Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Both are too big
To be fair, the first pick up can haul dirty stuff or things that stick out like pipes, signs or maybe something like small boats. It's still hilarious tho that the carry capacity is comparable. Like you could theoretically fit a small pizza oven into it xD
What baffles me about Americans is that truck owners insist that they need to haul things. And I'm always wondering why would anyone spend time and money doing that? Here in the UK delivery is usually free. New bed? Free delivery. New PC hardware or huge TV? Free delivery. Lumber for a DIY project? Free delivery. A palette of cat food? Free delivery! Why the fuck would anyone waste money on petrol and haul shit themselves? The only paid delivery is groceries and it's £1 from Sainsbury's, I ain't driving for £1, fuck it.
The thing is, looking around at these monstrosities - the people driving them are almost never hauling anything. For the most part, they are just carrying the dumbass driver. And they are about 25% of the vehicles on the road.
And here in america nothing is free
I see...
As a Swede, I think the reason this baffles you has a lot to do with the fact that the U.K. is comparatively tiny, with 67 mil inhabitants on 244 sqkm. Sweden for example has 10.5mil inhabitants on 450 sqkm.
What happens is that densely populated areas will have access to these services, perhaps not for free, but they're at least there. Less sparsely populated areas have less service coverage, and so you get more car dependant. Here in Sweden at least we have a decent public transport network so even in my old village of 600 people you could make do without a car, you just couldn't be particularly spontaneous about things.
The U.S. is very much structured around owning cars. Massive roads, poor pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and a general lack of public transit. I visited Massachusetts back in 2019 and got a completely different perspective on things. Until then I didn't understand why my friend just didn't bike everywhere, but having been there it's easy to see that it's not viable. Even the cul-de-sac they lived on wasn't very pedestrian friendly.
That's not to say that the U.S. could have more sensible sizes on their cars, they definitely could. I think the sizes of cars growing has to do with manufacturers wanting increased profit. We're seeing an increase in the average car size here in Europe as well, with a lot of the more compact cars being taken off the market.
The problem with your logic is that top 5 most popular vehicles in the New York City are:
Tell me more about how these guys live in a sparsely populated area and need hauling hay and lumber all day long.
Unfortunately a lot of people buy these to haul kids. They act like you can't put car seats in a sedan and put strollers in the trunk. We had 5 people in my dad's 1972 Mercury Capri when I was growing up. The back seat was small. Of course we weren't as fat as typical Americans are today.
When I had two kids in car seats I upgraded to a bigger car. It was a VW Jetta wagon/estate. Plenty of space for both kids and all our stuff to go on week long vacations. And since it was a diesel it got like 40mpg highway.
I mean there's status tied to car culture as well. It's a common problem with consumerism, and why people build these tribes around brand loyalty and whatnot. The fact that massive vehicles are popular in NYC isn't incompatible with the notion that delivery services and public transport is available there. According to this... Powerpoint (??) on nyc.gov, about 53% of households in NYC have access to a car (page 53), which is significantly lower than the national average.
Yes, unfortunately in the US it's two parts 1) rural areas are not very well-serviced as you say, there is a lot of land in the US (~8,000,000 sqkm) much of which is empty, so being able to do more yourself is always the better option 2) there's always been kind of mythos around self-reliance in this country that has become kind of exaggerated with certain political demographics, so that leads to people in cities owning these giant vehicles as kind of a political status thing "Look at me, I'm a self-reliant manly man who doesn't need help from any community or collective." Which us a ridiculous attitude to have when living in a city, but that's the political climate undortunately. Also plays into why so many of our services suck arse.
It doesn't even have to be that rural, honestly. My friend lived in a town in MA with about 70k inhabitants. To me this is a fairly large town, my current town is about 20k, and my previous town was about 30k. Honestly I didn't even have any idea that the town they lived in was so populous until now (as I just looked it up), because it didn't feel like it. In terms of services and population I got the impression that it was smaller than my hometown at the time. It's just spread out over a much larger area and very little is made to be accessible by walking.
