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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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn't fit in many places around here it's owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
Where I live the speed has recently been reduced from 30 mph to 15 mph in an effort to make the area more livable. Roads have been narrowed with more room for trees, sidewalks and bike paths. As well as artificial choke points and high speed bumps, all in an effort to improve life for the people living there. This is done alongside an effort to create larger high speed roads around the area and push cars to use those, which are the long way around but since they are higher speed still faster.
However fucking idiots driving these huge trucks can just go across the speed bumps at 45 mph and they rush all the choke point no matter if they have the right of way or not. When such a huge thing comes rushing at you, you move out of the way. They also regularly cut across parts where cars aren't supposed to go. For example tight corners where the side walk is lower so larger delivery trucks and busses can still make the corner by cutting across the side walk a bit. Regular cars are supposed to just drive around them and in a regular car the kerb will make sure people don't normally do that. The big trucks however use them all the time as they don't even notice the kerb.
Since car brains experience the efforts to slow everything down as obstacles to overcome, more and more choose to drive these huge trucks and drive any speed and route they want. This actually goes against all the efforts to make the area better for pets, bicycles and people.
We desperately need max weight and size limits for cars.
Get the city to install chicanes with trees planted in them. You can't just roll over those and a landship like that is going to have to slow down a lot to maneuver through them.
But yeah, I'd love tax brackets depending on car size. Huge trucks pay more, kei cars pay less. That would make a lot of sense for city liveability and road maintenance.
Ironically, that effort is what landed us in our current predicament. There was a clean air push, and the government wanted to start regulating fuel efficiency in vehicles. They were going to start requiring vehicles to hit certain efficiency minimums. But auto manufacturers lobbied to add a tiny little “efficiency can reduce as vehicle size increases” provision. They said it was because larger cars were naturally less efficient, so they needed that exception to be able to reasonably hit the efficiency targets.
In reality, what happened is the auto manufacturers started making larger and larger cars, so they didn’t have to deal with making efficient vehicles. Because the less efficient engines are cheaper to produce at scale and they can sell them for more. They started doing huge advertisement and astroturfing campaigns, to get people into the “bigger is better” mindset for cars… And it fucking worked. Americans almost universally drive massive cars now, purely because auto manufacturers didn’t want to be held to efficiency standards.
Well, yeah, if the car makers can add exceptions to the law and turn it upside down then the law becomes useless.
I explicitly wouldn't allow that exception. If larger cars are less efficient then disincentivizing their use by means of higher taxes is clearly beneficial to society. If you want to drive that three-ton gas guzzler then you can surely afford that 30% higher vehicle tax. If you can't, might I interest you in this comparatively efficient and tax-reduced Subaru Sambar?
Mind you, I would apply different rules to things like semi trucks that (at least in my part of the world) you can't drive without a special license. But if you can drive it with a regular European class B license then the tax should scale progressively with size and mass because making larger and less efficient cars unattractive is specifically the point.
Holy shit, TIL about Chicanes! I'm definitely going to lobby my city for those!
Time to start hucking bricks at passing trucks
Your city is doing riiiiight! I hear you regarding the growing pains, but the successes are glorious. I'm proud of you!