Cities are amazingly resilient and it feels like every generation has a moment in which the city largest and most local to them is having a revival. Seems most large metros are going through some post-COVID pains: Increase in crime, extreme high cost of living, etc.
New York will, like always, come back.
But! The benefit to our mid size cities is great. We need these mid size cities to grow, and from my understanding, they have! Larger mid size cities mean a better national network for travel, more opportunities for jobs, growth, and movement of people/families. I'm here for all that.
The "resilience" argument was misused and misapplied during the pandemic. You also saw it used for school closures -- "kids are resilient". It seems to justify inflicting known harms by having faith in "resilience".
covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.
The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.
> The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.
Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.
We sacrificed the educational, emotional, and psychological development of children during the pandemic to help 90 year olds live to 91. Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that - it's a tradeoff and one that many people felt was not worth it. That doesn't make them bad or selfish, they're just on the opposite side of very difficult question with no clear answer.
It wasn't just the elderly. Pretty much anyone over 50 was at higher risk.
I'll point out again, covid killed over 1 million people in the US alone. That doesn't even account for the ~ 10% of infected who got stuck with the lingering effects of long covid.
Yeah, we asked kids to attend school remotely from home. Some didn't have parents that kept them on task, and suffered. The pandemic was hard on everyone, but even in places that didn't lock down, loved ones getting sick and dying takes a toil. I felt like I was rolling the dice every time I visited my grandmother.
My child's classmate has a mother who has only one lung, and that one lung is barely functional. If she catches COVID, she will certainly be in the ICU. As a class, we all worried about her mother during the entire pandemic.
So we should paralyze a generation? You work to keep the mother safe. You don't sacrifice the well-being of children and whoever else at the altar of her well-being.
The same goes for the elderly. You don't lock down the world to keep them safe (which in NY was a disaster under Cuomo anyway). You take measures to secure their well-being without paralyzing everyone else. And FWIW, there are plenty in that age group who would rather risk COVID to see their grandchildren than live out their remaining years in isolation.
If anything is irrational, it's the ridiculous priorities that were imposed by the lockdown.
I think you're letting a bit of emotion get in the way of logic, take a step back and just breath for a second.
Given the information we had at the time, and how violent the virus was ripping through communities it was the best, worst choice we had at the time. Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved, but we kept the curve down and allowed medical facilities and practitioners brace for the infection wave.
It wasn't irrational at all, and if you found wearing a mask a "ridiculous priority" you were part of the problem. Sometimes someone higher up than you needs to impose a restriction or law to protect others.
> Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved
I have to say this is ridiculously callous. My grandmother cried every day until she passed. I would like to see an investigation into pandemic preparedness. I don’t think we have been getting our money’s worth.
A generation was paralyzed because it had 1 year remote school instead of in person? Kids are just fine. I think they rather got a much more valuable lesson on how to act in a crisis.
I don't believe that COVID "paralyzed" a generation. The acute non-vaccine phase in the US was what - 18 months tops? Hyperbole does not help.
People still got paid. Business got done. My kid learned. People got married. People got divorced. Children were born, people died. No evidence of a "paralyzed generation".
My youngest kid has incredibly strong math and verbal skills compared to my older kid, and I suspect that's because the youngest sat and listened to the online instruction along with his sibling.
Absolving all culpability and foisting it on "the government" or "shutdowns" is just as weak as using hyperbole to make misleading claims about how a generation was "paralyzed". Difficult to get shit done? Sure. Not paralyzed.
I don't generally agree with parent's needless reduction to 'protect 90 years old to get to 91', but can't we agree that whole schooling from home was pretty badly mishandled literally everywhere?
Not sure how we can isolate and measure just school-from-home effect on kids across age groups, various places etc. but I strongly believe there was some harm and it was not tiny. How much, and if not temporary again I can't say (but maybe some huge long term stats on things like grades, counseling frequency, suicides, BMI etc. can, but who knows if they won't show just 2nd order effect of parents suffering too).
> You're doing the work of big pharma companies so they can continue making record profits from your tax dollars while being legally indemnified from liability.
A word from your own mouth: Please stop spewing propaganda.
The 140k children who lost a parent or caregiver to COVID [1] would probably disagree with your statement. Losing your parents is also not great for emotional wellbeing or development.
>Overall, the study shows that approximately 1 out of 500 children in the United States has experienced COVID-19-associated orphanhood or death of a grandparent caregiver.
What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?
That remains to be seen. The 2022 PISA tests suggests that in developed countries, children have missed on the equivalent of 0.5-0.75 of a year's worth of learning.
This happened everywhere, including in the places that only shut down in-person schooling for March 2020-May 2020, and opened up again in August 2020.
Maybe the effect of going through a pandemic was a stressful event harmful to school performance, independent of whether your schooling was in-person or remote?
>Education ministries the world over will envy the handful of rich places that have a cheery story to tell amid the gloom. In Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, test scores not only held steady over the pandemic period, they actually ticked up in at least one of the three subjects in which pupils sat exams. Israel and Switzerland are among other countries that appear, at least as judged from these data, to have done reasonably well.
>Some of these outliers protected learning by keeping school closures short. Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests. Teachers in Switzerland ran fully remote or hybrid timetables for only six weeks (the average among countries in Europe was around 29). Closures in Japan were also comparatively zippy: in 2020 schools in that country shortened their summer breaks in order to claw back some of the class hours that children had lost up to then. Singapore, likewise, decided to alter school holidays to maximise learning time.
They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school? Aren't you learning your whole life? Do you use everything you learned in school?
>They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school?
But did lose those years of in-class instruction, as the PISA tests have shown, post pandemic scores were down from historical trends. The article says that there was a correlation between lockdown intensity and/or catch-up school days and test performance, so I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that lockdowns did cause a loss of learning.
>Aren't you learning your whole life?
You can also make money your whole life, but that doesn't mean it's totally fine to steal a year's worth of salary from you.
>Do you use everything you learned in school?
And did the pandemic related lockdowns conveniently only caused students to miss the knowledge that they didn't need?
Nobody stole anything from them, they were still learning. They maybe even learned something they otherwise wouldn't in school. Maybe some kids got a break from their bullies. Some spent more time with other grown ups or some spent it more outside. PISA tests are really not a measure of any kind of success in life.
I feel like anyone who feels the way the above poster does hasn't experienced having a kid in school and the way infections spread through those populations. Especially with young kids who still do things like thumb sucking. My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.
For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all. Especially when you consider the 10% of cases that have long term consequences. We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.
I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91. I think the main benefit was slowing down the spread enough that hospitals weren't badly over capacity so that people who needed emergency care mostly could get it. Letting COVID spread like wildfire through the population would result in more people needing emergency care than we had resources for.
> For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online
Supervised by who, though?
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you about the risks. But those of us that were working remotely from our office jobs while our kids stayed at home had enormous privilege over the people who still had to go to their jobs in person. Like all the cheering we did for first responders: first responder parents? Oh, well they’re screwed.
IMO we should have prioritized (in the areas where it’s climate appropriate) outdoor schooling. I’m sure there would have been a steep learning curve but it would have been possible, a lot of schools have plenty of outdoor space available.
>My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.
That's just a normal part of being a child in in-person school, temporarily made somewhat worse by lack of in-person schooling for 1, sometimes 2 years.
>I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all.
All dependent on timescales. I'd rather my child get COVID or any other respiratory virus and stay home from school without learning anything at all for a week max, than keep them home from school for months on end. Even though it wasn't too bad for me as a parent to have my kid home, I'm also part of the laptop class.
>We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.
Yes, we saw a few examples. We didn't see those few examples pre-COVID when it came to bad flu complications because it wasn't click-worthy so no one bothered to write the article. This isn't to say long COVID or COVID complications in under-50s isn't a problem, just trying to put context into the equation.
>I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91.
It's about as simplistic and dismissive as "pfft kids will be fine without in-person school, they're so resilient". Which I've heard far too many times.
> Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that
I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.
Everyone suffered during the pandemic. There was no way to spare anyone, it was a traumatic experience for everyone. Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.
> I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.
The parent commenter stated that the way we handled COVID made them lose their faith in humanity. I was pointing out that there were a series of choices to make, none of them good, but just because someone wanted to make a different tradeoff does not ipso facto make them a bad or uncaring person.
Was I snarkier than I should have been, sure. That was immature of me.
I'd add that there were a variety of different approaches in different countries and regions and, unless I've missed something, there's no smoking gun that "WOW This approach vastly slashed deaths vs. that approach." You can make arguments that this similar country did a bit better than that similar country but did anyone (with reliable data) really come out as having clearly found the magic formula?
>another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.
Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease, and we were trying to save lives.
We can debate the philosophy of saving people near end of life vs. allowing children to continue with close-contact education. But it's revolting that the first place your mind went was "save the vote".
Hell, old people who vote lean Republican, so if you're going to play a shrewd voting population game with a pandemic, wouldn't it have been in the interests of the "pro-isolation" coalition to let it run amok?
---
One final note, moving away from your premise: The reason we needed to lock down besides saving lives from COVID directly was that our hospitals and funeral homes couldn't handle the burden. You can't treat people with heart attacks and broken bones if the ICU is filled with people dying of influenza-class viruses.
Maybe if our healthcare system can keep up with a disease's infection rate, we let society chug on - as we have each year when preventable, transmissible diseases kill tens of thousands of people per year.
> Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease
Death always comes for the elderly though. The metric of "years of high quality life saved" is important to apply here.
I was all for the shutdowns starting in March 2020, and was arguing in favor of it, but it then went on for way too long. NYC schools remained closed until fall 2021, and even then they kept shutting down individually for awhile afterwards as part of the COVID protocol. In hindsight it went on for way too long.
"The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives"
Did it actually significsntly save lives or prevent long covid? I'm wondering if any countries didn't shut schools that we could compare to?
I would guess maybe in the initial wave by not overwhelming hospitals it would save a few lives. But when the policies were continually extended thier return on investment dropped as the harms they inflicted increased and the value they provided decreased. Perhaps a better approach would have been to tell the at-risk populations about the risks and mitigations to let them decide what level of protection they wanted for themselves (not talking about others since the whole masking thing turned out to be effectively useless without at least N95s).
My main point is that I know we could save tons of lives by banning cars (not just traffic fatalies but forcing people to walk could prevent many chronic issues), but that doesn't mean the cost/benefit is justified by ignoring the downsides, forcing large opposing population segments into it, and merely stating it was to save lives.
It's worth bearing in mind that the people making these policy decisions in 2020 were doing so without any objective knowledge of how the pandemic would actually end up playing out.
Car safety is somewhat different. While the harms of a car-dependent society are subjectively hard to come to terms with, especially for those who have grown accustom to it, it's a lot easier to objectively measure and predict.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Even in 2020, they knew that the fatality rate was very low for most of the population and was only an issue for the elderly and those with specific comorbidities. Many of the secondary and n-ary effects of either the pandemic or eliminating cars are unknown until they actually play out. There may be some projections, but those projections tend to change. For example, maybe electric scooter become a huge problem because people refuse to walk after cars are banned (negating the potential exercise related benefits).
A large percentage of the population relies on school for childcare. No childcare = no work = no money. A large percentage of those families didn’t have elderly in the home or visiting. For them, in-person school was critical.
Percentage of parents that died from COVID doesn’t compare to the percentage of parents that require school to take care of their kids during working hours.
If we’re debating theoreticals, “Sorry John, Timmy died when he was left at home unsupervised and his 14 year old neighbour didn’t notice he hit his head”
On the other hand, there's a deep learning deficit that that generation will never recover from. That has costs too, and people trapped in a bad economic situation because of shitty schooling have reduced lifespans as well.
I agree that longterm closure of schools was a bad move and created many problems. However, I do think to be fair we need to look at some of the other issues at play regarding education. The system was barely working to begin with. It seems that countries with better school systems (or educational cultures), or just individual schools/districts here faired much better. The broken system can't play catchup if it was struggling to meet the basic education to begin with.
There's always a strong tension between the two points:
1) School closures were good, kids weren't harmed at all and it saved lives!
2) Schools provide the basis for future success and are critical to our social and economic well-being!
My stance is that, as mediocre as many public schools are, they provide a better environment for learning than home life for the majority of children. We should be moving toward making public schools great. (I'd be the first to agree that a broken system makes that a very difficult task.)
There's really no evidence public schools are a better learning environment than homeschooling, in fact there's evidence to the contrary.
Even when you include the extreme fringes of homeschooled children such as religious fundamentalists and unschooling, homeschooled students perform better on average.
This is probably because many-to-one learning is MUCH less effective than one-to-one learning, even with a massive difference in skill. Individualized learning is far better. Schools are the opposite of individualized.
> covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.
Was someone forcing the grandparents to visit their infected grandchildren? In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick. This was despite her having four great-grandchildren and being a widow. When she finally got COVID this year for the first time, she developed some blood clots, but was able to pull through and now is back to great health.
I think the damage to children who were isolated from one another was much worse, and unlike the elderly, they couldn't really understand why we lived so unnaturally. If elderly people wanted to "just see their grandkids," they knew the risks and made a choice. Every death is sad, but I have a hard time thinking we should adopt harsh and even draconian measures just to protect those who ought to know better.
> In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick.
Absolutely! I was already under personal quarantine of sorts before the pandemic even started, because I had immune compromised people under my care. I would bever expect society to turn itself upside down to accommodate my particular situation.
How many kids not learning to read is an elderly life worth? Kids not eating? Child abuse going unreported and unchecked?
How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?
And when did the benefits of closing school stop being worthwhile-how many years after the vaccine was widely available? Because the ongoing disruptions to education were measured in years- all while grandma and grandpa were living it up at bars and restaurants.
Are you factoring in the many other ways that children and families could be kept safe (masking, air filtration, UV sanitizing, outdoor classrooms+heaters, etc)?
The pushback on school closures isn’t because people hate grandma, it’s because some people are capable of a cost-benefit analysis and looking at second order effects when we do so. “Hurt millions of kids to spare thousands of grandmas” folks made me lose my faith in humanity.
>>How many kids not learning to read is an elderly life worth? Kids not eating? Child abuse going unreported and unchecked?
>>How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?
Luckily this wasn't the problem, because kids were still learning, maybe at little slower pace, but on the other hand got to learn a lot of things they otherwise wouldn't get to learn in school. Do you use all the knowledge you learned in school? Have you not learned anything new since then?
Or maybe our inability to collectively act and sacrifice to save over a million people is damning. It absolutely gutted my faith that we'll successfully tackle climate change.
If you are going to call bullshit on something, feel free to cite your source. However, regardless of what you think you're talking to, this source suggests that your claim of bullshit is bullshit. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761
This "scientific article" isn't worth the bits on the hard drive its written on. It uses simple propaganda techniques to manipulate CDC data to give the desired answer. Firstly it only measures up through 2020, even though well before the time of publishing more data was available, why is that? It is to do the number crunching as close to the bottom of the Covid lockdown curve for car accidents (more WFH/distance learning = less car accidents). Except, that alone doesn't give the desired result, so they have to change what the definition of what a child is to include 18 and 19 year old adults, but that STILL isn't enough, so they need to exclude 0 - 1 year old children. I would be ashamed to have that attached to my name, let alone have it published in a journal of medicine.
I don't have children so the statistics don't matter to me, but these casual armchair dismissals do a disservice to the institutions we try to hold to standards. Sorry that you (and apparently many others) don't feel that their work is adequate to meet your criteria.
Linking another website using the same tricks really doesn't really dismiss my point, and referring to my criticisms of the definition-gaming and timeline chopping as "casual armchair dismissals" amounts to nothing more than name calling. I'm sorry that you have misplaced your morality when it comes to telling the truth.
You (and cnn/everytown/giffords) use the word kids to imply toddlers are getting shot with glocks when a majority of those are "teen" gangbangers in chicago/baltimore/detroit/LA killing each other.
I wouldn't call the thing you are seeking truth. Why do you have to lie? Just say you want to ban guns.
Hahaha I do not want to ban guns outright(I will leave it as an open question whether I have guns in my own domicile). Why do you want to imbue my use of statistics with an agenda you think I support? I do think we should resume a strict interpretation of the 2nd amendment (specifically "well-regulated militia") if we want to claim an originalist view of the Constitution. And I am also in favor of regulating harmful substances so that humans can interoperate in society, while still allowing trained humans access to useful tools for manipulating the universe.
Furthermore, these humans that you choose to label as '"teen" gangbangers' also deserve compassion and the opportunity to live in peace.
Lastly, as a student of epistemology, I am acutely aware of the slippery nature of truth and dare not suppose to be the arbiter of Truth. But I suppose whatever I find, where I find it, will have to do. I'm more likely to find it in a Crackerjack box than this thread, however. (I do also take umbrage at being called a liar in this context too but I forgive you.)
The gun debate has been done to death (no pun intended). I'll leave with this.
> well-regulated militia
Regulated meant well supplied or well armed at the time the constution was written.
> I am also in favor of regulating harmful substances so that humans can interoperate in society, while still allowing trained humans access to useful tools for manipulating the universe.
DC vs Heller rejected the idea of an interest-balancing approach to Second Amendment. (right to bear arms vs harm to society). "The Second Amendment is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people". - SCOTUS
> these humans that you choose to label as '"teen" gangbangers' also deserve compassion and the opportunity to live in peace.
Then they can stop killing each other. I don't see why joe the plumber that lives in the suburbs should have his rights be infrigned because people in some other city choose to break the law. The problem isn't guns, its the people.
It's funny to see these bickerings still happening.
It was a no-win situation. Trying to save lives inflicted measurable harm. Doing nothing would also inflict measurable harm. Either side presenting their position as the "correct" position is just biased.
I would also assert that tying your faith in humanity to an unwinnable situation is probably not the correct move, but YMMV.
That doesn't work in a lot of cases though. It's the RTO/WFH struggle. If teachers decide they don't want to be in a classroom, sending your kid in isn't very practical. Or is it only parents who get a choice?
Ideally you would reshuffle - people who lost jobs in some areas and were qualified to be teachers could teach in person; teachers could take remote teaching jobs for the kids that wanted/needed a cyber school. Nothing is perfect, but some choice is better than none.
At least RTO and WFH companies can co-exist though, and there are hybrid models as well. With school parents are stuck with what their specific district wants to do, and the number of hours and days spent in school is extremely rigid. For the academic year that started in fall 2020, it's not inherently impractical that the two options could have co-existed for both teachers and parents. But obviously it was unrealistic given the state of the school system already pre-COVID.
I think the broader issue with this sort of choice in a pandemic is it does have downstream effects. People going to school everyday could cause an uptick in community cases that then makes necessary trips like the grocery store more dangerous for those who do want to isolate as much as possible. Especially relevant in a city where many people are living together in apartment complexes.
So I agree there's no clear answer here, and I think pre-vaccine I would've kept my kids home regardless. But more generally I am very dissatisfied with how homogeneous and inflexible the school system is, and that is something we should push for change in. Funnily enough, my district has done a full 180 since COVID and this past year stopped accepting doctor's notes to excuse absences! They are quite literally encouraging people to send their kids in even while sick. A friend's son has mono right now and the HS is threatening to hold him back over absences (grades are fine still because ofc that matters less than attendance record.
"They are quite literally encouraging people to send their kids in even while sick. A friend's son has mono right now and the HS is threatening to hold him back over absences"
Maybe complain to the state departments of education and health. Many states have laws on what constitutes an excused absence and procedures around communicable diseases. Many times the local people in power don't know or would rather do whatever they think is best until the state steps in.
I don't know. It seems the media coverage (sometimes bordering on fear mongering) had most people wearing masks, using hand sanitizer, etc. Enforcement of policies like masking were not widespread in most places, yet most people obeyed because of what they saw on the news. This is the method the government relies on for all forms of emergency preparedness - they present documents/resources for people to use, then in times of emergency the media diseminates them to the public. This generally works fine for stuff like storms, escaped convicts, etc.
My observation/experience was that we had lots of younger people in lockdown in (expensive) cramped studio apartments in big cities for two years while their boomer parents living in the suburbs more or less went about life as normal all while watching the value of their homes and investments skyrocket as trillions of dollars of additional wealth was transfer to them. At least in my circle of friends this was near universally the case.
Overall the entire situation was completely ridiculous on many levels, but it was the pro-lockdown forever crowd that made me lose my faith in humanity.
I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids. A few months of shutdown was reasonable, but shutting schools down for a couple years is too big of a price to pay.
Also, my kids were in daycare the whole time outside of Mar to May 2020, and they were spreading all sorts of viruses just like they were before COVID. How the government chose to allow the most prolific spreaders to congregate day after day, but prevent less prolific spreaders is very inconsistent logic.
What state had schools closed for years? I see this claim a lot, but even in California hybrid was available ~1 year after shutdown, and full return to school was available for the fall after that (so about 1.3 years)
Washington was pretty egregious. There were random closures and testing requirements that made planning impossible, all the way until April or May 2022, I think. And it is cover-your-ass related stuff, because no one below the state level wanted to be on the hook if the state was still going on and on with nebulous reactions.
If you're at increased risk of contracting a deadly disease, you should take steps not to contract said disease, up to and including isolation, quarantine, testing, etc. What you shouldn't do is use political pressure to permanently stunt the education and growth of an entire generation of kids by insisting that elementary school children can just go to class on Zoom. 40% of 8th graders are deficient in math[0]. That didn't happen in a vacuum, it happened because schools were shut down. It happened because we expected 7 year olds to sit at a desk and watch a computer screen all day instead of allowing them to go to school.
Are you proposing that organ transplants be prioritized to the 80 year old chain smoker over the healthy 12 year old?
Are you proposing that old people should be the first off a sinking ship?
Old people have lived life. They should have stayed home and isolated. Kids had practically zero risk. The difference in risk between a healthy 12 year old and the average 80 year old was orders of magnitude different.
I have pondered about it for over a decade. Our societies drastically prioritize the elderly over the young. They are the ones with political power, after all.
Here’s an easy example: why does the US pay doctors more via Medicare (for people over 65) than via Medicaid (for poorer people, including kids).
That's not a great example. One is a single payer system funded by workers and the other is government welfare. Plus, the elderly can be on both programs simultaneously. If anything, this is an example of money influencing politics since the people who have been paying those taxes for Medicare are more likely to donate to politicians than people who require Medicaid.
> If anything, this is an example of money influencing politics since the people who have been paying those taxes for Medicare are more likely to donate to politicians than people who require Medicaid.
That is what I wrote, the elderly have more political power.
The same legislature that allocates society’s resources towards healthcare for people age 65+ also chooses to allocate less resources to people who happen to be poor (or have poor parents).
The Additional Medicare Tax is another lovely reminder of how society’s resources, because funnily enough, even though it has been widely known Medicaid does not even pay enough to keep the lights on, there is no Additional Medicaid Tax.
Could you point that out? I saw that the elderly had power - not the wealthy. Many elderly are also poor. Much of the political influence on Medicare comes from those who are working as they near retirement. For example, talks about raising the required age do not affect those already receiving it, but future recipients. Those are the people involved. The people receiving it could care less since the already have their's.
The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).
Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system. There is no Medicaid specific tax because it is intended for a small minority of indignant individuals. As with other welfare programs, it paid for out of the general taxes and nothing specific.
It's a money and voter base issue. Yeah, that can be correlated with being old, but there's more to it.
> I saw that the elderly had power - not the wealthy.
Multiple groups can have varying amounts of power. In this case, I am using the fact that one group is getting a better benefit than another group as proof that the group getting the better benefit has power. Why else would they have it, and why else would those that do not have go without?
> The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).
This is my point. Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority.
> Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system.
This is incorrect. Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year.
"Why else would they have it, and why else would those that do not have go without?"
I already told you - the people working to get it later are included in the group. It's not just old people.
"Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority."
It's not a priority because the poor are a small voting segment. The voting segment concerned with Medicare include the elderly and those who are working and thinking about their future retirement, which is a huge segment.
"Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year."
That's not exactly means-tested. You get Medicare if your old enough, then yes you have premiums and deductibles since this is insurance after all. You even have contribution requirements for things like part A. The permium cost can vary based on income, but that doesn't affect the actual coverage or eligibility.
Yeah, money is fungible. The laws are pretty clear on the funding sources and amounts for the entitlement programs, unlike with welfare programs that are more open-ended and less predictable.
Bend points are not means testing. You get your benefits regardless of your situation. The insurance just pays out based on a formula to adjust to cover the more basic expenses. You can see this intent in the way the formula for payouts is designed as a replacing percent of income as well as in the tax cap.
Stuff like Medicare and Social Security are not welfare programs that are means tested. The costs and benefits can vary based on contributions and income but you are entitled to the benefit. These programs are not powerful just because of the old people. The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.
> A means test is a determination of whether an individual or family is eligible for government assistance or welfare, based upon whether the individual or family possesses the means to do without that help.
> The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.
I see what you are saying, but I don’t think many people buy it anymore. The demographics alone make it quite obvious that workers today should not be expecting those benefits, not to mention the continuous devaluation of them already for many years.
