There's at least two other trends that are, IMO, more to blame. SUVs in general for one, and the proliferation of particular mixed-use road antipattern.
SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go through rather than the over they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share.
The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is pretty much going to have a body count.
I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.
I'm a dreamer, but I'm dreaming self driving cars or even just sensors on normal cars are able to record the data and make this kind of thing indisputable.
Then maybe we'll have corporate pressure aligned with social pressure to change the laws and move traffic patterns beyond what random luck has 'evolved' to safe and sensible defaults.
Why do people blame SUVs when pickup trucks are some of the the highest selling vehicles in America and vans/minivans have existed since forever and are still popular? And they’re both the same size as SUVs?
If you have five children, you're likely buying a car with seven seats. If you regularly transport thousands of pounds of stuff, you're getting a pickup truck. SUVs, on the other hand, often get purchased in lieu of a sedan; pickup trucks and minivans have use-value that often justify their place on the road.
What sort of little bubble do you live in? Where I live people get pretty good utility out of their sport utility vehicles! We have had a ton of snow this winter, including a couple of storms where having ground clearance was key to getting around. The snow was coming down so hard that the plows couldn't keep up. I saw who got stuck and who didn't in that big storm. The interstates were a mess, secondary roads had 2' banks where plows had only gone through in one direction. Front-wheel drive cars and minivans were stuck everywhere, as were tractor trailers, RWD cars without snow tires, and so forth. Everything AWD was still moving pretty well.
Now if you're saying people with true low and high range 4wd trucks and SUVs don't go rock crawling with them that much, that's probably true, but those vehicles have a lot of utility doing things like pulling a boat trailer up a wet boat ramp, driving on a frozen lake to go ice fishing, and driving on farm roads or other unimproved surfaces.
Having lived in both places, commuting in northern New England this time of year often means that you're not driving on a surface a Silicon Valleyite would consider a "road"
Yeah, living in the Midwest I've actually encountered potholes where, if I drove my Fiat over them at any speed, would literally swallow the entire wheel and likely render the car undrivable without major repairs. Not only does an SUV/pickup have bigger tires, they're also made for driving over incredibly rough terrain. Solid axles and four-wheel drive mitigates a lot of those issues.
Statistics/stereotyping said so. If I guess that every New Englander on HN is from MA and lives east of 495 I'll be right far more often than if I pick some other place in New England.
>There are still days that it stays at home and the trucks and SUVs come out because the snow depth is above the bumper.
I've lived in all three of the northern New England states and currently live in MA because money is more important than happiness right now.
I was kind of looking forward to telling someone from MA that you don't need more than AWD car amounts of ground clearance on roads that never get more than 5" of snow between plows. Even in northern New England it's very rare for there to accumulate more than 6" of snow on public roads except maybe a few days a year and even then only in the most rural areas.
I think it's also social pressure to some extent. In the US, cars appear to be on average about 1.5x the size (in all dimensions) of cars in Europe. If you see one on the streets in Europe between other cars it often looks comically huge. I assume that if you drive a regularly sized car in the US (or a smaller one like a Toyota Aigo), it looks comically tiny between the rest of the giant traffic.
If this piece of road is the one I’m thinking of, there’s nary a crossing area for at least a mile. Phoenix isn’t known for walkability, and this isn’t downtown Tempe.
SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go through rather than the over they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share.
The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is pretty much going to have a body count.
I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.