| Over the years my opinion on light trucks has shifted from ambivalence to seething resentment. The main reason is that I now live in an area where large vehicles have become increasingly disruptive to normal living: 1) Side streets that prioritize street parking (e.g. streets with multi-family housing) mean that a poorly-parked truck is literally impossible to see around when you're driving a smaller vehicle. Exiting an apartment driveway is frequently a precarious maneuver when you can't clearly see traffic coming in one or both directions. Heaven forbid there's a bicyclist obstructed from view. 2) Headlight elevation blinds other drivers, especially those in shorter vehicles. If you're being blinded from behind at night, you have to slow down to let them pass, or else your mirrors become useless or even actively dangerous to look at. 3) Blind spots in newer light trucks are horrendously large, as indicated in the video. Many drivers are not aware of the blind spot to the front-right side of the cab and are at risk of being PITed by an inattentive driver changing lanes into them. 4) Echoing the point about parking infrastructure. Being unable to park these sorts of vehicles in standard spaces and garages means that many of these end up parked on the street where inconvenience to other drivers is maximized. The only way a driver can completely mitigate these problems is to simply join in the Bigger Vehicle arms race, to the detriment of all other drivers and pedestrians. |
The "personal space" of an SUV is gigantic, while driving around in small cars you have a vastly better sense of the road and people around you. If everyone is driving cars, your visibility of the road and traffic is far better because you can see through the windshields of cars in front of you.
AND THOSE GODDAMN HEADLIGHTS.
When the human race was first getting mainstream education on global warming in the late 1990s, the United States of America collectively decided to basically double the weight of its vehicles, and squander engineering wonders that vastly increased the fuel economy of vehicles.
If the demand and desire for these is really so great, slap a $10,000 surcharge + $1,000/year fee on their ownership and redirect all of it to BEVs and alt energy.