The old/young divisions are thoroughly established. Technically, I guess the division is old and young expecting inheritances versus young not expecting inheritances. There are just so many examples. California’s prop 13, defunding state colleges in favor of indebting students, tiered taxpayer funded DB pensions and retiree healthcare that are only available to older employees.
My child's school was online-only instruction from March to June, and reopened in September 2020 for in-person instruction. They did not miss one day of instruction. No idea what you're talking about.
A lot of schools remained remote in fall 2020 - depended on the school, and it's not exactly easy to switch between districts. Also, the quality of instruction in spring 2020 was absolutely affected as teachers adapted to remote and everyone dealt with the general chaos. Again could vary by school, but I think saying no instruction was missed is naive. "Days in class" is a horrible metric for learning, and there absolutely were classrooms where quality of learning degraded.
It was a shitty situation all around, and I'm definitely not arguing that schools should have remained open that spring. But it's silly to pretend that education was not affected across the country by the switch to remote.
> covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.
If only there was a way we could stop the elderly from contracting covid from their grandkids that didn't involve isolating children from social interaction and learning at the most crucial periods of their development.
I have an idea, maybe the people most at risk of dying can isolate themselves so everyone else doesn't have to.
There are at least hundreds of thousands of teachers in high-risk age groups. I can't imagine any solutions to this logistical problem that wouldn't also significantly affect learning outcomes.
> I can't imagine any solutions to this logistical problem that wouldn't also significantly affect learning outcomes.
Okay, what's the least harmful? It seems obvious to me the easiest solution (blanket ban of in person schooling) was chosen rather than trying to minimize harm.
Just off the cuff, regarding high risk teachers, why not have _them_ work remote with an in class, lower risk, TA to handle the physical interaction required?
I can't say I have all of the solutions or even a good suggestion but I can say that, after the initial closing of schools when there was very little information, once the risk factors became much more apparent, there was a minimal amount of rethinking of policy because everyone had already taken ideological stances when there was only ideology to make decisions with. That extends well beyonds schools as well but schools and retirement homes are essentially the opposite ends of the spectrum of risk and seemed to, at best, have the same solutions applied to them.
Well, it would be great if that worked but in general people with this oppinion seemed to be fine to sacrifice (as in let die) anyone with a higher risk rather than contribute with money to allow this isolation.
That assumption obviously has an availability heuristic bias / selection criteria bias, like speeding down a road is safe because you haven’t died yet.
NYC no doubt has a lot of things going for it, I think being the financial center for the hegemony is the deciding factor. In my view survival of NYC probably has less to do with local crime than the outcome of future wars.
Detroit was the center of manufacturing for "the hegemony," which is currently in the process of losing its control of the financial markets, just like they did in manufacturing.
Unlike Detroit, NYC has a very diversified economy. In addition to being the primary finance capital it is a major international player in media, art, fashion, tech, and more. NYC is simply not utterly dependent on finance in the way Detroit was on manufacturing- or SF is on tech, for a modern example.
I think that’s what has made it, and the other global cities like it, so extremely resilient over a long period of time. That and financial services being, thus far, an evergreen industry.
Finance is pretty meta itself, which is probably a contributing factor to NYC having such a diversified economy. Like an automotive company might still want a business-focused office in NYC, but a non-automotive company doesn't have much reason to open an office in the auto manufacturing capital.
I agree that the midsized, and even small cities are important. I think there are some real problems associated with the centralization of populations in large cities. We have tons of dying cities in former manufacturing regions that could be utilized instead of having population/density fights in the more popular locations. The main problem is the vicious cycle that causes the loss of job and the loss of amenities, which decreases the attraction. Instead we get into an infinite desire/density loop because that's where the jobs are. Having more options for cities to move to would provide better population distribution and alleviate many density or flux related issues.
This is a great point! I like the fact that the US is more decentralized and isn't dominated by a single large city. Germany is similar in this regard. I understand the appeal of NYC, especially to the young, but if other cities reap the rewards of increased inward migration, then I think it's a positive thing for the country overall. People too might realize they can have a better quality of life without the insane competition for resources.
> Seems most large metros are going through some post-COVID pains
I don't know about the US, but here in Canada the 2016 census was already showing meaningful decline in communities with >100,000 people, with communities of 1,000-29,999 people picking up most of the slack. COVID may have accelerated things, but signs of a 'counterubranization' movement were already presenting itself long before we ever heard of COVID.
Covid maybe in part but it’s mainly because of the demands that enforcing laws must stop by activists and certain political organizations. So crime is up and the city looks shabby and there’s drugged out zombies and homeless everywhere. So people leave.
It’s what happened in the 1960/70’s - lots of political changes made cities hospitable to crime and people left. As cities managed to become nice again, people moved back and tax revenues rose.
NYC needs another Bloomberg that’s willing to cleanup the streets and keep them nice and to stop pandering to the worst aspects of society. To put the fringe idea weirdos back on the fringe where they are better complaining about things than actually getting things done.
However, unlike the situation in the 1980's, there's no desire to address any of their problems because it undermines so many ideological premises the residents cling to. Coupled with the most morally narcissistic people on the face of the Earth, I don't see any turnaround.
The mechanisms necessary to avoid becoming Detroit are not there
I think most of the "post-COVID" pains are actually much worse because they come from culture and macro-economic consequences, aka "chickens come home to roost".
There seems to be general feeling that stealing stuff and robing people are only bad if you get caught and even when you get caught the are little to no consequences. Forgetting the politicization of this for a while, this type of stuff is one of the worse cancers for society, even if "nobody says nothing", they know and think and they will vote with their feet. Detroit type situations are not really that far for some cities. I don't think this applies to NYC but I wouldn't bet my life on it.
Yup. Early in my career I was susceptible to this as well. Partly immaturity and partly business pressure (we need this thing now, and when the business adapts, we don't want to spend more engineering resources on it! make it work for the future!)
turns out that's nearly impossible, in most cases (businesses change)
I definitely take a more iterative approach now. There's a short spike window to architect the rough plan, get buy in from other engineers, and as long as we feel like we're directionally going the right way and we're not digging ourselves into a corner, we ship it.
Sometimes that has resulted in redoing things (we made a mistake in our thinking), but those redos are minimal compared to the weeks/months we may have spent over-architecting something
Plenty of Go commentary in this thread but can I just say I'm glad to have learned about nilness? Suffered through a few nil pointer dereferences after deploying and having this analyser enabled in gopls (off by default for me at least) is a nice change.
Do you have kids? If so, learn to write a game with your code by your side! That's what I'm doing, and I generally feel the same as you (NO GODAMN TIME!) :)
This "sitting in front of a computer" career gives me (and many others) the flexibility (and luxury in $$) to have a much nicer life than the majority of the population.
Nope. Anecdotal to me of course, but I did a little activity where I stood on a pedestrian island off a busy stretch of road near me. I did this a handful of times.
Over each 5 minute stretch, I'd observe at least 1/10 drivers staring down at their phones while driving through intersection
The hands-free law was IMO, a failure. What used to be people staring at their phones while holding them up at the steering wheel now has people trying to be more discreet and placing phones between their legs or near the cup holders.
This is my exact experience! People used to text with their phone in front of them, which is dangerous but at least they had peripheral vision. Now they hide their phone while they do it. You see it so often, someone not everyone looking vaguely at the road.
I thought this was a problem at first, but I don't see anyone trying to hide it anymore. "Driving" is just an app that people glance at while using their phones.
I guess pickup trucks fall under the category of SUVs?
It's wild how we've lost access to our streets and neighbourhoods for the convenience of mostly suburban vehicle users. Actually not wild, but disgraceful.
The majority of roads are too wide and with little options for alternative modes of transport, drivers are growingly frustrated and angry on the road. We continue to make the mistake of thinking the solution is wider roads.
An incredible policy and prioritization failure. That said, it would take very little work and money to fix the problems. Road diets (as pointed out by the article) and tactical infrastructure is cheap and the solutions are well known. The spend will be a drop in the bucket compared to most other budgets.
We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size.
There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.
Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).
Or maybe yeah, most consumers just mimic other people and cost be darned. Then when gas eventually becomes pricier they complain because they had the foresight of a goldfish.
(And theoretically no efficiency laws need to be passed. Increase taxes on fuel and there you have it)
I disagree -- I'd love if my last car was a station wagon, but there were eight station wagons on the market in the US at the time, made by five manufacturers. And of those eight, four have an MSRP under USD$50,000, and only two have an MSRP under USD$30,000. And the market hasn't substantively changed (Jaguar and Buick have dropped out of the market, but Mini entered the market and Porsche added a second model) since 2020, when I got my car.
I'm calling this out specifically because, in another era, the station wagon would have been the preferred option for a "family vehicle" that needed more space than a sedan. But since it's "easier" for an automaker to get an SUV on the road, the regulatory environment dictated how the market went.
No, not necessarily. Starting in 1996 there was an update to CAFE regulations (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) that set tighter restrictions to start 2005 which only got tighter year over year from there. Conveniently thanks to the Jeep Cherokee XJ, the Chevrolet/GMC S-10 Blazer/S-15 Jimmy, and the Ford Explorer moving into a more luxury oriented direction, SUVs became the fastest growing segment starting in 1994. So how did the companies targeting the U.S. market react? They started pumping out SUVs, and later, crossovers, also called CUVs.
The CUVs started as cheaper ways to make SUVs using sedan platforms and showed up with the Toyota RAV4 and the Honda CR-V first. The third major crossover, and the first made to exercise a loophole in CAFE was the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which was a mid-size hatchback built on the second generation Dodge Neon's platform that was classified as a compact due to them purposely engineering the interior to be smaller, since vehicle sizes are partially determined based on interior dimensions in the U.S. for some odd reason. Chrysler then got it shadily certified as a "light truck" with the EPA for emissions thanks to how the unibody was designed and the rear hatch. At the same time other companies also started exploiting this loophole, such as Ford with the Escape, which was based on the then brand new Focus.
As the 2000s wore on the loophole was closed slightly, but still left open with the so-called "footprint" rule. The footprint rule dictated that light trucks with longer and wider wheelbases were subject to lessened emissions and CAFE regulations, meaning they could pollute more and get worse fuel economy with fewer or even no penalties. As a result smaller more efficient sedans and hatchbacks became less and less profitable and thus manufactured less because they were subject to stricter and thus more expensive regulations, the exact inverse of what was intended to happen with CAFE. This caused a growth in vehicle wheelbases and thus overall sizes to try and lower costs, and the eventual death of several models and even market segments outright. Three door hatchbacks ceased to be in the U.S. market sometime around 2007, as did nearly all hatchbacks. Minivans also suffered because they couldn't always be reclassified as light trucks due to some shenanigans Chrysler had pulled in the 1980s to try and lock out Ford's Aerostar and Chevrolet's Astro, and so prices went up, creating another reason minivans pushed further upmarket in the late 2000s.
The Cobalt was replaced with the larger Cruze in 2008, the Neon replaced with the larger "light truck" classified Caliber in 2007, and the long-in-the-tooth first generation Focus was given a half-hearted exterior styling change and neglected for the updated Escape and Taurus X/Freestyle come 2007. Suzuki replaced the Aerio with the SX4 in 2007, Nissan tried supplanting both the Versa and Altima with the Rogue in 2006 but failed, Mitsubishi shifted all their focus to the Outlander and Endeavor in 2008, and Honda doubled down on the CR-V with it's third generation in 2006. The 2008 financial crisis shuffled things up a bit and thus Ford finally brought over the Fiesta and the fourth generation Focus from Europe in 2011 while Nissan gave us the new Versa and the brand new Leaf that same year, but GM doubled down on CUVs and Chrysler just gave up and put all their money into Jeep in order to make the new Compass and Patriot they'd introduced in 2007 because it was the only thing they could afford. European brands meanwhile jumped on the same bandwagon of bigger CUVs because they realized they could jack up the prices just by jacking up the ride height, and thus developed the MINI Countryman in 2010, FIAT 500X in 2014, and the Opel Mokka which was brought over as the Buick Encore in 2012.
At this point in 2023 nearly all new vehicles sold in the U.S. are either SUVs, CUVs, or full size pickup trucks. Ford infamously axed everything not in those categories except the Mustang, Chevrolet only has one sedan left in the Malibu, Buick has nothing but CUVs after killing off the Opel-filched Insignia sedan and it's Crosstour X branded station wagon version, and Dodge and Nissan are the only ones left in their respective market segments as non-luxury full size sedans with with Charger and Maxima. Even the mighty Honda Accord and Toyota Camry in the venerable mid-size category are falling, with the Camry selling 408,000 units in 2013 and only 120,000 sold so far this year with a projected sales number of only 250,000 by the end of the year. And that's in a ravenous market desperate for new cars.