My friend had a ~30 minute walking distance from their house to the nearest grocery store. In my current town I have 2 grocers within 9 minutes of walking distance. Both are easily accessible with bicycle as well.
There's also the general consumption attitude. My friend went shopping once every 7-14 days. Nowadays I order in groceries in bulk every 7 days, but in the past going for groceries was a more spontaneous thing. I know plenty of people who pick up groceries more or less daily on their way home from work. From what I observed, a lot of consumer goods is available in larger bulk quantities in the U.S. compared to what you see here. You generally also don't buy drinking water here, but in the U.S. that's sometimes required.
There's a lot of nuances. I live quite comfortably as a pedestrian/cyclist over here in Sweden. I don't think I could do that if I'd lived where my friend did.
Sure, no individual is like to force you to live in the middle of nowhere, but circumstances might.
I'm not saying that cars should be a thing, but rather talking about (some) reasons they are. The biggest determining factor really is just car culture. The car and oil industry has done a great job at manufacturing demand for cars, and I'd wager that's the main determining factor.
If you want to see a reduction in cars on the roads, the best way to do so is simply to make other means of transport more feasible. You don't fix traffic by widening roads, that just induces further demand. Instead, set up bus lines, mark certain lanes as bus only. Heck, convert some lanes to bicycle only lanes.
It's been easy for me to take that kind of infrastructure for granted. Where I live for example, there's a pedestrian/bicycle path all the way from my town, to the nearby larger town ~35km away. It's fully possible to bike over there if you're prepared for a 1-1½ hour ish ride.
Because US "cities" are sparsely populated suburban wastelands that take hours to drive across. The model of exclusively cars and suburbs just doesn't scale.
You listed all new item purchase things, where delivery is just part of the price you paid for it in the first place.
What do you do when you're not purchasing something, i.e hauling shit you already own from your old place to your new place when moving?
or if you have a shit ton of stuff and a big house: pay movers to drive it in a shipping truck like all the rest of the middle class fucks that can afford one of these trucks.
So you need a driving license to move in the UK?
I moved once by strapping a sheet of plywood to the roof of my car and tapping in nails along the edge. We Beverly Hillbillied our stuff and tied it down. It was one of my greatest achievements. Note: I took side streets to my new place and got everything done 3 trips I think.
American here looking to buy a truck that's not absurdly oversized and over priced. I need it to haul hay and bring garbage to the dump. I save a couple hundred a year for bringing my own garbage instead of doing trash pick up, and hay deliveries cost way more than they used to.
Plus my rural area requires driving everywhere and the winters are pretty bad so a 4 wheel drive vehicle is good to have for going to work or emergencies.
I'm looking into those tiny Japanese kei trucks as a potential alternative if I can't find something that's reasonable though.
Let's be honest here, the majority of Americans with trucks don't live in a rural area. Rural life is different ofc, people not only have trucks here, but also tractors, telehandlers and whatnot.
Even out here in the rural areas people who have these ridiculous, oversized, luxery trucks aren't using them for actual work. I guess that was kinda my point. People who haul stuff want something affordable that can take a bit of a beating. Not some gas guzzling humongous thing that doesn't even offer more hauling space.
Those trucks are definitely not being built for work. I hate them because finding a decent work truck that won't bankrupt me is becoming a huge hassle.
I needed a truck for almost the exact same reasons - including hauling garbage - and made do with a pretty old Silverado 1500. Trucks are built like, well, trucks and with even minimal maintenance.
I got mine in 2013 for about $12k with 180,000 miles on the odometer, and drove it for 70,000 more miles with minimal maintenance until I moved to the suburbs and didn't need it anymore. Hauled rocks and hogs and feed and garbage, got stuck in a muddy field and dented and scratched it as much as I wanted because it's a truck for doing truck stuff.
Ford Maverick? Same price as a Civic, good mpg (for a truck), and it can replace your car.
