhouses” how I think of that term. They look quite wide, and have a fairly deep setback from the street. Additionally the street is very wide, and the development looks far too homogenous.
Whatever you want to call them, they share at least one wall, are two story, have a deep aspect ratio and side access on the other wall is minimal (if there at all). The only awful features are the set back and the giant garage (which can just be used for indoor space|.
