aight, i'm just gonna unload here
I'll lay my cards out first that I don't really like BIG TRUCKS and BIG TRACTORS. Not my thing. I use a pickup and a tractor for my work and sometimes I have to fix them, which is why I'm on this and similar forums. I've lived both urban and rural. Currently and hopefully for the rest of my life I live rurally but I have lived in cities often over the years. I see a lot of people looking at this from a rural perspective (which makes sense, this IS a tractor forum!), so I want to add an urban perspective on the issue. The article (which I never saw the link for, but I assume it's the recent one in The Atlantic) is definitely written with urban perspective in mind.
This is about people living in cities wanting their neighborhoods to be safer and more livable. Many large cities have changed big time in the last 40 years. Cities of 40 years ago were mostly treated like service centers for a larger metro area. Lots of people would commute in for work but urban residents tended to skew to young singles, poorer folks, and people of color who, for various reasons, do not have a lot of clout with urban planning and infrastructure policy. Gentrification has really blown up in the past 20 years and now more affluent people want to raise their families in cities. And they want to walk or bike to a school or store with their kids (and let their older kids do so on their own) without running a gauntlet. They want parks, not parking lots. And they know how to navigate and leverage political power so they're pretty likely to make some headway. And good for them. They live there. I'm just passing through.
From a walking and cycling perspective, it's pretty simple: Cars are a threat to pedestrians and cyclists. And not vice versa. Period. All the victim-blaming of pedestrians on this thread doesn't change that, unless you consider the cost of re-detailing your grille and removing bloodstains to be higher than the value of someone's life. I don't care how good a driver you personally are or how clean your record is, vehicles are dangerous - a top 5 cause of death in many countries. If you have that one night in calving season or when your kid is sick and you don't get enough sleep, the risk goes up. And I get it, you still have to go to work or pick up meds or whatever. But you don't want to kill someone, even if they are on their phone or drunk (last I checked, these were not capital offenses). So why fight against measures that mitigate that risk? Like better bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, lower speed limits, congestion zones, transit to get more cars off the road, and yes, smaller vehicles. Because:
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It feels like auto companies are marketing to our worst instincts - it's like an arms race where everyone needs to get a bigger truck to feel safe and see over and around the other big-ass trucks. Stick airbags in the pillars that protect the people inside the car but obscure the people outside. Who cares as long as you're safe? Everyone else can look out for themselves! Personal responsibility, you know?
The only way out of these kinds of vicious cycles is a regulatory nudge. No one is going to be banning large pickups, but it wouldn't be a bad thing if you can't drive them anywhere you want in cities, need an additional license endorsement, or pay a premium on insurance that would accurately reflect their costs to those around us. All these things would discourage people from buying a big truck unless they really needed it to make a living. I would love to see insurance companies switch to a mileage based premium instead of monthly that would encourage us to use the safer vehicle when possible. I think the roads would be a lot safer if we left the big truck at home whenever possible.
tldr - stop whining and let people in cities have safe streets, it's not an assault on your personal freedom any more than having to get a drivers license or purchase insurance.
p.s.
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544cc and 28 wild horses, baybeee. now that's a pickup for the city.