Oh my fellow European, affordable delivery just ain't a thing in America, always shocked me just how expensive daily life there is. But even then you're absolutely right, 99% of everything Americans "haul" would easily fit inside a regular family car or even a smaller car like a Renault Clio. And for the 1%, why not just borrow/get a small trailer or rent a small van?
Also just a side note, I was shocked when I visited my American buddies and legit NOTHING fit inside those huge ass vehicle. We bought like 8 bags of groceries for a week trip and 2 of those bags were on my lap IN THE FRONT SEAT!!! I mean you're not putting anything in the trunk, shit'll break, and the back seats have barely any space, it's ridiculous.
I can assure anyone who is wondering that a 60" tv fits in a 2007 Mazda 3. Sure I had to take it out of the box but it fit in the back with the seats folded down.
I once hauled about 200 paving stones in a Mazda Protege. I spread them out on the floor and in the trunk so it wouldn't hurt anything for the three mile drive I made back form the home improvement store
So I have a theory that the carrying capacity of a car has nothing to do with the size of the car and everything to do with how much the owner cares about the car and the comfort tolerance of the passengers. Out of all the loads I've observed carried with a car(pickups count as cars but not vans or trailers) the biggest are always in a small beat-up old car full of tolerant and poor young people. I can't think of a time when I've tried loading a car and stopped because the car is too small, it's always because the owner objects.
I like this. It feels like something Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett would have written.
Particularly in rural America, that's not an option. When dealing with used stuff, well one person or the other is going to need a truck to haul it. If you take a boat regularly to water or a camper regularly to outdoors, you need something that can tow.
I rarely need to haul, but I do need to tow a lot, so I have an SUV that can tow and rent a trailer on the odd occasion I have to haul stuff. The SUV is from a European manufacturer if that's comforting.
But these pickups have laughably tall heights that is just a detriment to utility and a safety hazard. Ironically brought on by efficiency standards that gave a pass to larger vehicles, so when the car company can either try to engineer more efficiency or just make them bigger, they chose 'just make em bigger'. The truck buying market doesn't help, with a lot of people getting giddy at the thought of playing "I drive a big rig" with their personal vehicle.
I didn't know that NYC counts as a rural area, pardon me.
It turns out that over 97% of people in the US do not live in NYC. I don't know why you think when I cited rural America I would have even possibly been trying to cover NYC...
Because 97% of Americans don't live in rural areas.
Well, it gets trickier.
About 20% unambiguously live in 'rural'. That's pretty significant and a lot of folks that get hit with this are in that 20%.
But 'urban' can be... not very urban. So the example led with NYC, the biggest and most dense city by a wide wide margin. I live within one of the top 50 cities and need to rent a truck on occasion. I'll say for sake of argument roughly the top 50 cities represent areas that are so well served they shouldn't need a truck. Only 15% of the US population lives in the top 50 cities. Only 30% live in cities larger than 100,000 people, if you want to assert that relatively smaller cities 'should' be better served. So 70% of people live outside of cities over 100,000....
It's not free; it's included in the price. Those are entirely different things.
As for why someone would want to haul things themselves, well, there are a lot of things that you can not reasonably expect delivery on, or paying another person to haul would be unreasonably expensive for. Does that necessarily make up for the cost of a truck? Probably not by itself, in most cases.
Technically - yes. But you won't get a discount if you try to haul it yourself. You'll just spend more money and time.
That's a Piaggio Ape (or Apecar), which has been made in literally any and all possible shapes and uses. It has been used by generations in Italy and many other countries to haul everything imaginable. The standard variation has an open bed, the one posted in the image is a modified Ape with a closed bed.
It's the Vespa of the pickup truck world.
Oh, I only ever saw it like this, didn't know it came with an open bed variation. mkay, I stand corrected, that is absolutely beautiful!
Oh boy! I want to see you get on a highway with that and then drive it 50 miles in traffic at highway speed.
Motorway speeds in the UK during rush hour is comparable to a walking speed.
Or you could not do that and still get where you're going, albeit slightly less fast.
I'd do it.
And that's why those aren't available in the US.