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!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
There's diagrams that show the visual impairments such trucks have. They are worse than semi trucks and even an Abrams tank.
I don't get how these people even feel comfortable driving something where you can't see the road that's in front of you for 10+ meters out. I just wouldn't feel safe, there could be any kind of obstruction you can't see on the road from 10m away but will still fuck up your day and/or life.
As a truck driver I get it. It's nice to see more. The tradeoff isn't worth it and not why they do it. I would bet my paycheck they never take it off road either. Which would be the only good reason to raise something that much. Truckers have a good reason to. They have giant engine and transmissions that need to last for the industrial work involved.
but you don't actually see more, that's kinda the whole point here?
maybe you see over other cars but you lose sight closer to you
You see more further down the road. Which you need when it takes 4 to 8 times longer to stop depending on conditions.
Can you elaborate? I don't quite follow.
4-8x longer to stop because of cold snowy or icy weather? Or because of increased weight of such large vehicles?
And why does seeing farther matter for stopping distance, when the rule of thumb is to maintain X car lengths or Y seconds between your car and the car in front of you? Not even a fully loaded semi needs the entire length of what their higher viewing angle grants them
4 if it's good weather. 8 times in bad. Your reaction time in a bigger vehicle is different because of the weight. So both your guesses apply.
Maintaining distance does help, however it's not a perfect matrix. People cut in front of big vehicles constantly expecting the same distance and it just doesn't help. The added view helps. An entire industry is based on it and backed by all sorts of reasons.
What they haul plays a role as well. Liquids and gases slosh funny and higher speeds.
I'd be interested to see some studies that support the idea that increased ride height in a vehicle results in fewer accidents (or fatalities or injuries, however you'd measure it) specifically because of the change in viewing angle
I'm extremely skeptical, especially since taller vehicles are becoming more common, wouldn't that alone diminish this effect?
The Smith System. Look into it. Science backed results.
I don't see "sit really high" in these five driving habits
Then you need to dive deeper into the history of how it was developed and why it was. Reduction into just 5 steps isn't looking into why it's backed by an entire industry.
They don't look or care. Their car is big enough that they'll plough right through a bunch of kids before they even notice they're on the sidewalk.
It’s simple uneducated hubris. Nothing bad could ever happen to them because they are a Good American.
If they thought about things and came to good conclusions afterwards, they probably wouldn't be driving this kind of car to begin with. The people who are driving it are probably not good thinkers.
I have one of these out of necessity. I don’t understand getting one as a daily driver for someone to go to their office job and pick up groceries.
Agreed, but some people drive that way. It's their road, get out of the way. I had a 1996 Dodge dually long ago for pulling a trailer, and its visibility wasn't very bad, except for around the damn side columns. I got into the habit of leaning forward and back as I would turn so that I had some idea of what was being blocked. At one point we had considered upgrading to the big trucks like the F-450/F550, and I got into one to see what it was like. I could see EVERYTHING. I was like, holy shit, this is luxury.
Side columns like that should be illegal. I was driving my stepdad's '21 Silverado 1500 crew cab a few weeks ago and was totally blown away when I almost pulled out in front of someone coming from the right in a big ass truck.
This attitude is really prevalent here. As in you don't really need to see the road, just the car in front.
People scream blue bloody murder about bikes on the road.
Looking at those dumbfucks driving their emotional support vehicle in the city, they don't seem to be comfortable
They are driving slow and can't stay in their lane, as they can't judge the distances correctly
Emotional support vehicle? Don't you mean Gender Affirmation Vehicle?
They don’t care, as long as they get to drive their behemoth and feel powerful.
I have a Chevy 2500 to tow my RV (needed for the weight and it’s my home) and I hate not being able to see shit. I would gladly replace it with a cab over if they brought them to the states. The truck only gets used to move the RV from site to site and I have small single cylinder motorcycles to get around because fuck parking that thing anywhere.
That would require rational thought