Automakers will still market to where the dollars are: people who buy cars (17 million/year in the US, 60 million/year globally).
Outside of NYC, Chicago, and SF, there’s very little mass transit to speak of, even in urban areas. Texas and Florida have significant population centers where car ownership is required, and that’s where folks are moving to.
True! But they’re spending the dollars, so their preference is what will be built for (see: Ford’s vehicle lineup, all trucks and SUVs). And if you attempt to regulate against them, you’ll get voted out (just like NIMBYs).
There are a lot of personal preferences we regulate away. I prefer to drive drunk home from the bar, but that's illegal. I prefer to build buildings without obeying fire safety building codes, but apparently that's also illegal.
30k / year die in car accidents in the USA. This is a real problem with a huge human toll, akin to drunk driving or building codes.
Step 1 is slow the vehicles down. As soon as they slow down, one of the main drivers of size - fear of an accident with a bigger vehicle - will be greatly decreased and we can do step 2: shrink them.
If everyone rode all your straw horses we’d all be safe to sip from chocolate streams and eat from gumdrop trees.
Driving has never been safer in this country. Slowing cars down is silly, interstates were built to drive 85 MPH on safely with cars without airbags, ABS, even seatbelts.
We went through that with the 55 MPH federal mandate, which lowered death rates only a small percent at a large economic cost.
You are also right driving has never been safer. But you could have said that before airbags or abs or even seatbelts.
and fyi, interstate driving is dangerous:
> the fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled in 2015 was still 2.6 times higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.84 in rural areas compared with 0.71 in urban areas)
I can't even imagine what that would do to traffic that is already pretty congested. Large swaths of suburban metros would just grind to a halt.
> 30k / year die in car accidents in the USA
Closer to 40K. Even then, that is compared with almost 3 million people who die for all reasons combined. It's actually sort of amazing how low the fatality rate is given just how much movement there is every day. One for every 100,000,000 miles driven. That's remarkable.
Slower speeds means cars drive closer together which means throughput increases (to a point). I think around 60km/h is generally considered the speed which yields the biggest throughput of cars.
I think we need to change our language a bit and stop referring to crashes as accidents.
Crashes are common. Accidents are exceptionally rare. While "accident" is a statement of intent, and outside of extreme road rage scenarios, nobody intends to cause a crash, people do deliberately create dangerous situations that lead to crashes.
You might not have intended to rear-end somebody, but you did choose to text while driving.
You might not have intended to side-swipe somebody, but you did choose to not check your blind spot before changing lanes.
The word "accident" implies a mistake that you couldn't see coming. But when someone chooses to create the dangerous situation, it's no longer an accident, because the situation could have been avoided entirely.
The only one of those that requires a large car is six kids (which is pretty rare). Bike racks work great on small cars. Home Depot delivers. I rent a van or truck to move furniture the one time a year I need to do it. Most people who drive a giant SUV absolutely do not need one.
Or alternatively, how much nicer of a car would you like to have for the same money? Most large SUVs are not well-constructed, nor are they much fun to drive. They’re just big.
My smallish wagon does everything a typical family (2 adults, 2 kids, dog) has a regular need for (heck, I carry trees and 2x12s and gravel in it, which is more than most people need). On the rare occasion that I’m buying furniture and they don’t deliver or whatever, I rent a van. As a result, my day-to-day driving experience is infinitely more pleasant.
The comment of yours that I replied to was in response to someone whose first sentence is an acknowledgement that the use case of 6 kids does need such a car.
Then they suggest that the other use cases are valid but people like them don't need such a car despite those use cases.
How did you interpret that as "hectoring other people with different use cases"??
That's a specific (I think over represented) use-case. When I had my first kid I considered something large. Looking around I saw people buy large cars after having their first kid and by the time they needed it (driving around friends, hockey equipment, etc) it was 5-7 years old and probably getting swapped out anyway. I'm happy I switched to a 4-door and went with a smaller car. I can carry much more and longer lumber using a roof rack on top of a subcompact than I can inside a larger vehicle. If I need something larger I rent it or have it delivered. Using a bike rack outside the car is much easier than storing it inside. For road trips I'm pretty sure I've seen its cheaper to rent something instead of putting miles on your daily vehicle--so you get a nicer car that's more appropriately sized.
The average number of kids in the US is 1.9 and the median age interval is 2-3 years. That's not that many years of carrying around kids and their gear; one, maybe two cars in a lifetime.
On the other hand, so many Americans drive by themselves, long distances, every day, in giant cars. A lot of people like larger cars because it makes them "feel safe." Or people buy the largest vehicle they can "just in case." I was taken aback when I found out about 10 years when a friend had to run his credit card twice to fill up because it capped the sale at $50 and when gas prices went up he couldn't fill his tank for that.
I feel like I'm the weirdo in the US for preferring smaller cars. I couldn't stand poor pickup of fleet vehicles a decade ago, but as long as they have decent pickup I really love the maneuverability, the ease of parking in smaller spots, and the mileage of a smaller car.
>Until you need to haul 6 kids, or three bikes, or furniture, or hone remodeling supplies from Home Depot, etc.
