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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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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 ~~be~~ feel 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.
Now you're dodging the point. You're spreading the harmful propaganda, and using the fact that it's effective to justify spreading it.
I edited my original comment to make my point clearer - you're right that larger vehicles don't actually make anyone safer.
I maintain that the illusion of safety is, itself, the motivation for why people are buying these vehicles. That's not a cultural thing, but rather, an irrational and instinctual thing. As long as these huge vehicles are allowed on the road, everyone else is terrified into buying their own. Statistically a large murder machine doesn't make you safer, but being able to see the road when you're surrounded by other huge murder machines will make people feel safer regardless of culture.
You aren't going to get these things off the road by shaming people. We have to make them illegal.
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,
Citation needed. SUVs tend to be modern which would generally have stricter safety regulations
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.
Agree 100%
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.
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.
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.