In short, yes. Fuel economy regulations in the U.S. are to blame because they backfired when it comes to vehicles. And since the U.S. and China essentially dictate world trends for vehicles, the U.S. has set in motion the death of the small car.
Not for very much longer outside of insulated markets like Japan and central Italy where big cars physically will not fit the streets. In the UK for example nearly half of all cars on the road now are SUVs or CUVs which are inherently larger than their hatchback counterparts regardless of what size and tax class they're weaseled into. Two of the best selling cars there in 2022 were the Kia Sportage and Nissan Qashqai, both compact CUVs with Nissan having completely dropped hatchback offering in that size class. In the EU and U.S. crash regulations have dictated cars be wider to accommodate side-impact airbags and side-sill reinforcement bars on doors, while hoods grow taller to adhere to pedestrian impact regulations. In China it's starting to be seen as unsightly or lower class to still be clinging to an A or B-class city or subcompact car, and so the market has trended towards mid-sizers. Combine this with the small car profit problem, and cars like the Ford Fiesta and Kia Picanto won't be around for very much longer. Ford's already discontinuing the Fiesta this year with no announced replacement.
I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE!
In 2008 Obama came in and made changes to CAFE and CARB with Californias very willing help.
The news headline you might have seen, and just saw again this year with Biden Admin pushing it was “All vehicles to be XX MPG by 20YY”. To which people who know absolutely nothing about vehicles clap for. People who understand vehicles or politics know it’s something else.
What happened was Obama Admin came in and wanted to push towards an economic future that wasn’t technically possible for stoichiometric reasons.
The end result was in meetings with MFGs, the admin knowingly compromised and said “We’ll just judge a vehicle based on its size”. A single vehicle’s emissions could be 1.3 or so if it was 1.3 the footprint of a vehicle at the time.
The MFGs replied and said ”If you are going to grade us on size, we are going to give you size”. And they/we have.
Look at vehicle bodies from 2008 on. Larger every single revision.
You can’t actually legislate technological advances. What you can do is knowingly change the game so “your people” have an advantage.
There is a WHOLE lot of bullshit with CAFE and CARB (which is not just California when you understand the market), and even NHTSA anymore.
But… Do not call an intentional “gift” a loophole. Everyone involved knew exactly what was going to happen.
CAFE has had an exception or lower standard for light trucks and an exception for heavy trucks since 1978, and vehicles used as passenger vehicles but meeting either of the truck categories have been incentivized since then; its not something that started 30 years later.
The rise of SUVs and Minivans was a product of this — in the 1980s, not the late 00s.
Not true. CAFE was amended in the late 2000s to provide more fuel restrictions for smaller cars while keeping the same fuel restrictions for bigger cars. The result is bigger cars being made.
What isn't true? Nothing you said, even if it was true (it's not) contradicts anything in the grandparent post.
> CAFE was amended in the late 2000s to provide more fuel restrictions for smaller cars while keeping the same fuel restrictions for bigger cars.
No, it wasn’t. The footprint model within the passenger car class did differentiate by size, but it didn’t provide more restrictions for smaller cars while keeping larger cars the same.
Do minivans meet the definitions? Mine has a pretty low ground clearance, and I don't think it meets the attack angle requirement, either (which is typically the cheapest.)
Edit: I guess I'm a trucker! The 2013 Odyssey is 19lb. over the minimum GVWR!
Hang on, the F-150 and Silverado started ballooning in the late 90s. The Hummer came, Nissan introduced their Titan truck in 2004, the Toyota Tundra got massive. All years before 2008.
Regulations may have well prevented reversal, but the buying public was clearly already making its preferences loud and clear.
Airbags, crash testing, NHTSA, fuel injection / data bussing, small changes to CAFE, comfort options, and emissions equipment all made vehicles get slightly larger, that’s true. But not “ballooning”.
The 2004 Nissan Titan you mentioned was smaller in every single dimension and aspect over its comparative 2004 Dodge Ram. That was Nissan trying to play big boy, but was nothing unusual.
I’m talking about everything. Take an entire line from a MFG and look at its model over model changes.
Find a vehicle that decreased in wheelbase. I wish you luck in your search.
There were more fuel restrictions for smaller cars after the CAFE amendment of the late aughts. Automakers were incentivized to build bigger cars to get around the restrictions.
I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE!
Sure it is. Going back to whenever, heavier vehicles classed as light trucks (or worse) have been subject to less stringent emissions and safety requirements. That's generally what folks are referring to when they mention regulations favoring trucks.
Look at vehicle bodies from 2008 on. Larger every single revision.
That's been generally true since the fuel crisis subsided in the 70s.
Interesting. So you're saying small trucks aren't technically viable under current US legislation? That seems like a glaring emission indeed. Why not just create a light truck category with more lax emission standards? (I suppose it's not too difficult to disallow normal cars from qualifying as light trucks to get higher emissions?)
There are light trucks. The ranger, Tacoma, Colorado, gladiator, etc. They make money, but not like the bigger trucks.
They’re also larger than 1/4 ton trucks of decades ago.
There is a side game with CAFE. Things like the 2DR Wrangler exist - so Jeep could sell more 4DR wranglers and Gladiators. You balance what you have to make with what makes money.
A LOT of Tesla’s financial history is wrapped up in them selling California “carbon credits” (not sure the actual process) to GM, Stellanis, Ford so they then are allowed to sell more trucks in California.
All the mfgs take a small to medium loss on their small cars so they can average their line out. Dodge small cars haven’t made money so long as I have been working in automotive.
If you want an example of nonsense, find a new Tacoma and look between the grill and the front of the radiator. There is more than a FOOT of empty internal space in there.
Being in this industry taught me a lot out government regulation and how it’s almost never what it seems. Regulations exist entirely to be worked-around and not built to. If we built cars to regulations they would all look identical and be pretty poor at everything.
In other countries, vehicles are organzied and taxed by class. Where light trucks can emit more than SUVs the idea being they are needed for work instead of for comfort. This system is gamed too. For example, let’s say Indonesia, it’s far cheaper to get a 4DR Jeep Gladiator than a smaller 2DR Jeep Wrangler. The tax on the latter is high. Both are premium vehicles there.
Regulations exist to be worked around or to be expensive for anyone but your friends to manage. Once you accept that, it makes a lot of decisions make more sense.
I think it's just people defining loophole differently. In our minds, it sure sounds like some unintended trickery to get around a rule. I think OP is saying that it was known and intentional. Is it still a loophole? By definition, I think it is, but not how it's usually used.
Seriously though, this law wasn't passed in 2008. It was passed in 2012, after democrats lost control of the house. This "gift" as you call it, was an appeasement to republicans to get them to vote increase MPG in general.
You do realize things don’t happen overnight right?
The new Obama admin came in and said “you are going to do this” in 2008. Everyone knew it was happening. Things take a little bit of time from the backend to the front end.
Remember what was happening at the time. TARP, carapocalypse (bailout of GM and Chrysler, massive re-org at Ford).
Today, I’m working products on 2032 vehicles. Spoiler alert, they’re still gas and won’t get 55mpg.
> There's no reason a 1/2 ton pickup should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150
It is funny that we still call trucks like the F150, Ram 1500, Silverado 1500, etc as 1/2 ton pickups. Even though they are still officially categorized like that by all the manufacturers, Edmunds, Motortrend, KBB, and so on, they are actually essentially 1 ton pickups. Our "light-duty pickups" (which is their official classification) are actually 1 ton pickups.
The whole tonnage designation refers to the payload capacity of the truck (people and gear in the bed for example). Traditionally a 1/2 ton pickup could carry 1,000 lbs (half a ton roughly). This was the light-duty, "everyman's pickup".
But take the 2023, F-150. It has a payload capacity of ~2,200lbs on all trims above Lariat. And just shy (~1,800-1,900 lbs) on lower trims. These are literally 1 ton pickups being sold as 'light duty' 1/2 ton pickups. They are way more power than the average person needs, yet they are the best selling vehicles in america. When I look at my neighbords, of the 18 houses on my street, there are 14 pickups (3 of which are 3/4 ton pickups, the rest are 1/2 ton). There is one guy that carries a small trailer a few times each summer with a dirt bike in the back. The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.
Not only are they more dangerous to pedestrians, and are worse for the environment, but they also clutter up the streets because they often don't fit in garages,so more and more people park on the street.
For fun, I looked up the current payload of the Ford Ranger, which is Ford's
1/4 ton pickup. And it clocks in at 3/4 of a ton. So again, we have moved up two notches in truck size.
> The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.
Imagine the quizzical looks and stares and sarcastic remarks that would follow someone who decided to hitch an empty trailer to their family sedan and haul it around every single place they go. To work, to the dentist, to the bank, to the grocery store, to drop the kids off at daycare. An empty box the size of a grand piano bobbing around behind them everywhere, complicating everything involved with driving, parking, and fuel economy. For no purpose except the same once in a blue moon haul of a television or a couple 2 by 4s.
And yet this is literally what suburban pickup trucks do all the time- burn gas hauling a giant empty box every single place they go, for no reason at all.
But because it's a "pickup truck" it's normalized and no one thinks anything of it despite it being exactly is ridiculous as the car scenario.
> The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.
I have an older pickup that my in-laws sold us years ago. It's not in the best shape, and most of the time we use it for typical second-car usage: picking up kids, getting groceries, etc. However, it's been useful _so many times_ in the past five years that the convenience of having it outweighs having some other smaller car and then renting a pickup when necessary.
- holiday travel, packages and luggage fill the back. (I'd prefer a minivan, but we don't have one.)
- Some local farmer donates a bunch of stumps for the school garden, we can use the pickup
- trash / e-waste delivery to the dump
- get / deliver furniture
- bring school projects to/from school
- buy a bunk bed at IKEA, it's in half a dozen six foot boxes of wood
Most of these are occasions where there's significant disruption if we were to go try to rent a vehicle from Uhaul or Home Depot, which makes it less likely that we actually do these things, or suffer through trying to shoehorn things into a tiny car. Being able to throw things in the back of the truck makes life occasionally a lot more convenient.
With the pickup being mostly useless, but occasionally Extremely Useful, it is not surprising to me that many keep them, and even consider buying higher trim levels to have a nicer+bigger cab, especially as their kids get older and larger. :)
Having recently rented a trailer, this doesn't mirror my experience at all.
Picking it up took an hour and was a pain in the ass. You still need a vehicle that can haul a trailer, and a compatible hitch. You have to drop it off by a certain time, so now you're rushing. If 3 other people in the area decided to move on that same weekend, you're now screwed because you have no access to equipment.
> Pretty much everything above compact can haul a small trailer
Not according to trailer rental companies. And since it's their trailer, not yours, they get to make the rules - yet another way it's more convenient to own a truck.
> and surely they all use a basic ball hitch?
I had to go buy one, and there were three different main sizes of ball hitch, so there doesn't appear to be a single "basic ball hitch."
PS, I don't own a truck, but this experience - and many similar days where I ended up renting a van or similar - have led me to eye the Maverick.
> Not according to trailer rental companies. And since it's their trailer, not yours, they get to make the rules - yet another way it's more convenient to own a truck.
> I had to go buy one, and there were three different main sizes of ball hitch, so there doesn't appear to be a single "basic ball hitch."
Damn the US are silly as fuck. The wiki confirms that the US has 4 size of hitch balls (1 7/8, 2, 2 5/16, 3).
In europe there’s only the ISO (50mm) hitch ball. Above that you might get drawbars and pintles, but they tend to be more specialised and for heavier applications than a basic trailer or camper.
But surely you can get a class II or class III receiver tube, and then have a set of tow balls you can swap in based on trailer requirements?
In the US most places are less concerned about the hitch and more about the vehicle itself. Even if the identical car is sold in Europe and rated to tow something hefty, it's probably not rated as such in the US and you'll have a hard time getting someone to rent you a trailer.
Part of the problem is that there are generally more restrictive speed limits on RVs and cars with trailers in Europe (and those limits are generally more stringently enforced). e.g. Spain sets a limit of 90 kph for a car with a trailer while South Dakota sets the limit at 130 kph.
Indeed you can even get a single, uh, shaft, that has a ball on each side and pull it out and rotate it to select which one to use. Maybe not for a 3” hitch.
FWIW, I doubt my neighbors see all the stuff I haul in the bed, or the trailers I pull, when my truck is not parked in my driveway.
I still think people who delete their diesels or lift their trucks, etc are compensating though. I just won't judge a person who has a standard pickup truck.
I owned an F150 because there's a weird premium on anything smaller, it was cheaper than a Ranger or Tacoma.
Eventually just switched to an economy car with a trailer hitch, and it was somehow mind blowing to everyone that a Toyota Camry could haul 2000 lbs.