Station wagon with a roof rack can do any two of those things at once. And I say this as someone who also owns a minivan and a couple trucks. I actually prefer station wagons for hauling sheet material that's too long or wide to fit flat in a pickup bed because it's less of a pain to deal with strapping it to a roof rack than any of the other options.
The problem with this approach is that despite the fact that modern vehicles can support thousands of pounds on (or in) the passenger cabin and that modern air suspension and dynamic shocks (as found on many higher trim SUVs these days) would be fine with the extra weight) it is not socially acceptable (and social norms are very much defined by vocal minorities) to use vehicle at 110% their capacity if you can reasonably avoid to. Imagine the "think of the children" themed hate you'd get if you posted a picture of a Mercedes wagon hauling 300lb of I-beam on the roof or a minivan hauling a ton of paver bricks or a bunch of people crammed into a Honda Fit for a road trip. That's why we can't made do with less.
Audi station wagons are probably the single most common company car in Germany. Much more fun to drive than any SUV for sure.
A lot of the arguments here read like people want an SUV that will fit all the stuff you'd normally just use a trailer for, like moving furniture or a bunch of lumber. This seems very odd to me.
We discovered, after accidentally having twins and bumping the kids count to 3, a typical sedan cannot physically carry more than two children because you cannot fit 3 or more child seats in the back as required by law. That's why families of 3 or more kids have minivans. It's not like the 80s where you toss the kids in a station wagon and let them wander in the back, they are required to be in massive padded seats.
Chicco infant and EvenFlo little and big boosters will get you to three in a back row. Use a seatbelt extender or two to make buckling easier. Not taking away from your point, because parents absolutely prefer two to a row, just helping anyone who happens to read this.
Suburbia has made parents lives needlessly miserable with extra kid hauling. For the other rare occasions, rent a bigger vehicle. The idea that we need to clog the roads to prepare for that 2/y errand is also ridiculous.
> I’m getting tired of the “all I need is a tiny tin box thus so should you” crowd.
I don't care to tell people what they need, but I do want my public space back. Car owner's aggregate decisions absolutely do effect personally and the commons so they have no right to hide behind that shield.
Sure, but they don't necessarily need such big ones. Big cars are primarily a consumer preference thing in the US rather than an actual need, and consumer preferences can change, both organically and due to outside pressure (the 70s oil crisis did reduce the size of American cars significantly, for instance).
Also, of course, bad mass transit is fixable. And potentially fairly cheaply; for the lowish density cities common in the US BRT systems would likely largely be fine.
We can afford them for now. If oil prices go up significantly I’ll seriously reconsider my 18MPG suv... but I’ll reconsider to an alternative that can still support my lifestyle (perhaps Tesla truck, or something like RAV4 Prime/Hybrid but larger). Not a mini car that can’t go fast.
Based on the metric I’m guessing you don’t live in USA? Here we have vast expanses of designated wilderness area (well over 1M sq km), where it can be really quite fun to get up to speed while enjoying the views.
I do live in the USA. I used 100kph because that's the car under discussion.
I've never been to a drivable wilderness area, or on a freeway where I'd be comfortable going all that fast. And if I was going there just to drive hard it would probably be rare enough that I'd rent a really nice fast car.
Average price of a new car in the US is creeping up on average income, so the ‘can afford’ thing may be marginal. The industry seems to be quite effective at making people stretch their spending on this.
No they do not. Half of Americans live in the suburbs or equivalent, which are not urban environments and certainly nothing remotely compared to what qualifies as an urban environment in eg Europe. Having a Target, Costco, Home Depot, Whole Foods and Starbucks doesn't qualify a region as urban. 70%-75% of Americans don't live in urban environments:
"America Really Is a Nation of Suburbs"
"According to the newly released 2017 American Housing Survey (of nearly 76,000 households nationwide), about 52 percent of people in the United States describe their neighborhood as suburban, while about 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent as rural."
Towns and suburbs are generally classed as urban. Maybe low density urban, but urban nonetheless.
It probably makes sense. Having yards and trees and driving 2 miles to Target is more similar to not having trees and driving 2 miles to Target than it is similar to driving 200 miles to Target.
Given the choice, how would someone living there most often visit a grocery store?
In an urban area walking might be the common mode.
In a suburban area driving is OFTEN going to be the preferred mode, and even in small cities (particularly ones still small enough to have free parking at a nearby grocery store) driving there is still going to be preferred; at least in the US. In my experience Bellevue WA is a small, still suburban like city, while Seattle has crossed the anti-car (and expensive real-estate) line to 'big city'; but is neither old enough (pre-industrial grocery store layouts) nor big enough to be a healthy big urban city.
Offhand, I would define rural as any area where a drive to the third closest typical grocery store is at least a one hour round trip (by car, at legal speeds, including delays at any traffic device or from commute volume).
I wasn't trying to invent a dividing line, more trying to highlight how usage/understanding can vary. Here's some discussion from government statisticians:
Large swaths of the US are what that page calls 'micropolitan', centered around small urban clusters, which are the areas I think cause the most confusion, built up areas that are treated as urban in statistics and conversely thought about as rural by lay audiences.
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