Originally Posted by
Kontact
All I've experienced in this thread is that makjng relatively simple observations licenses the kooks to be rude. It doesnt even make sense why you and 3alarm are acting like this. I don't have an agenda, so it is bizarre why you two react like you're combatting one. That's your "politics".
...I missed this, because I've been ignoring this thread since it went south for the winter. I can only speak for myself, but I simply posted a relatively extensive pinion piece from the NY Times that speaks to a lot of my own observations on how many bike fatality items I see posted in my local news. I don't intentionally look for them, or I'd probably stop riding. But they are definitely there.
I don't think it's bizarre that I simply stopped responding to you, when your initial entry into the thread ignored the majority of the data sets included by the Times author, as well as the links on things like bigger cars and SUV/truck things, in favor of some smaller portion of it about the Covid years . The data sets go all the way back to 1995, and there's a clear beginning to the rise in fatality stats here in America. Sometime around 2013 0r 2014, in America we started going back up in fatalities, and we've been diverging from the rest of the first world straight through 2022.
After responding to two or three of those, I quickly concluded you either did not read the article (maybe you lack access to the Times ?), or did not care to read and digest it, to focus on the points it makes. Anyway, here's another link, since someone brought up BEV's. It also makes some salient points about size and weight, and the way cars and trucks are marketed in the US that adds to this already significant problem. It's a cross post from another thread, on electric cars in the P+R.
“Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.”
The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s
road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are handing them?
Converting the transportation system from fossil fuels to electricity is essential to addressing climate change. But automakers’ focus on large, battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.
In many ways, EVs reflect long-standing weaknesses in the design and regulation of American automobiles. For decades, the car industry has exploited a
loophole in federal fuel-economy rules to replace sedans with more profitable SUVs and trucks, which now account for
four in five new cars sold in the United States.
...
This shift toward ever-larger trucks and SUVs has
endangered everyone not inside of one, especially those unprotected by tons of metal. A recent
study linked the growing popularity of SUVs in the United States to the surging number of pedestrian deaths, which reached a
40-year high in 2021. A particular problem is that the height of these vehicles expands their
blind spots. In a segment this summer, a
Washington, D.C., television news channel sat nine children in a line in front of an SUV; the driver could see none of them, because nothing within 16 feet of the front of the vehicle was visible to her.
Few car shoppers seem to care. For decades,
Americans have shown little inclination to consider how their vehicle affects the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists. (The federal government seems similarly uninterested; the
national crash-test-ratings program evaluates only the risk to a car’s occupants.)
As large as gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks are, their electrified versions are even heftier due to the addition of huge batteries. The forthcoming electric Chevrolet Silverado EV, for example, will weigh
about 8,000 pounds,
3,000 more than the current gas-powered version.
There's another link in there, to an extensive article in the Atlantic, on how this market trend is killing more people, but the Atlantic is another subscription magazine, and I'm not sure if you can get access to it either. It's here:
The government can no longer allow the auto industry to treat walkers and bikers like collateral damage.
After a decade of steady increases, the newest Ford F-250—part of Ford’s F-Series of pickups, the No. 1 selling vehicle model in America—measures some 55 inches tall at the hood. That’s “as tall as the roof of some sedans,” a Consumer Reports writer remarked in a recent analysis examining the mega-truck trend. This height would easily render someone in a wheelchair, or a child, totally invisible at close range. If I, a tallish woman at 5 foot 6, were hit by a new F-250, I would be struck above the chest. The face, head, neck: These are not great places to suffer a forceful blow—like the kind that an up-to-7,500-pound F-250 can deliver.
...European and Japanese regulators have for many years imposed pedestrian-safety standards on automakers, leading to innovations like the active hood (a little airbag-type of cushioning for a car’s hood). American regulators, however, have been slow to think beyond the driver’s seat.
This helps explain why passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while
pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of
6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.
...
In 2003, a study found that SUVs were three times more likely than sedans to kill pedestrians when they struck them. Leg injuries are dreadful, but “serious head and chest injuries can actually kill you,” the injury-biomechanics professor Clay Gabler told the Detroit Free Press in 2018.
...
The late consumer advocate Clarence Ditlow
called pedestrian protection “one of the last frontiers in vehicle safety,” and added that the industry was reluctant to address it, “because it relates so closely with styling.”
Meanwhile, the hyperaggressive macho-truck trend has been enormously profitable for the auto industry—particularly the Detroit-based Big Three. Profits are as high as
$17,000 on a Chevy Silverado. Crossover SUVs sell at a $10–$15,000 markup over the sedans they were based on, according to
Automotive News, even though they cost a similar amount to make.
On the personal anecdote side, I once took a class from Mr Ditlow, while at the U of Maryland. He was still working for Nader and PIRG at the time. It was a long time ago, and it was interesting in a lot of ways. It was in that class I finally learned the definitive answer to why Nader went after GM and the Corvair, rather than Volkswagon, which sold a much more dangerous car, responsible for many more crash deaths and injuries. And don't even get me started on VW busses of that era. But those were mostly killing the drivers and passengers who rode in them.