I was hauling a motocross dirtbike, 200lbs (trailer was maybe another 400), if it was a 200lb person any small car could seat 4 of them.
When I switched to a sports sedan and wanted a hitch all the forums were like "Just get a cheap truck", for some odd reason they only sold the hitch in Europe.
Seems like the solution to anything slightly heavy or large is "Buy a truck that can haul 2000lbs". Meanwhile my old Scottish dad would remark to me "We used to haul caravans with cars smaller than this!"
IIRC it’s basically a different generation of naming. 1/2 ton trucks got bigger and increased to 3/4, manufacturers labelled them 1500 (but the 1/2 ton informal naming remained), then they kept growing but the class remained.
So now you have light duty trucks with >2000 lbs payload, badged 1500, and called half ton.
“My life is flashing before my eyes but at least it was an environmentally conscious Rivian that took me out and not a gas-guzzling RAM. My life may be over but the Earth is in good hands. Nice color too, really like the yellow.”
I always think the same thing about federal gun restrictions in the US. I can't imagine someone getting shot and thinking "I'm so glad he didn't shoot me with a barrel shorter than 16 inches!!!"
Clearly the barrel-length restrictions were intended to be about how easy they are to conceal. There was an attempt to draw a distinction between long-guns and hand-guns.
The NFA ended up exempting pistols, which results in the strange situation where manufacturing a pistol to fire a .223 Remmington is legal, but shortening an AR-15 is not.
Perhaps if they only exempted revolvers it would make more sense.
That is false. The objective was to prevent the handgun ban from being circumvented. The handgun ban never became law but we're left with an oddball restriction around short barrels on rifles.
I mean this is obviously false. The heavier a vehicle is, the slower it needs to be going to cause a certain amount of damage, up to and including death. How many pedestrians are hit every year? If you can lower the average weight of vehicles on the road you're directly saving lives.
The couple drivers I'd have to avoid as a pedestrian explained to me that they were not looking in the direction of travel. So I can't see what height or visibility would matter.
An aerodynamic 3,001lb vehicle would be much preferable to me than a 2,999lb flat-front. The physics imply only a portion of the heavier vehicles energy is imparted to me.
I don't make the comment to argue that weight isn't meaningful, but to say that "lethality" of a vehicle has many factors.
Yes it does, because we're talking about regulations that would cap the size of vehicle classes. You're not going to turn a 6,000lb F-150 into a 2,999lb truck, but you can shave 50 or 60 pounds off a vehicle.
All else being equal, lighter = less deadly. That's all I'm saying.
which should be fine, because heavy EVs aren't exactly more environmentally friendly, they just make very different trade offs. Yet, they are more deadly, destroy roads faster, and devalue quicker (half its value come from the battery).
Small City EVs are great though, better for environment, better for not killing more pedestrians, better for urban planning, and cheaper!
The other day, I saw a 1990s Chevy S-10 that had been raised to the height of a modern step-up pickup. It looked ridiculous. Similarly I was on my bike at a red-light looking to turn right with a (stock height) late-model F-150 next to me going straight. I couldn't see over its hood.
To a certain extent, yes. I'm mostly daydreaming about if you magically remade my little Volvo with modern materials and one of those low-displacement turbo engines they put in cars today. It would be 500 pounds lighter with 3 times as much horsepower.
But... that car would be a dud today. It's too simple and lacks features (like power seats).
What does weight matter on a road trip? Unless you are exclusively driving at 30 mph uphill I don't see it mattering much. Wind resistance is the dominant force. This is the same reason why most railroads put limitations on the maximum grade they have to climb. They are mainly working against wind resistance, not gravity.
There are two numbers on the sticker for fuel efficiency. In-town and highway.
For in-town weight matters greatly (both because you essentially throw away energy every time you break, and because rolling-resistance matters more at low speed).
For highway, up until 2008 the maximum speed tested was 55, which disadvantages heavy-vehicles, as rolling resistance is a higher component of energy used at lower speeds (as a simple approximation, rolling-resistance is linear, and air-resistance is quadratic).
Driving around Yosemite or Yellowstone is gonna be closer to in-town riding than to highway riding. I wouldn't be too surprised if time spent on driving at the destination was ~50% of my driving time at some road trips I took.
Yes, but no, because the MPG standards in the US are on a per-size basis. I forget exactly what, but it's per weight, or per footprint (m^2) or something else that lets you shrink the ratio by just building a physically larger car.
>There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Sure there is. Those 90's pickup trucks were absolute death traps. Bench seating, no airbags, drum brakes, no ABS, no crunch zones. There are very good reasons that cars have become much heavier in the last 30 years.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo
240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
The 240 was a good car for its time, but its time was the late 70s. A 2023 Camry hybrid is rated at 53 MPG highway and is much safer for everyone involved. When the 240 was sold you could still buy a new car where you were unlikely to survive a 35 mph head on crash into a wall (e.g. crashing into something roughly the same weight).
Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.
There was a brief and futile anti-SUV movement in the 90s. Manufacturers generally got much better about size and safety compared to what they were, but they still sell based primarily on looks. For anyone who actually needs all that interior space, you're always better off with a minivan. And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan. I've got a wife and two kids we can fit ourselves and enough junk for a 4-day vacation in a compact pretty easily (which I rent as needed because I live in a walkable city).
American cultural sensibilities making small engines a hard sell?
Historically the torque converter gearboxes were a big problem for small euro engines, but nowadays I’d assumed the gearboxes either are DCT or have lock-up clutch so it should be a non-issue.
Americans are just terrible and inattentive drivers in general, because the culture is that driving is a necessary thing, and therefore a right. They also like to merge onto highways in the stupidest possible ways, so you "need" 200 horsepower even in a damn corolla so you can accelerate to 80mph from 30 because you don't understand the concept of an on-ramp or smooth merging.
> Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever?
why not? At least until bateries are good enough.
Heavy EVs are not exactly more environmentally friendly than ICEs, they just make different trade-offs.
Instead of thinking of the dangers of an ICE sedan, and showing an abomination called an EV sedan, just have a simple EV city car, or invest in actually humane mass transit, propper city planning, etc. If you use just your ICE sedan for longer trips, that's decent enough.
EV replacement for our current type of car types are just an hacky way that doesn't really help, just changes the problems.
Maybe F-150's should be considered impractical family vehicles instead of trying to shoehorn them into a do-everything-everywhere-all-the-time kind of vehicle?
Only the new ones fail at being pickups because their beds are short they can't fit much and so high off the ground you'll blow your shoulder out trying to load it with anything but groceries.
mpg wouldn't be as bad as it is if they didn't allow the giant light truck loophole -- regulating on weight would have the same problems if they excepted a class of vehicles that everyone would then flock to
I don't know the details but apparently some concession was made to big auto on mpg that meant there was a loophole and bigger heavier trucks didn't count against your mpg targets as much. That, not a focus on mpg, is the cause.
In many areas, it would take a ton of work in the effort of making destinations closer to each other. Huge parking lots, setbacks, wide roads, and detached houses on their own quarter, or even eighth, of an acre lot make it so the choice between walking/bicycling and using a personal car is not much of a choice.
Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.
Sure, turning Houston into Madrid would be very hard. But this is one of the most incrementally solvable problems I've ever seen. There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better.
In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.
Lord help you if you need a variance, and I cannot even imagine what eminent domain on that scale would look like. I do not see how the change would even be possible without tearing buildings down and building new ones closer to each other, and to do it legislatively adds unimaginable legal expenses, I presume.
Edit: Also note the popular local opinion in many places is keeping a place car dependent means the population who cannot afford a car is kept out.
I meant stuff like city counsel passing a new zoning law. Maybe some concrete bollards to make a protected bike lane. Run a few more busses and trains. That kind of thing.
My point is that does nothing, because the root problem of destinations being too far from one another is not addressed.
A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it. You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car. The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.
And that type of frequency is simply not economical without density. Chicken and egg at this point. Best case scenario is to build outwards from already dense areas, but it will involve eminent domain and demolishing buildings and parking lots to make new ones that are pedestrian friendly and hostile to cars.
> A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it.
So add more buses and trains.
> You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car.
More buses and trains will make this happen. More bike lanes will make this happen. With the proper infrastructure people can go longer distances without a car. All these things can be done incrementally and you're trying to claim they can't be.
> The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.
No it doesn't and your groceries are fine being out in the heat for 20 minutes. They won't go bad. They could be out there for 2 hours and be fine.
> Refrigerate or freeze perishables right away. Foods that require refrigeration should be put in the refrigerator as soon as you get them home. Stick to the "two-hour rule" for leaving items needing refrigeration out at room temperature. Never allow meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, or produce or other foods that require refrigeration to sit at room temperature for more than two hours—one hour if the air temperature is above 90° F. This also applies to items such as leftovers, "doggie bags," and take-out foods. Also, when putting food away, don't crowd the refrigerator or freezer so tightly that air can't circulate.
On top of that, this two-hour thing is a general guideline for maximum safety and is overly restrictive on purpose to avoid ambiguity. Realistically you could leave things out for longer but the FDA would never admit that because it sends mixed messages.
Another note on the refrigeration issue - I get around predominantly by bike, and if I need to I have a soft cooler (like delivery people use) that I can put an ice pack in to transport frozen goods. But last night I went out with just a backpack in 80F heat and bought ice cream that survived the 20 minute trip home just fine.
[0]> But fluid and traffic are not the same thing, as shown by 60 years of governments trying and failing to road-build their way out of congestion. The idea of induced demand – more road space brings more cars – has been known for decades, and it also works in reverse. This is especially so with bike lanes, which are such an efficient use of the same space that they can often mean the same amount of space carrying more people overall.
[1]> Yes, traffic jams have worsened in some cities where bike lanes have been built, but studies show this is largely down to other factors, for example the growth in the number of Uber-type private hire vehicles and Amazon delivery vans.
I agree with you, especially because the crux of the matter is convenience of car versus public transit.
Cars are VERY convenient, so public transit needs to be on time, frequent, and very close by to compete. The other option is to make cars inconvenient, which is politically unpopular.
Zoning changes and removal of parking minimums are the first steps towards bringing things closer together though, and that can happen at the stroke of a pen. Towns can't begin to densify until they're permitted to do so.
Allow someone to build an apartment building on top of that enormous parking lot next to a shopping center, and in many cases I don't think you'd need eminent domain; it'll happen simply because the apartment building is more profitable than the surface parking lot.
(Though a good form-based code might help to nudge things in the direction of walkability too.)
Zoning is how you start to fix density issues. And getting rid of parking minimums. Charging fair market rates for existing parking can funnel more money in to public transport while also making it the cheaper option. Dedicated bus lanes and signaling changes can make busses faster than cars. All of those can be done with words written on paper or paint on roads.
Where I live the city council deliberately rezones the city on a regular basis in a manner contrary to state law. Each time, it's overturned by the same group of citizens. It's a deliberate political tactic so they can tell voters "well we're trying to fix the issue but the awful government won't let us!". This way they can campaign on the same issues until the heat death of the universe. All the NIMBYs know in practice it is safe to vote for them, as they will never rezone the city.
> In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.
At what point can we as a people say: screw it, break the laws and just get it done. it'll be worth it in the long-run.
>"There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better."
I used to think this as well, until I started sitting in on HOA and city council meetings. Good lord, even the most seemingly simple proposals are drenched in red tape and artificial barriers imposed by busybodies. I'm not sure how to get around this, sadly.
Easy: drop the public commentary portion of development. Random old people with nothing to do all day shouldn't be allowed to delay a project by months because they want to complain about the orientation of a window on a project. If you don't own the land, weren't democratically elected, and aren't funding the property you shouldn't get a say in local land use. Ridiculous that we've even set up these systems.
What if that window is looking straight into your bedroom or bathroom? I'd want to at least voice some concern over that. It's then up to officials to ignore that complaint or not. Having no way to express such concerns is faster of course, but there's downsides too
Move out of the city, or put a blind over your window
Being able to see other people's windows from your windows is an inescapable consequence of living in a city. If that's not acceptable to you, then you buy an acreage in the woods somewhere. It's not a reasonable thing to be protesting a development approval over.
Which is longer than the elction cycle in most counties, not just the US. Herein may lie part of the problem: its hard to incentivise politicians to solve long-term problems when doing so does not help them get re-elected.
Key point: all of these "low cost, low effort" ways depend on people staying where they have influence. Any change to zoning laws, or to approve funding for bike and public-transit infrastructure, etc., requires residents who support those things. People who grew up in a city because that's where their parents lived, or who run away from the suburbs to the cities (or to other countries), have zero influence over the problem where it exists and therefore have little moral standing in these debates. Don't just make things better for yourself. Don't be a coward. Stand and fight.
