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
I've said it's stupid when the whole SUV crazy began some 15 years ago. Everyone rushing buying SUV's to chug their children to school and everyone was buying them with excuse of safety and visibility. Nevermind that when everyone has these oversized dick compensators, no one is "safer" any longer and for visibility, people have proven they can't drive for shit whether they are in a small hatchback or a tall SUV. They still don't see shit and still hit things because they don't actually look.
And there is no way going back, it's just getting worse. Few years ago European sized SUV's were the most we've seen. Now some are Murica sized SUV's that are the size of aircraft carrier and I'm seeing more and more stupid pickup trucks like F150. And it's not driven by some lumber worker who needs heavy equipment in a middle of forest, it's always some rich posers driving them.
They can't revert what has been done, they can just stop this madness at what it is now.
In my opinion that should by handled by vehicle taxes. If your car exceeds the dimensions cities are designed for right now, your tax increases. If it's noticeably smaller/lighter (think kei car), you get a tax rebate.
People would be a lot more interested in compact vehicles if driving one made a real difference in their wallet.
beyond a certain size should require a Commercial Drivers License as well
Issue is, people who buy oversized SUVs already have money, they don't really care if taxes on them increase. It'll just become even greater showcase of who has cash to throw around and who doesn't.
We won't need to change maximum car size, we need to change average car size. Because right now politicians are arguing for a reduction in bike and foot paths and for more space to be dedicated to parking because the average car keeps getting bigger.
I didn't care whether people who drive 100,000 € luxury SUVs keep doing so. But I do care whether sedans and hatchbacks get replaced by 20,000 € SUVs.
@Jesus_666 @RejZoR I agree, as long as non-car owners are considered. If a kei car owner gets a rebate, non-car owners should get an even bigger one.
Mind you, I'm talking about a partial rebate on the vehicle tax. People who don't own cars don't pay vehicle tax, of course.
Honestly I think it was more than 15 years ago. As soon as "light trucks" (a category including SUVs) became less regulated than any other vehicle, it's been aggressive marketing from automakers to push them. Remember when even the Simpsons was pushing how terrible and dangerous SUVs were with the canyonero? It's just been political loopholes pushed by corporations, and now we live in a country where the top 3 best selling vehicles have all been 20 foot long pickups for years.
We didn't even have term SUV back then in my country. It was either a sedan, hatchback or a "jeep" (which is what we generally call any larger 4x4 car).