858
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
858 points (97.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9887 readers
1 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
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.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
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