Yes, some areas in particular the big box developments are almost a lost cause. What needs to happen to those first is large, dense development within the plazas. Build residential on top of the mall, remove parking lots (or move them underground), and densify first. Once you move that needle, you can focus on active transport options.
The type of development I describe is happening (two examples in my Canadian city). Ultimately the evolution of a poorly built model.
"Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.
There is a middle ground, I think.
I like individual houses with gardens (most people do, I think) with a size such that convenience stores are viable and reacheable on foot. It's like that in my area (England): good size houses but it's dense enough that I can walk to 2-3 different convenience stores when I need a few things, with a Post Office counter in one of those stores.
In Europe there are also plenty of small scale 'appartment buildings', say 3 to 5 floors surrounded by some greenery and a small carpark, which I think works well, too. A random example in France (near a world famous tourist site): https://goo.gl/maps/avKMYuRAfgxq3gvM9 (that area is also built around a big shopping centre, which is therefore within walking distance).
The bigger it gets the higher the likelihood that it becomes shit.
> "Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.
Where I lived, there used to be tons of orange groves, beautiful natural areas, trails, and fields to ride your bike through. They all turned into suburban houses. Tracts of homes with huge offsets. Cars zooming by at 60 mph on streets so wide it takes half a minute to cross them on foot, all while dodging cars.
Some people try to make it sound like densification will lead to Soviet era buildings or everyone living in Skyscrapers. But it mostly just leads to the city staying in the city instead of spreading out like a cancerous tumor across farmland and nature.
The USA already has those btw, they're called "streetcar suburbs". They're also some of the most expensive piece of real estate in America, because they're the nicest places to live in.
If the goal is to diminish VMT, we need to be creative and add places to go to walking in suburban neighborhoods, as well as incentivizing people to walk/bike. It's not easy when all public meetings are at 2pm on a Tuesday and everyone who shows up is a 70 yold NIMBY who thinks that adding a bike lane will end the world.
What is your definition of a convenience store? To me, a convenience store sells candy, snacks, beverages, sometimes coffee and rather nasty hot prepared food, vapes and tobacco products. 95% of what a convenience store sells is stuff that you really should not be eating. Perhaps they'll have a small basket of apples or bananas, but they are a far cry from the small grocery stores I've seen in European neighborhoods that stock a reasonable selection of produce as well as meat, dairy, and dry goods.
In the USA, I think many people would view having a "convenience store" in their neighborhood as a negative thing. I know I would.
Outside of major cities and very rural areas maybe. NYC lives and breathes on bodegas. Many very small towns will probably ONLY have a 'convenience' store, with an actual grocery store being many miles away. My family's mountain cabin is 5 miles from a convenience store, but 25 miles from a grocery store.
In these situations Convenience stores probably have a very small section of fairly durable produce, maybe some frozen meat but probably some lunchmeat, certainly things like toilet paper, bread, cheese, eggs, snack foods, household cleaners. Certainly not the kind of selection you'll get out of your kroger's but enough to get by. (the place near my family cabin also has a small selection of fly fishing gear during the 'season' swap for some wintery items during the winter)
I live in a suburb in Oregon and our local convenience store, within easy walking distance, is a small market. Half dozen aisles, perhaps 2500sf of floor space. Yes they have some traditional 'convenience store' items like you describe -- mediocre hot food, fountain drinks, and snacks. They also have a decent selection of all the usual things you find at a larger market, just without the same variety of each item. Milk, eggs, meat, dry good, etc. Marked about 25-50% compared to the nearest large store, but for that I'd have to drive.
I sometimes get the impression that HN folks think there's only one kind of suburb in America.
At least in the UK and France, a fair proportion of "convenience stores" are owned by the big supermarket chains and stock a subset of the products that you get in a large store.
Rather different in the UK, more like a small supermarket (often Bangladeshi or Pakistani run), sweets & tobacco but also lots of tinned goods, small selection of breads, often fresh vegetable in packets ... and rice, Indian pickles & sauces, you can live out of these places.
I was on holidays in Sardinia 15 years ago, and around the corner from the place I was staying was a corner shop that sold the usual sweets and tobacco products and wine and bread ... and a zillion other things, including live fish (for eating).
The British terraced house to me is basically perfect urban development.
Terraced housing allows places like London with a fully functioning public transport system whilst also allowing for a civilized home life, hobbies, gardening etc.
It's one of the best things about UK cities IMO. I feel like people who are obsessed with towerblock apartments miss the forest for the trees.
That looks exactly like the type of row houses that have become extremely popular in the US over the years. At least in my region. Especially close to light rail and bus lines.
In the parts of Europe I lived in (France, Switzerland, Sweden) there is one additional important thing: there is usually at most one parking space per apartment. This makes everything already a lot denser.
So remove parking, then hope something comes in to fill the need for transport?
Some of us like big vehicles and the freedom that enables. The last thing I want to do in a Houston summer is carry groceries to a bus stop in 102 degree temperatures and then spend 30 minutes riding a bus when a car does it in 10.
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
I see this repeated whenever pedestrian fatalities are brought up, almost like clockwork. Is this really an epidemic of phone-gawkers that is causing a consistent increase in instances of cars killing people for their crime of entering a roadway on feet instead of wheels? I suppose it's a possibility. What I know for sure is that since the inception of the automobile, car companies have been extremely successful in shifting all blame and responsibility for cars killing pedestrians onto pedestrians. This talking point stinks to me as more of the same.
In the case of SUVs and trucks, we are talking about a few tons of steel accelerating to speeds that easily break bones, maim, and kill people with the slightest of errors. If you are going through neighborhoods or places with high pedestrian traffic at a speed that you can't reactively stop on a dime, and/or are driving a vehicle that has poor line of sight especially for small humans, that is a problem.
Maybe there really is an epidemic of people walking into the street without looking, I've just never seen it happen personally. In any case, if pedestrians are guilty of walking into traffic while looking at their phones then I can almost guarantee that drivers are even more guilting of staring at their phones while driving through neighborhoods and other areas where pedestrians are likely to be. The notion that distracted pedestrians are more of a problem than distracted drivers does not come close to passing the smell test for me.
> In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedestrian accidents.
From what I understand, trucks, including pickups and SUVs, don't have to meet the same safety requirements as regular cars, which is just insane, when you think about it. They are already bigger and heavier and therefore more dangerous, and on top of that the safety rules are looser?!
Big trucks require a special license, but small ones can be driven with a regular license. Maybe that needs to change. Either they should follow the same safety rules as regular cars, or they should require special training and a stricter license.
"He was right, dead right, but just as dead as if he had been dead wrong."
Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.
The 'you can be right and dead' trope is so tired.Of course we should always be looking to mitigate dangerous and distracted drivers.
>Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone.
The person driving the gas propelled two ton vehicle has more responsibility to avoid hitting things than pedestrians have to avoid getting hit.
>. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.
Pedestrians *should* be able to text while they cross the street. The only reason they can't/shouldn't is because American drivers are largely allowed to operate their machines in a negligent manner at all times.
Walking is an inherently safe activity. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity. Drivers should have more a burden for safety than walkers. You, as a driver, should expect things to enter the road. That's why we have speed limits. That's you watch the road instead of playing on the road.
In every city I've lived in the US jaywalking is actually illegal, perhaps it should be legal and even encouraged in your opinion but until it is - it's your responsibility to follow the rules.
Sure! And motorist need to follow the rules of the road. Unfortunately when they break the rules, which they do most of the time, they can easily end someones life.
I'm guessing you're one of the good ones who definitely doesn't speed every time they are in the car.
The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words. Please don't try to ad hominem, it just shows that you don't have any arguments of substance and degrades the discussion.
> pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words
This is... not the definition of jaywalking. It is legal to use one's phone while crossing the street.
Aside - history of the term "jaywalking," from Wikipedia: "The word was promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, according to historian and alternative transportation advocate Peter D. Norton. Today, in the US, the word is often used synonymously with its current legal definition, crossing the street illegally."
It depends on the state, I guess, in which state you can walk into traffic without paying attention, with or without phone, legally? Please be specific. And yes, I've seen this article in Wikipedia, it forgot to explain how pro-automotive interests managed to enforce that in USSR, for example.
You're the one that brought up jaywalking when that wasn't the crux of the argument, are confused about what jaywalking actually entails and then you accuse them of trying to ad hominem.
> The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words
Sorry, you are not understanding what jaywalking is. If you can find a definition of jaywalking that mentions phone, I'll concede your point, but you can't, because it has nothing to do with phones.
Sorry, the rules don't work like that. Jaywalking with a phone is still jaywalking, same as speeding with a phone is still speeding or littering with a phone is still littering. Here is the definition from Wiki:
Jaywalking is the act of pedestrians walking in or crossing a roadway that has traffic if that act contravenes traffic regulations.
Please show me how using a phone suddenly stops contravening with traffic regulations or whatever definition you believe is true that cancels jaywalking somehow when you stare at a phone.
I think it's difficult to make cities more dense if viewed as just strictly taking the current cities and trying to condense them, but that also seems like the less productive way to do it
First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput
The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing
As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes
It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.
The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is
I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.
No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.
And make those buses have dedicated lanes cars can't use. It is amazing how nice a bus can be when it's not stuck in the same shitty traffic as all the cars.
I am speaking more to the political possibility. Things like increasing car parking costs, removing car parking, and spending money on more frequent buses is feasible, but politically impossible.
Sufficient voters will have sufficient resources to own and store their own car, and they are going to want to use it, and they are not going to want to spend money on empty buses.
One of the most important factors in whether someone will vote for a transit tax if is they can imagine riding it themself. Since the current system sucks people can't imagine that and they vote no. Which keeps these networks starved of resources.
Meanwhile legislators approve billions for highways every year. Zoning laws and minimum parking laws are kept in place. Every time gasoline prices increase politicians seek to sooth voters/motorists.
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
I think it depends on where you are, but useful public transit is very possible in most places. Low frequency is the result of poor planning, not a requirement of public transit.
I'm treating them as one and the same here. My point is more that it's not endemic of public transit itself, but the way it's implemented (and supported and funded).
Fixing bad infrastructure takes time, but you don't even need that to reduce pedestrian deaths. If only people had smaller vehicles the rate of survival would go way up.
I could pretty easily imagine a sliding vehicle tax scale where safer, more practical sub-compacts and minivans are subsidized by the mega-lifted land yacht SUVs and pickups. Sure it doesn't fix the design problems of cities, but it at least means the vehicles that are traversing them aren't as likely to kill and maim people while we sort out the other problems.
We wouldn't even need to change taxes if we just stopped subsidizing gas. Fuel would cost about $12.75 per gallon, naturally making the Prius significantly cheaper to operate than the F-150.
As true as that is, I'd be happy just with attention being paid to sidewalks and protected bike paths. I live in an area with a grocery store that is well within biking distance. But it is on the other side of a four lane road and there's no safe way to get a bike across it. In other parts of the state, there are housing developments within walking distance of grocery stores, but no sidewalks.
It isn't uncommon to see people get in their car to go to the mail kiosk 2 blocks away, in part because of the lack of sidewalks.
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
There is so much land available in the form of parking lots, and so much unmet housing demand, that you could reasonably infill your standard mall or big box lot if zoning allows.
A lot of malls have been doing this since retail has been in free fall for quite some time.
Pedestrian and bike bridges are car infrastructure. You can tell because they make the person who is moving under their own power, climb a set of stairs, walk across the bridge, and then walk down the stairs. In the meantime, the most vulnerable road users (Disabled people) have to cross 2 miles down the road at a deadly intersection. All the while, people who are sitting in air conditioned motorized vehicles have a straight level crossing.
In my opinion, if you can't afford to build an at grade crossing for pedestrians with a car underpass, you should close the road to cars, or lower speeds 15 mph with chicanes and raised crossings. Making people climb stairs to cross the road is insane.
Considering how much of the country is suburbs with large streets or freeways separating housing tracts from shopping centers, is your proposal really to close those freeways and arterial streets down? Or just demolish all the homes that are there and move those people to higher density areas?
I'm sympathetic to the idea of building new large developments in a non car centric fashion, but how do you do this with the majority of existing areas.
To be honest, the majority of existing areas will probably go bankrupt as densification happens, plunging the value of cookie cutter, match stick homes to be bulldozed and hopefully re-wilded. Most of suburbia is already going bankrupt. The roads, sewers, pipes, and electrical wires are falling apart because they are too expensive to maintain. All it takes is one company to move out or the land to run out before they start to spiral. San Bernardino CA is a good example.
I’m highly skeptical of the core thesis of the “strong towns” link, and cherry picking a few examples certainly doesn’t convince me.
I can cite plenty of small suburban areas that had an influx of demand without “growth” and the subsequent increase in tax revenue.
