[chemeril]

Finally some action from the NHTSA on this. As a driver of tiny Japanese shitboxes my entire life the last ten years of new vehicle development has been terrifying to watch from the driver's seat. Not only are these new (last 10 years) trucks and SUVs absurdly large and growing bigger, the sightlines from their driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible. Here's to hoping the car bloat arms race gets damped a bit with legislation stemming from the NHTSA's push.

[hyperbovine]

Recently did a one-day rental on a late model American pickup truck for a cross-town move. I absolutely could not believe the ground clearance and (lack of) view out the front of that thing. (My frame of reference is a bicycle and, occasionally, a Honda fit from the aughts.) You literally need a sort of ladder, which comes standard, to get in. Driving it was what I, previously, imagined getting behind the wheel of a semi-truck to be. It amazes me that auto mfrs can just ramp the size of these things up without any regard to how it might affect others on the road or sidewalk.

[readthenotes1]

My small car was totaled in a fast food parking lot be a ford f-250 whose driver claimed to literally not have seen me when he broadsided me. it was easy to believe as his hood was higher than my roof.

[rajnathani]

Side (off-topic): I really like how I finally found the missing word for the 2000-2009s: "aughts".

[themaninthedark]

I prefer "Dawn of the millennium"

[FireBeyond]

> driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible

This is the thing. The sightlines and pillars are so big it's literally difficult to see other cars on the road with you.

That alone should warrant some safety regulation.

[chemeril]

If I pull up behind a modern pickup at a stoplight my car is completely occluded. If I pull up to the passenger's side of a modern pickup the driver has no idea: they cannot see down far enough from the driver's seat to know that there's another vehicle next to them. It's remarkable.

I knew things were off the rails when I parked my beater 2nd-gen Ranger next to a then-new F-250 and couldn't see the top of the Ranger's cab when looking through the F-250's windows.

[klingoff]

I don't really understand why first cities allow private vehicles in general. Either you have commercial plates or you are basically a nuisance to residents and your convenience lowers the value of voter's residency.

I don't think main street has an argument any more for why we should risk getting run over for out of town shoppers and office space can largely be rezoned.

I don't particularly like the experience of walking in a city with bikers, but at least they are engaging in as much risk as they put others through and accidents with them are likely to be short term inconvenience instead of permanent injuries and death.

[amiga386]

> I don't really understand why first cities allow private vehicles in general.

Because people of all capabilities need to get to the businesses in the cities. If you're proposing prohibiting private transportation, you first need adequate public transportation, which is expensive and often lacking.

The alternative, where _nobody_ has easy access to the city's businesses, tends to result in the businesses moving out of the city to somewhere else, taking their tax payments with them, often places that are _even harder_ to get to for people who don't have cars... because businesses need customers. If you won't support them (by providing affordable and convenient means for the customers to reach the businesses), they won't wait to die, they will solve the problem themselves.

Only cities which have well-developed public transport networks, and have very popular city centres (to the point of congestion) are even thinking of banning cars from them. The rest of the cities need all the help they can get to fend off financial ruin from e-commerce.

[klingoff]

Obviously emergency vehicles are needed and similar access for commercial and handicap vehicles makes sense.

Popular cities don't really need to compete to fill a bunch of commercial real estate. They have people who commute every day by public transport and residents who are competing for real estate with this property.

It's enough now with the cars, there are mall towns and cities happily lose 'business' to them because it is not worth wasting 30% of all land to attract a bunch of people who may never actually get out of their car in your city and then at most to a business that probably pays less in property tax than a correspondingly sized residence.

These businesses can't vote and if they aren't in town to complain the noise from them stops. There were also a lot of angry horse cart drivers once.

[kelnos]

Because public transit is woefully inadequate to get people where they need to go in nearly every city in the US. Even if we were to magically immediately fund this to the levels needed, it would take 10-20 years to build out that infrastructure. (To be fair, need could be met with buses until subways and other light rail is built.)

But people in the US don't actually want that, unfortunately. They mostly like being able to drive around in cities (either their own city, or nearby cities where they want to visit). It's weird to say that, because most people would probably say they hate driving in city traffic. But when the alternative is driving to some sort of park-and-ride and switching to trains or buses, many US residents will prefer to drive.

Let's also not forget that even some of the most transit-heavy places in the world still allow private vehicles. In some (Tokyo especially comes to mind), it ends up usually being more expensive and take more time to drive than to take transit, but people still choose or need to do it for whatever reason.

Your phrasing of "why cities allow" is a common one, but remember that a city isn't its own entity with its own wants and desires. The laws reflect the wants and desires of the voters who live there.