This story is published a few times a year with the details changed. It's a perennial like "people will drive around holiday time". A lot of it does not apply to Massachusetts, more to the South with its wide pedestrian-eating boulevards that turn a daily stroll into a game of Frogger.
Part of what does apply here relates to the perverse incentives of regulation. In the 1990s American car makers offered us a product that looked like a big car but was legally classified as a truck, meaning it did not have to meet safety or fuel economy standards set for cars. That was the now-ubiquitous SUV. I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's "Big and Bad" for a look at the state of affairs 20 years ago. SUVs are no longer trucks, but the incentives to go big remain. Last winter a story made the rounds about the Postal Service buying bigger trucks than it needed. USPS, like car buyers, is following the incentives. Trucks over 8,500 pounds don't have to meet stricter standards for smaller trucks. To burn a gallon of gas in a 5,000 pound truck is villainous, but to burn the same gallon in a 9,000 pound vehicle is virtuous. A car gets no credit for having good visibility or handling, allowing the driver to avoid a collision. A car gets no blame for huge blind spots. The ideal car, from the point of view of regulators and reviewers, would be a 26,000 pound tank with heavy armor and a tiny vision slit. (Over 26,000 pounds you need a CDL to drive it.) It would constantly be crushing people and things, but oh the star ratings for crash safety. Visibility is important because a lot of what gets people killed in urban environments is lack of situational awareness. Can you see the pedestrian crossing the street parallel to you? In a convertible with the top down, yes. In the cab of a semi, no. But there is no "star" system for cars you can see out of. We could imagine taking away the quota system for fleet average fuel economy and let the price of gas drive people in the right direction. And imagine what would happen if we had European-level gas prices instead of a complicated formula of taxes and fines which mostly don't show up as line items in the sticker price. Complaints about gas prices are about the only thing that can scare a member of our state legislature. John Carr On Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 1:36 PM John Mendelson <johntmendel...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths > > https://nyti.ms/3i6DS8Q > > > -- > The LincolnTalk mailing list. > To post, send mail to Lincoln@lincolntalk.org. > Search the archives at http://lincoln.2330058.n4.nabble.com/. > Browse the archives at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/private/lincoln/. > Change your subscription settings at > https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/lincoln. > -- The LincolnTalk mailing list. To post, send mail to Lincoln@lincolntalk.org. Search the archives at http://lincoln.2330058.n4.nabble.com/. Browse the archives at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/private/lincoln/. Change your subscription settings at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/lincoln.
