These rules are convoluted and near impossible to apply. Specific braking speeds for some objects compared to others? That requires reliable computer vision, which hasn't been demonstrated anywhere yet.
And those speeds? 92mph is 148kph! Why the fuck are cars even permitted to be capable of that when no road in the country allows it? And why would you want to introduce unpredictable braking scenarios at such speeds?
What is feasible is a speed limiter based on the posted limit, but that'd be too practical.
What is feasible is a speed limiter based on the posted limit, but that'd be too practical.
I have recently got a car that tells me the currently posted limit and it is frequently wrong. It misses sign posts and sometimes thinks that a signpost for a side road applies to you.
It also has a speed limiter and a button to set the limit to the detected speed which I use a lot but I wouldn’t want it to do it itself.
Thing is like none of our roads are properly tested for the posted speed limits. Interstates can often go up to a 75 limit and regular traffic will go at 85 (because cops dont care til more than 10 over and that difference adds up on long trips) with some people going 90+.
There's easier, more effective battles to fight. People aren't giving up their SUV's, and they are a symptom of a bigger problem anyway.
Good public transportation could eliminate millions of cars, roads, and road maintenance.
A few other ideas:
Coal power is disgusting and doesn't even make sense economically anymore.
Cruise ships and mega yachts should flat out be banned. They use a ton of energy and dump sewage right into the ocean
Heavily tax gas powered lawnmowers. They have a surprisingly large environmental impact because they have no pollution controls and often burn a mixture of oil and gas.
Also bunker fuel being burned in ocean shipping. Since there very little regulation they burn some of the worst sulfur-emitting fuel. A single container ship emits the equivalent of something like a few hundred thousand every car on the planet, as I recall
The biggest container ships produce more emissions than every car on the planet. Granted, I think there's at most a half dozen of those in operation, but that's still 6x more than every car on Earth.
I remember hearing that during COVID lockdowns the first year, an estimated 50% of cars were off the road and total annual emissions dropped 2%.
The increase in SUVs isn't driven by people's natural preferences; it's driven by automakers being incentivized by stupid CAFE standards to push SUVs on them. Those bad regulations are what we need to fix.
You know what's fucked, Standards Australia annouced they were considered increasing the minimum size for parking spots and gave only 3 weeks for public comment.
So many comments against, but I bet the car lobbies get their way anyway.
This entire article is quotable, but this one stuck with me: "The analysis, by the International Energy Agency, found that the rising emissions from SUVs in 2023 made up 20% of the global increase in CO2, making the vehicles a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis."
Dallas has an extensive light rail network now. A friend rode it recently (wanted to check out all the major 3 lines and stops along the way), said it was all homeless and poor people.
The people who drive these things here in the UK are mental. I got smashed by one once overtaking me on a slip road because I wasn't going fast enough for him. I followed him all the way to his golf club and confronted him about it. His tank was barely scratched while my driver side door was totally fucked.
Yeah even the SUV would be uncomfortably wide on some UK roads, end yet they're getting really common. They're almost all driven by people who don't need a large vehicle.
I've seen a small woman driving a Hummer in Ware (Hertfordshire UK) of all places, can just about see out of the windows (that's another thing that pisses me off, don't people know you can raise the seat to let you see out of the windows?), can't park in normal bays as it's too big (and she can't see) and it has a plate something like V8 HMR. FFS.
I haven’t read up on the new law but the EU already mandates that all new vehicles are required to have “advanced emergency braking”.
I wonder how different that actually is from the US law, or are the car manufactures making a fuss over something they are already doing somewhere else.
Plus, you tend to need to carry a lot of stuff when evacuating. My photo albums alone are too heavy to cart around for any meaningful distance, never mind spare clothing etc.
In what scenario would you bring photo albums when evacuating? If it's non-serious then you can come back, it's serious then you should have higher priorities.
In other countries, where motorcycles are common, you'd see a good portion of them zig-zagging past the mostly stopped cars. While carry capacity is severely limited, compared to a car, it's still better than nothing.
Now, people without any means of transportation are pretty much fucked, because to evacuate, you need time to pack some of your shit and some way to transport it with you. Depending on the event, you'd have to choose between GTFO ASAP or packing the most you can. Even if a government provided buses for people without cars, how long would it take for everyone to finish packing their stuff inside and getting in before it's too late?
This reminds me of watching a Vietnamese YouTuber talking about getting through a major typhoon. I don't think they explained how the buses were organized, but there were buses.
I'd cycle and camp. I reckon I could cover 50-100km a day on a bike, possibly more if motivated by emergency. 20km city riding takes me an hour usually.
I almost have the proper gear for this... I'm sure I could make it work in an emergency. A good contingency idea. I think I've done about 80k in a day before, and it wasn't particularly strenuous... you can cover a lot of ground on a bike if you just keep going.
It's not just remote places that can get evacuated.
I don't live in the north, don't own a car, and don't worry about it, but if something catastrophic were to happen here, I hope there would be options for the many non-car-having people.
I had to check Google maps to make sure but the next closest city appears to be about 300kms south (Athabasca, unless Lac La Biche is closer), even with public transit they aren't getting anywhere else. There's nothing in so much of Northern Canada you're screwed for mobility without a vehicle.
What systemic problems are you referring to? Seoul has some of the best public transport in the world and the vehicle was a sedan. The driver either was drunk/high or had a stroke.
9 dead people don't speak for themselves in your mind, I guess. Why are you on this community?
I'd love to go through it with you, step by step, using crayons and simple wording if I must, but alas! Not one of the 19 articles I looked at provided an exact location or pictures clear enough to figure that out.
My logic here is very simple: If a car can hit pedestrians, then the infrastructure is bad. 9 people died to prove this point and you're acting as if this is a freak accident that happens once in a decade. It doesn't, people die all the time because of inattentive drivers or faulty vehicles. Bollards save lives.
Looking at the second photo in the article it looks like it bent the bollards over, which I would guess mightve launched the car into the air...
I think the bigger systemic problem would be the 8 lane roads in the area which enabled enough space for the car to get up enough speed to do that sort of damage to a bollard: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aHDmVJMPt3LKvAeL9?g_st=ac
Another systematic problem is the enbiggening of vehicles in the name of occupants saftey(larger pillars for better rollover protection, and extra passenger cabin rigidity, which also harms visibility for the driver due to wider pillars)
The systemic problems are a stroad which seems designed for high speeds, yet with many dangerous points of interactions with pedestrians and other drivers. There seems to be no infrastructure to protect pedestrians and no design features to limit speeds. As you point out, this wasn't caused by a tank of a vehicle but a standard sedan.
This is in stark contrast to Vision Zero, a strategy where it's nearly impossible for vehicle collisions to cause fatalities. It doesn't matter if a driver is impaired, we have the technology to engineer away these deaths. From the images in article, the road seems to follow almost none of the tenants of Vision Zero.
Fuck Cars
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