Even if you are correct, what time frame do you think this will happen? Will hundred of millions of Americans living in the suburbs be in bankrupted cities in 20 years? 40? 60?
It is already happening, with the pending commercial real estate crash I expect a lot of the big ones will be looking down the barrel soon. Most cities are propped up by short term gains. Foreign investment, capital firms, large business offices, etc.... It won't take much to tip them over. We're sitting on a ticking time bomb trying to add seconds to the clock instead of disarm it.
In my opinion, yes. At its root, it’s simply physics. Once the distances between destinations becomes sufficiently large, it is impossible, especially for the elderly or children.
Search for Target/Costco/Best Buy/Walmart/Kroger/mall and do a street view in US suburbs and see if you can walk those distances carrying things.
You could easily be looking at a quarter mile just from one store entrance to its adjacent store entrance, or even crossing the road which is usually 8+ lanes.
Lot size isn't really the issue, it's having big swathes of land zoned all-residential or all-commercial. We live in a small college town with mostly half- to one-acre lots outside of the downtown core, but we walk and bike everywhere most of the year because it's an actual town laid out before cars, with pockets of not-housing spread out among houses, and no wastelands of giant retail parking lots.
I would really like to get more infill development and smaller lots, personally, but just for the sake of preserving open space. It's easy to walk and bike in actual cities and towns already. Suburbs are the issue, because they are entirely planned around cars.
The reason why drivers are increasingly angry where I live is because there is no enforcement of traffic laws at all. Red lights are run nonstop, drivers use bicycle lanes as travel lanes, etc. I watched someone just reverse down a road opposite the direction of travel yesterday. Like it was no big deal.
This has been my experience, in my area people have even found ways around the newly installed red light cameras, they just remove their license plate. Usually you would get hit with a pretty big ticket for that but the police are not enforcing any sort of traffic laws and relying on cameras to do the enforcing.
This is what happens when every traffic stop is billed as a combat situation. Cops feel like their dangerous (and they are) because America can't pass sensible gun restrictions.
Lol statistically nearly every traffic stop is a completely benign affair with zero danger. Cops just spend all their training being told everyone is trying to kill them and to shoot anything they don't like.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of cop deaths are from traffic accidents, but try telling cops to stop driving like idiots or driving distracted and they'll just tell you "no no no no it's a hard and dangerous job".
Sanitation workers die on the job more often than cops.
What do you mean by "sensible"? People would probably start carrying Glocks with a suppressor, stock, vertical front grip, and micro red dot. That's only sort of safer for police as long as people don't look up how to make an armor piercing bullet.
This is an extremely local phenomenon. We have very light touch enforcement in our state yet people do not run red lights or stop signs, because that's a stupid thing to do and a great way to get into an accident.
Distracted driving could use more enforcement though.
Good luck making policy changes against the wishes of a majority population that's frustrated and angry as it is. We are in deep, deep trouble. Not only are we not removing lanes and giving space back to people, we're still adding lane miles in every city in America. Even my "urbanist" home town of Portland Oregon is about to spend billions to add a few dozen lane miles to an urban freeway that already destroys the entire East bank of our waterfront and a couple historic neighborhoods, and is used mostly by people and companies that don't live here.
Shame we can't instead invest billions into making public transit, especially the max lines running from the suburbs into downtown, far more efficient as a practical solution for commuters. The Esplanade is one of my favorite bike routes in the city, second only to the Springwater corridor. I love cruising up the East side and back on the West side while looking out over the Willamette.
I'm going to be sad if that route gets all fucked up, and all just to add a few lanes that simply induce more demand and do nothing to solve traffic problems in the long run. I hate to be that guy, but its inescapable.. cars (as currently conceived and implemented) are a blight on humanity.
I'm hesitant to take the Max in Portland because of the homeless/drug problem and I'm a fairly big guy in the prime of life. Definitely not taking my family. I LOVE being able to cart my kids around in my perfectly sized and designed mini-van.
If only we could have made max more like a real urban rail system instead of a toy. It's brutally slow, especially if you are unfortunate enough to take it through downtown Portland.
That really needs to be fixed. I live in NE, and if I need to go to Beaverton, I ride my bike to the West side of downtown to catch the Max there. It saves 30 full minutes. They need to get rid of half the downtown stops.
My suburb does as much as it can to make itself walkable. There are crossings and sidewalks everywhere, but it's still a low density suburb so it doesn't make much sense to walk almost anywhere (my kid does walk to school as it happens to be close, but that's it). So while they are trying to address this problem, very few people actually walk.
But all of this said, I want low density. Having lived many years in a high density ant colony (aka "walkable city"), I want nothing to do with that. Keep your high rises to yourself. I think that high density living is inhuman. I respect your opinion, but we don't think alike. And I promise to not mess with your lifestyle if you don't mess with mine, we can all live together many miles apart.
I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go. I exercise every morning by walking around for 45 min in my cookie cutter neighborhood; the air is pure and it's a joy to walk around trees, ducks and birds instead of buses, cabs, people sneezing etc.
Curious, have you considered the in-between here? Consider medium-density European cities, which still have massively higher density suburbs, but rarely the density -- combined employment and population densities -- of the urban core of most American cities.
I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic.
For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Your theory about "suburbs are supported by cities" is controversial. I already know the video you shared and it isn't very convincing. But arguing about this will basically be the usual link exchange (I'm not an urban planner or state accountant and I assume you aren't either). I have some data for you though:
- My county doesn't have any medium-sized or big cities, so all the county maintained roads (most of our roads) are fully paid by our property taxes, which are relatively low percentwise but, as a high-income county, adds up to a pretty penny. I do most of my driving inside my county.
- A lot of road maintenance comes from the gas tax, which I pay plenty and is used inside and outside the county.
- As a tech worker, my state income tax bill is WELL above the median (like 3x-5x+). And the same applies to the suburban county I live in - these suburbanites pay a TON in state income tax. The county only receives a small fraction of the state taxes, which also goes to subsidize - guess what - city living programs.
- My federal tax bill is also huge, well above the median, as is the case with my fellow suburbanites, so I think I'm paying for all my use of federally funded highways in my state and the next 3 or 4 states to the north (if not more).
Suffice to say, I do pay a lot for this benefit, and I'd pay even more if it came to that. And if it was that much more expensive, land in the suburbs would be a lot cheaper than it is now, which would even the math.
To each their own. His attitude seemed to me like finally, someone, somewhere actually gave a damn about the fact people are killing us and our kids, and stealing our cities, instead of abstracting it away.
Reading this discussion I can't help but get reminded of the whole discussion around free-range chicken. Just in your comment, you talk about how tou have "access" to a park. Sounds like a little pasture area meant to distract you from the urban "farm" you are in, and you get a little slice of free range grassland to keep you happy. Dangling it infront of you to keep you productive. Does this not disturb anyone?
If you want to live in the country, live in the country.
I, though, like living in my neighborhood of single-family homes & small/medium size apartment buildings, with four coffeeshops, two independent grocery stores, restaurants, local shops, and more within walking or biking distance. I like being able to take a walk to pick up some bread and eggs and buy a present for a family member (no car) and bike to a major river area where I can hike for tens of miles if I like, or even go swimming and drown (it's wild enough for that if that's what you value).
People are driving in risky ways these days, running red lights much more than they used to, but it still does feel that in my city neighborhoods, folks are more conscious of pedestrians and bikes than in the suburbs I sometimes visit for friends/kid stuff/work. In the suburbs there seem to be many wide roads (4 lanes) separating areas of cul de sacs, with 35 mph speed limits but people actually going 50. Part of this is that the city streets are packed with parked cars and there are people visibly carrying out activities of daily living, while the suburban wide streets give this impression of being cars-only.
Yeesh that's a dystopian view of the world. Some of us like living in cities due to proximity to other humans, and amenities like running water and sewage systems with toilets that flush, and don't want to live like ancient humans in the wilderness.
The whole high rise situation in almost every U.S. city you described (i.e. small central cluster of high-rises) is more a result of insane zoning policies, not traffic safety. High density and peace and quiet really aren’t mutually exclusive, although admittedly 99% of towns and suburbs in the U.S. fail to build such places, largely, in fact, because of traffic engineering.
For example, I lived in a town of around 100k in the Netherlands called Delft for a while - high density, walkable, and far quieter than the two suburbs I lived in the United States.
Not saying the situation will ever change here. But it is possible.
Implementation definitely matters. There's plenty of quiet to be found in the Tokyo metro area for example, which is quite dense relative to US cities. The residential areas are pretty tranquil all day and aside from nightlife hotspots, big chunks of the inner city are absolutely dead at night.
It is unrealistic to expect this lifestyle in the long term. The era of the car will come to an end, likely in the next few decades. The personal car is a profligate use of materials and energy. We can afford them at the moment only thanks to market distortion and a massive one shot energy surfeit. When the real costs are priced in, very few people will be willing or able to pay. Had the real costs been priced in from the beginning, we might not have designed an entire way of life around them.
Your cookie cutter neighborhood (mine too) depends on circumstances which are unlikely to last. I say this with the utmost respect, and as an SUV owner!
I disagree with your claim that cars will be gone, as the rare non-SUV owner (and as someone who also answered parent to argue.) Cars don't cost that much when you drive reasonable cars for occasional trips. They're expensive, but certainly not as much as, say, food.
When there is enough momentum to push most cars out of town centers and to slow those not removed (10mph is ample to do the heavy lifting which should be the domain of cars), there will still be a place for asynchronous, on-demand high-speed travel. It will probably be a return to the family car for those with families, and other efficient arrangements for others.
When that happens, the relative free-loading of tractor trailers on interstates will be more exposed, plus the big box stores won't be as popular without daily car trips for all. By some highly suboptimal taxation scheme, we'll push logistics off the roads, except, once again, for high value uses where asynchronous, on-demand roads are worth the price.
Edit: I learned that the 2013 Odyssey is 19lb. over the minimum GVWR, so I am, in fact, a truck driver.
That's fine, but lower density requires lower level of service: narrower roads, some gravel, etc.
> I'm willing to pay for these roads
I'm not saying that it's impossible that you wpuld want to spend that much, but you couldn't possibly know if you live in the US, because you've never paid for it.
I don't mean to suggest that you're in the wrong for taking resources someone has dangled in front of you for something that looks nice; the malpractice lies with the people who designed and perpetuate those systems. But those systems are sucking rural places dry and preventing the creation of new urban places.
There is a middle ground; I live in a detached, standalone house in small east coast city, and I am within a 10 minute walk to a really good coffee shop/bakery, a pharmacy, small public library, a few restaurants, small boutique kitchenware and fabric/clothing shops, etc. I'm also a couple of blocks away from a bus stop that can take me to the train station.
The neighborhood is dense, but there are no high-rises, and I actually know my neighbors.
Similar. Englewood, Colorado. 5-10 minute walk from the grocery store, barber, bar, several good restaurants, and the theater. Really can't complain, why aren't more places like this?
Probably in nearishby highrises or in detached homes with roommates, by either car or bus, because it's an east coast city so those things most likely exist.
Contrast with Houston, say, where in most areas streets are not really crossable.
There is a middle ground. Walkable cities are not a cluster of high rises and this is mostly the result of poor zoning (we lack the appropriate "missing middle")
I pay more than $3462 in property taxes alone. So I'm good? The majority of people in my county pays more than that, so it's pretty clear to me that the city isn't subsidizing us... More likely, we're subsidizing the city in our income taxes (in my state a significant chunk of income taxes are spent on welfare services for city dwellers).
Usually, if you are out in the suburbs, your infrastructure costs way more than you are paying in taxes, just because of the distances involved. I don’t know your specific situation. Strong Towns has some info about this if you want to know more.
I hear you, and I've seen these videos and claims around, but I don't believe them. They don't make sense. I've seen the public financial statements of my suburban county (which, again, has no big city in it), the average income and funding source of roads, schools etc in my county/state.
The numbers don't add up to the city subsidizing the suburbs - quite the opposite instead. The rich suburbs pay a TON in state, local and federal taxes. So while I suppose it's possible that the cities pay relatively more than they should in the road construction category, all other categories are subsidized by the suburbs on a per capita basis (roads are just a small fraction of overall state expenses, which are dominated by health services and other type of welfare vastly subsidized by the richer suburbs).
Interestingly, this just reminded me of the situation in a nearby county that includes both a large city in a wealthy suburb. The suburb at one point wanted to secede from the city and create their own county because of the massive transfer of funds within the county towards the city.
Which is laughable because for most of human history, we've lived extremely close to each other. Cavemen didn't have acre plots separate from other cavemen.
