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Why America Has So Much Road Safety Research, But So Little Actual Safety — Streetsblog USA
(usa.streetsblog.org)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I wish there were more regulation on the size of private vehicles, particularly in North America. It's pretty clear at this point that what is contributing to higher pedestrian/cyclist fatalities despite better urban infrastructure is the increasing curb weight and ground clearance of automobiles. We can hope that collision-avoidance tech in newer models may reduce human-error type accidents, but at the end of the day, kinetic energy is a bitch.
I wonder how the EV transition will affect things? On the one hand, an EV would weigh more than an ICE of the same class since batteries are heavy. On the other hand, batteries are also the most expensive component by far and you need more in a larger vehicle, so from a dealer's perspective, the margins may not necessarily grow the bigger you go like with an ICE. The sweet spot might actually be something smaller. (In fact, for me, it's actually ebikes.)
Another effect these oversized vehicles have is that they are generally safer for the occupants in the event of a crash, which means the driver doesn't have to worry about their safety or self-preservation as much, which means they crash into things more often from not paying close attention to their surroundings.
Unfortunately the rest of us who may get hit by one of these oversized vehichles don't have the luxury of being safer and not dying.
Yeah it's kind of an arm's race with people feeling they need to be the biggest thing on the road to feel safe. I've driven a few larger vehicles as airport rentals when they had nothing else in stock, and I've noticed they also tend to have a lot more blind spots than what I'm used to.
I remember when I was taking lessons, my instructor said I should think of the airbag as being a spring-loaded spike that will impale you if you screw up. I guess he was trying to impress on me that it's not good to feel safe and smug when you're driving? And actually, I've read since that air bags can be pretty violent when they go off, so he may not have been as far from the truth as I thought?