- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or # to comment.
we obviously need to take money from Amtrak and public transport grants to rebuild the interstate system. Guardrails upgraded everywhere, new lanes would be added to reduce congestion
New lanes don’t reduce congestion. When you add new lanes, drivers who had previously avoided those routes suddenly think “oh more lanes, it’ll be less congested” and it just fills back up to capacity. Except it’s worse because there’s even more cars now in the extra lanes you just built. Adding lanes makes congestion worse, not better.
What we need to do is get people off the roads and onto public transportation. That’s how you reduce congestion - get people off the roads. Unfortunately that means actually investing in public transportation, so that’ll never happen in the US.
I agree with you but also woosh because OP also agrees with you.
It’s called induced demand
The guard rails are pretty good enough as is. When you hear of something like this it’s very often caused by lack of maintenance/poor installation/assembly. There is a guy on youtube that has videos of a whole bunch of guardrails that are simply unsafe because they are missing bolts or were assembled incorrectly.
And remember - guard rails are meant to slow you down enough to try and prevent a worse situation rather than always turning you back into the roadway to create a larger accident with other traffic or stop you completely.
I know America has an obesity epidemic, but did it really have to be extended to our cars?
fuel eff requirements tied to weight
just another oil company + car company scam
The car companies (like basically all other corporations) successfully passed their externalities onto the Government and the Government has done nothing to try to recoup those costs.
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of today’s SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold.
MGS being what I’ve known as W beam guardrail.
Velomobiles weight 35kg (77 pounds) and offer very good protection compared to normal bicycles. Theoretically you could design single seat cars not much heavier. Of course for higher speeds you’d want more protection and a little bit wider.
I imagine the ideal self driving car or robo-taxi to be two seats that face each other, so when you get one alone you have plenty of space to stretch your feet or put your groceries. It could be totally luxurious, simple to call and use and fast too. And the embodied energy would be very small and the “mpg” would be insane.
It’s just sad how badly we are tackling climate change by just letting the free market run wild.
They should regulate the weight of cars. There’s no reason passenger vehicles should be as heavy as they are. For EVs they honestly shouldn’t have as much range as they do. 150 miles and improved charging infrastructure, make charging easier for folks who park on the street, is a better way to go. Folks who need to drive more than that a day should have a hybrid or ICE vehicle. Ideally a small fuel efficient one. Folks who need pickups for work should be able to buy the small European versions or work vans.
150miles is no where close to enough range for people who travel regularly. In a 3 hour trip I can do 150 miles. Depending on weather, battery degrading, and elevation that trip now requires charging multiple times which just isn’t acceptable. Let alone if you were trying to do a real road trip where you drive 1000+ miles, the amount of charge time is insane. And I want an EV for those road trips, extremely convenient for car camping.
250mi is a good number. Enough to do a lot of errands and medium trips in a day and charge overnight.
Bolt EV/EUV has that and it’s a compact.
Better to charge higher registration fees by weight.
The whole highway infrastructure tax structure will need revision as electric vehicles not paying gas taxes become more popular. Or we could just built more public transportation.
Our Bolt EUV only gets around 140 for a standard charge. It’s enough for our usual daily use cases, but there have been several nail biters when we started on a half charge because we forgot to charge over night.
That’s whack. A 2023 euv I use gets 240?mi in the summer and maybe 190? in the winter. Both from 80% charge.
Folks who need a pickup truck for work should be required to file a permit request for pirchase of said truck.
Written by someone who owns a truck
Trucks haven’t always been the fucking obnoxious beasts that they are now.
I’d love a truck… The size of a '93 ford ranger. I don’t need or want a goddamn castle on wheels. I want a low vehicle, doesn’t need two full rows of luxurious seats, with a box, with a footprint SMALLER than a fucking Nissan Altima. Yes, that is the '93 ford ranger.
The crime was artificially creating the false dichotomy.
93 97 Ranger Splash with the side steps in yellow was my childhood dream to own. I have no problems with 1/4 ton trucks specially that size, but there is honestly no need for a 1/2 ton or larger truck, specially as big as they have them now.
Edit: there was no yellow ranger in '93
I don’t know if I have an explicit issue with larger trucks for merely existing, and I don’t mean to be the judge and jury for who does and doesn’t need what amount of towing power for whatever they might need them for.
They’re just obscene as a daily driver, though. Two luxurious rows of seats, massive box, giant towing capacity. Pick TWO.
If consumers had a viable option where they could get any 2 without needing all 3, I think they’d take it. Lack of diversity where automakers try and find manufacturing efficiency by limiting offerings such that trucks are everything for everyone is why they’re designed for excess.
“Designed for excess” is the American way.
Yeah, I love my truck but i don’t need it and it is selfish for me to keep using it imo.
I am hoping to get away with not having a car when it eventually dies but I’ll be buying an EV or a Hybrid sedan if I really need a car then.I regularly haul 800 lbs of wood heating pellets in the back of my Subaru Baja. That’ll get me through somewhere between a week and half to almost three weeks of heating, depending on how cold the weather is. Wash, rinse, repeat all winter long.
Then there’s DYI work I’m doing on the house. I usually use my girlfriend’s Tacoma for that. Plywood, lumber, gravel, and cement mix. All of it needs to be hauled, and delivery is prohibitively expensive.
None of that is required for my desk job work.
I could give up hauling the 19’ sailboat, if need be, since that’s a luxury. It’ll make me an angry man come summer, though.