>I want the convenience of a drivable suburb with wide roads where everything I care about is just a 5-10min drive away and I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go
Your lifestyle requires a massive subsidy from the federal government, so you aren't really willing to pay for it. Suburbs generally require other places around them to also have massive parking lots and roads to accommodate the car lifestyle. If suburbanites just stayed in their bland community, it'd be fine, you all want to drive really fast through other people's communities and you clog up our roads.
Assuming https://ourworldindata.org/land-use is reliable data, the world currently has about 1.5 million km^2 of built-up land usable for human dwelling. If we further assume it isn't a viable option to just remove even more of the land currently in use for things like farming, rainforests, and polar ice caps and what not, if we try to divide that land evenly among 8 billion humans, we get roughly 187.5 m^2 per person.
The problem is that is all built-up land, including commercial and industrial use and the roads themselves, including whatever small amount of urban greenspace might exist like parks, including schools and courthouses and everything else we need to just run human society. If we conservatively estimate this takes up maybe half of built-up land use, then we're down to more like 90 m^2 per person.
Let's assume a family of four, so now you get 360 m^2 or about 3875 ft^2. According to https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/sold.html, the average lot size of a single-family house in the US has gone from 18760 ft^2 in 1978 to 13896 ft^2 in 2020. We're talking now something like a quarter of current lot sizes if we wanted everyone to live in a single-family home.
So, as it stands, sure, live how you want, but don't forget that your ability to live the way you want is predicated upon the vast majority of humans on the planet living in much higher density, which you apparently consider to be not living like a human at all, in spite of it being the condition most humans find themselves in.
>I'm willing to pay for these roads and the electricity/gas to take me where I want to go.
Except you aren't, nearly all infrastructure that your using will need to be bailed out and paid for by the Federal Government because otherwise your taxes would need to at least double.
Yes they do now, in my State, until I think 30 or 40 years ago, pickups had to register as commercial and had to follow laws specific to them and pay more taxes. Some lows restricts commercial vehicles from many roads. I suspect it was a move by Reagan when he deregulated the trucking industry.
I think if a vehicle meet specific weight and size criteria, it needs to pay more and have restrictions. These new big pickups and SUVs fully meet that criteria.
>The majority of roads are too wide
Actually in my state it is the opposite. Most roads are way too narrow. When two large pickups are driving at each other, one needs to pull over.
In California, pickups are still registered as commercial vehicles. This comes as a surprise to some first-time truck buyers.
The new Rivian R1T is registered commercial and weighs over 3 tons, bringing further restrictions as to the places and times it can be driven or parked. Again, surprising some buyers.
You may be thinking of the classification they apply to pickup trucks that costs like $24. They have no additional regulation as a commercial vehicle unless you're using them, well, commercially.
The last of which makes pickups, based on the prior two definitions, commercial vehicles. "A “commercial vehicle” is a motor vehicle of a type required to be registered under this code ... designed, used, or maintained primarily for the transportation of property."
Or, you could just google "are all trucks in California registered commercial", ask any truck owner, or ask any truck dealer.
OK, go ahead and prove that with photographs or something. Because it's quite clear in the law that if you have a pickup truck it is to be registered as a commercial vehicle, unless it has a fixed camper top or other thing that permanently covers the bed. That's why almost* every pickup truck in CA has commercial plates distinguished by their format of a single letter and six digits, instead of three letters and four digits.
* almost, because you can still get custom vanity plates on pickups.
In Washington DC, ridesharing has taken over. I think if someone truly correlated this, they'd find that having a bunch of untrained and self regulated rideshare drivers contributes greatly to these troubling statistics.
Cities are also flooding roads with inexperienced bike and scooter riders on faulty equipment in favor of the revenue it provides, cities also have not updated traffic light infrastructure since the 50s...
The biggest innovation to come to traffic control are simply speed cameras, which dramatically reduced police on streets. It's all be a chaotic mess and cities also lobby their policies online, hiring private companies to provide spin and brigade online on sites like reddit in favor of their failed policies.
DC years ago introduced a campaign that everyone should stop for pedestrians in crosswalks (green light or not) and that has empowered some to walk into streets even when they are not clear. Cities have also turned already congested traffic lanes now into bike lanes, while bicycle traffic is untaxed to fun the arrangement. The aforementioned change also completely removes parking which existed before, leaving driver to double park and dangerously block traffic. The combination of frustrated drivers and frustrated pedestrians is a toxic mix. Many cities and states have been reducing speed limits in the past years since the pandemic to increase their ability to give out citations, despite cars being safer. more efficient, and able to stop faster now than ever. The changes being made now contradict logic as the demand to be on time increases more and more, and the statistics are showing deaths are going up.
In my opinion, separating traffic by type would go a much farther way to encourage safety. Innovation should also be centered around a smarter traffic light system, on separating traffic lanes and routes, and and in better and more affordable parking arrangements in every city. It's not a complex problem, the problem is that decision makers are often high on individual bias and not routed in reason to conquer this issue. Perhaps the decision makers need to be look at more closely, and held accountable for their continual failure to bring the number of casualties downward.
I'm surprised you wouldn't always be required to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Vehicles going fast speeding in dense areas are a huge driver of pedestrian fatalities so reducing speed limits sounds great to me. I've heard that lowering the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph can actually increase average throughput in cities by calming traffic. Here in Massachusetts we're trying to make it legal to use automatic speed limit enforcement (cameras with license plate readers detecting speeding vehicles).
Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).
Barrier separated transport is great for cyclists (and pedestrians), but not if it means restricting cyclists to only riding in bicycle lanes. If you limited cyclists to only riding in places where they had dedicated pathways you'd vastly reduce the practicality of riding in any US city I've been to.
I personally feel much safer riding on streets when there are more cyclists around me. It feels like the motorists are more likely to keep an eye out and not do something careless.
We could also try and force automakers to make safer "light trucks", as they're currently much more dangerous than This article[1] suggests the rate of pedestrian fatalities by vehicle type is 50% higher for light trucks than for cars per mile driven. It's baffling that we allow such large and dangerously-designed vehicles on the road.
> Bicycle traffic does far less to wear down roads and other infrastructure than vehicle traffic. They simply aren't comparable. They also have a number of ancillary benefits for the city, like increasing income from local businesses (even accounting for decreased curbside parking!).
This [0] is useful context. Bikes are rounding errors compared to everything else.
The person you're responding to sounds like they are rolling off a litany of automotive industry talking points. Especially the jab about "faulty equipment" in the form of bikes and scooters.
Ah yes, we need to quarantine pedestrians far away from cars, further locking them out of the physical spaces in their cities. Plus build more parking garages (what? lol). Oh, and let's take aim at the scourge of ride-sharing, all those inexperienced drivers are a menace! Get rid of scooters and bike-share programs while we're at it, all those inexperienced bikers/scooters are practically _trying_ to get themselves run over.
Why not take it a step further? While we're at it, we need more economic incentives in the form of tax breaks or other mechanisms to increase new car sales to help solve the problems with these pesky pedestrians getting themselves maimed and killed. I mean older vehicles are inherently less safe right? [please ignore the obvious design choices on new trucks and SUVs that serve no function outside of aesthetics which are contributing to the killing of pedestrians, especially children]
Telling pedestrians they can walk into a busy street when the signal clearly shows to not cross is not intelligent behavior. Regardless of right of way or safety stances, there is everything from impaired drivers to drivers with faulty brakes and other car issues that make crossing at any time unexpectedly unreasonable.
Pedestrians should only be told by officials to cross streets when signals indicate it's safe (as had been the case for many years prior). Regardless, they probably may not do so, but local government should not empower people to simply be reckless in crossing streets. Telling people they are somehow protected or justified simply by being in a crosswalk (even when signals indicate to not cross) contradicts years of jaywalking tickets given out in states for decades prior, when the death rates were lower.
Traffic lights are there for cars, of course pedestrians and everyone else should be able to ignore them. They are not there for safety, and unprotected road users are superb at managing risks.
Jaywalking should never be a crime if you live in such a community you really have along way to go.
I watched a movie (I think from the 50s), and it was amazing to see people ambling casually through the streets, and cars driving slowly and carefully to avoid them as if streets were for people, and cars were the intruder. I'd love to recapture that aspect of the past.
This is a relatively easy fix. Remove zoning regulation and the market should build towards denser towns. It is outright illegal to build dense right now in most of the US. There are other ares that need to be fixed that all exacerbate the issue: The NHSTA recommends large wide roads for moving vehicles faster, CAFE standards makes cars heavier and larger since trucks / suvs don't have the same regulations, FHA loans require developments are built with curvy roads and not grids. We need laws that prioritize pedestrians and bikers, force cars to be smaller through regulation and taxes.
Is zoning regulation as a concept really the root cause, though? Houston famously has no zoning code and is fairly lax with land use generally (although it isn't completely the Wild West), and it isn't very dense. It seems like zoning could even be a key part of the solution, being a tool that could be used to mandate that new construction be more dense around mass transit hubs, for instance. There are lots of anti-density zoning regulations that should be reformed, it's true, but throwing the whole thing out seems like overkill to me.
Houston has zoning codes but by a different name. They use Deed restrictions which functionally act as zoning.
Japan has the right solution though. Japan has a national level zoning that is black list based as opposed to white list, also it only has a few categories. In the US a town says "You can only build homes here with these requirements". In Japan you can build homes anywhere, and light commercial anywhere. So only heavy commercial and industry is effectively limited. In fact their "light industrial use" zones is where something like 60% of people live.
Fire department accommodations also shape road size. Being able to turn an engine for instance eliminates a lot of older alley designs in new construction.
Preferences vary, but the vast majority of Americans prefer to spread out and live in single-family detached houses with some space and privacy. HN users love to complain that this is irrational or wasteful or imposes externalities on others. Those are valid points, but they don't change the choices that home buyers make.
Many people do like that. But there is a difference between "Allow people to build a single family detached home" and "make illegal anything except building a single family detached home". If you look at traditional american towns, there are a lot of walkable nice towns with nothing but detached homes, but they didn't have the same setback requirements as they do now.
How is that a solution? Downtown L.A., for example, is not "full." And if you "densify" what are now single-family neighborhoods, that single-family neighborhood will simply move to the next frontier. Then the oh-so-horrible reign of terror will continue there. How does that help?
Zoning allows people to choose what kind of neighborhood they want to live in. If I wanted density, I'd live downtown. Why should developers be allowed to just roam in and destroy the lifestyle that the people in the area selected?
I live in a small town with... not enough sidewalks. I try to walk my dog, but half the streets where I live, I have to walk on the street or else on people's lawns. I definitely walk a lot less because of it
Not really a systemic issue in this case, just a pet peeve
I understand the sentiment, but is it these assault vehicles at fault here? I tend to think that the real problem is distracted driving, since EVERYONE from the smallest Kia on the street to the biggest lifted truck seems to have trouble staying off their phones while driving.
How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I don't think it can explain this trend.
There could be a number of reasons from average vehicle size to urban planning norms to pedestrian culture. Maybe we jaywalk more on more dangerous roads with larger vehicles with less visibility and our fat bodies have larger hit boxes.
I think the majority of the increased deaths are probably from the higher grills and weight -- instead of tumbling over the hood of a sedan, you get hit center mass by a truck or SUV which is far more damaging. That said, great point on jaywalking more, compared to when I was living in Germany or Estonia, we jaywalk far more (and engage in riskier activities in roadways like with scooters and ATVs) than those places.
Given that pedestrian (and especially child) visibility is so low in these gargantuan vehicles, I don't see how you can make such a definitive statement absolving their fault in causing collisions without data.
US cars seem to be a special case. Saw a Cadillac Escalade on European streets and it was so comically large. The driver looked like an ant. And I complain about SUVs here...
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
How many times are you going to copy and paste the same comment in replay to different parents? I see you do that a lot, and it doesn't seem productive.
I don't think analyzing this issue from the perspective of individual interactions is useful. Even in safe, walkable cities, some pedestrians will be reckless. Even in Phoenix AZ, some drivers will be courteous toward walkers.
All that disappears in the aggregate though, and we're left with the fact that the built environment is the main factor dictating how we interact on our streets. We build wide roads and build huge dangerous vehicles to go very fast on them. That's the issue.
Agreed. A pedestrian recently got themselves killed near my house by darting right into the rode in front of a driver who was going under 35 mph in a 35. Driver had no chance to avoid him. The pedestrian didn't even turn their head before being hit and was likely high or drunk (per the local business owner who was familiar with him).
New York will, like always, come back.
But! The benefit to our mid size cities is great. We need these mid size cities to grow, and from my understanding, they have! Larger mid size cities mean a better national network for travel, more opportunities for jobs, growth, and movement of people/families. I'm here for all that.