What’s your plan on addressing my needs, or are you happy to let me hang?
This.
Basically, if you need a half or full ton truck for work? Cool, ask for the permit. Oh, is it just to drive to your office desk job? Get a smaller vehicle or ride the bus
How is that permit process going to allow me a permit to get the stuff done that I need to do, while weeding out all the folk driving around pavement princesses?
The plan is file for a permit.
If you get denied there’s pickup trucks at the Uhaul store.
So you have no plan to differentiate on who gets a permit, and who doesn’t? That leads to one of three situations:
- Nobody gets a permit.
- Everyone gets a permit.
- Nobody gets a permit, except the friends and family of whoever’s in charge of handing out permits.
Good luck with that.
I’m not the guy who made the original comment but my plan would be, show me your business license. And as I said before anyone in need of hauling without a business can go down to Uhaul. As far as towing goes, that’s an engine/torque/frame issue. It doesn’t need to be a huge vehicle. There are minivans and crossovers with a 7,500 lb towing capacity.
To add, if you’re setup for towing then you can just use a trailer.
Brakes. You left out the important bit. My Baja will tow a lot more than it’ll stop.
Your plan would have me up the creek without a truck, especially if the Baja gets lumped into the truck category on account of it having a bed. Judging from the blank “apply for a permit” plan, it probably would.
I’ve gone down that “Just rent a truck from UHaul.” It stops being realistic when the local UHaul lot can’t handle current demand, much less whatever happens after y’all have taken trucks out of everyone else’s hands.
Take away my ability to keep my house heated, much less in good repair, and you’ll take away my ability to house myself, my family, my pets. They’re everything to me. Take everything away from a man, and see what happens. Then multiply that by every upstate, rural, blue collar man trying to get by… And see what happens to society. It ain’t gonna be pretty.
Your truck is not “everything”. You could easily haul that stuff with a trailer. And yes in a vehicle with competent brakes for it’s rated towing capacity. It’s not the government’s fault if you’re towing over capacity.
Also I highly doubt your home needs weekly DIY trips for years on end to remain functional. In fact, if that’s true you may want to look at hiring a general contractor instead of doing diy.
Edit to add - as an example a Subaru outback with trailer would work just as well as your truck depending on how heavy your boat and trailer are. But also there’s no reason a towing vehicle needs to be that large. Once the size is restricted you’ll be able to get 5,000 lb towing in cars, as it’s already a thing in Europe.
I can think of no better way to kill EV adoption than to intentionally make their usage less appealing than the alternative.
It’s not like heavy work trucks didn’t exist back then, was it just that there weren’t enough of them to care?
NGL - my last car was pretty big, but Google assures me it was only 4,100 lbs. My current car is the same size and is just under 5,000 pounds.
Yeah, it’s about reducing fatalities by engineering to the average, not engineering to the worst case.
If you mean pickup trucks they have massively increased in size and weight.
If you mean tractor trailers there’s little stopping that.
I mean, my grand dad’s GMC from the 70s wasn’t SIGNIFICANTLY different from your F-150s today.
This looks about right… bench seats, no seatbelts, ashtray… yee haw!
https://www.streetsideclassics.com/vehicles/7277-cha/1972-gmc-c1500-sierra-super-custom
Have you seen the size of F150s today?
209-244″ L x 80-87″ W x 75-80″ H
Compared with the '72 GMC
207.75" L x 79" W x 70" H?
2-3 feet longer, 8" wider (the hardest one to change and they still did it), and nearly a foot taller. Thank you for proving my point. We can also add hood height has gone up.
well it’s a good thing the heavy as fuck electric vehicles are not flying off the lots because most of us couldn’t afford one even if we wanted to.
That’s at least 500 stone.
Over $8800
Or like 1500 bricks.
For the trucks and land boats that weight more. Lol, that’s is all.
The article literally says that the problem will just get worse as we move to electric cars since they’re heavier.
I dislike people having useless pickup trucks as much as the next guy, but I don’t think they deserve to die either. Or how about semi drivers? You know, a crucial part of our delivery infrastructure?
Maybe take the time to read next time and think with the smart part of your brain.
Yes, have you looked at the weights of actual electric cars and not electric SUV and trucks? The average weight of a electric car is between 3-6k in weight. Secondly, where was the outrage when people were complaining about semis and safety? NHTSA has been at the mercy of the semi industry regarding safety updates. How long have people been fighting regarding undercarriage protectors to protect car drivers from losing their lives to the semi industry? Where has the outage been about the weight protection of those guardrails for semis? I didn’t know semis are so new to this country.
Again, SUVs and trucks drivers that just drive those for status… Boofuckinhoo.
Here a link for your average weight for electric cars.
Even a Tesla weighs less than the max weight allowed for the rails. But I guess my brain is useless.
Edit: a whole documentary for you about the undercarriage guards link.
-
If the average of an electric car is 3-6k that means that is it sometimes above the 5,000 limit, am I wrong?
-
You just did a whataboutism with this undercarriage thing which is irrelevant
-
Yes, let’s send the pickup truck drivers to their death and do a fake sob about it, yeah? You feel good about that?
-
For the 97% of the planet -
7000lbs is about 3200kg.
To put that into perspective, a big old Volvo XC90 is about 2400kg
That’s how fuckin stupidly wasteful, childish and insecure Americans are when choosing their vehicles
