Why Absurdly Large Trucks Are Terrible For Cities

recently i was staying in an airbnb where the tv just had a bizarre selection of obscure channels and i got kind of obsessed with a channel that shows nothing but wall-to-wall episodes of bob barker era prices right mostly from the 1980s and what was completely jarring besides the hairstyles and fashion choices was the size of the motor vehicles they were giving away i mean was there actually a time in us history where the size of the average car was like a ford fiesta apparently so and what was really striking was when they gave away a pickup truck which was rare because a pickup wasn't a hot item back then and it was usually something around the size of a subaru forester so that got me started thinking about how the pickup track evolved into what it is today and what it means that's all coming up next this is city nerd weekly content on cities and transportation and you know it used to be the if you wanted to see unreasonably large pickup trucks you had to buy a ticket to a monster truck rally well today you could just go out to your nearest strode and watch the show for free so i had to do a little research and make sure i wasn't just imagining that pickup trucks are radically different from what they were near the end of the 20th century and sure enough there's a consumer reports article that analyzes industry data and they found that the hood height of passenger trucks had increased by at least 11 since 2000 and that new pickups were on average 24 heavier compared to 2000 and i love this answer from the vp of analytics at jd power trucks could look less tough but you don't want to be the one to make your truck look soft you can also go find this report from the u.s environmental protection agency which has some interesting insights on how the vehicle fleet has evolved over time you can see by far the most radical increases in vehicle weight are from pickup trucks and the implications for the environment are not lost on the epa so fast forward to 2022 the top three selling vehicles in the us are the ford f series the ram and the silverado and these vehicles just don't bear much resemblance at all to what they were giving away on the prices right keep in mind the big auto manufacturers know what they're doing here pickup trucks have some of the highest profit margins in the industry the average silverado clears about 17 000 in profit for gm and they really do have the marketing dialed in the ads play up this kind of sturdy unpretentious no-nonsense blue collar ethic and the design with the grille the bumper the headlamps it's all about projecting strength and stoutness kind of like the way they used to design bank buildings back in the gilded age of course if the stock design doesn't project enough i don't know intimidation or general obnoxiousness there are all kinds of after-market mods available anyway i'm not here to trash pickups at least not completely they're definitely useful for specific situations and they're probably indispensable if you're like a landscaper or an hvac repair technician or something but let's be real most pickup trucks are not bought for actual work purposes i've read that something like 80 of pickup truck sales are based on like aesthetics rather than utility so well i decided to test this by going out and doing a highly scientific field study to see what percentage of trucks were actually carrying stuff as opposed to just driving around looking extremely cool with an empty truck bed i spent 20 minutes or so on this very attractive pedestrian overpass and i counted the pickup trucks passing beneath looking at how many were actually hauling or towing stuff some of them were obviously for commercial use so i counted for that separately but i counted up to 100 vehicles and what it got was 67 just driving around being awesome by the way in the traffic engineering profession this is what we call level of service a a road with four lanes in each direction with no apparent traffic on it is definitely the highest and best use of urban space don't let anybody tell you different so let's get to my thesis for this video which is outside of legitimate commercial uses pickup trucks are i don't know kind of dumb and not good for the transportation system i mean i get the pickup trucks are useful for occasionally hauling stuff around but you know it's 22. instead of buying a 50 000 pickup truck why not i don't know just have large items delivered to your house by professional delivery people or if you really have to you can rent a pickup truck from like u-haul for a couple hours for 20 bucks but the people who buy a pickup truck just because they might have to haul a couple things once or twice a year they're like the people who buy a house that has two or three more bedrooms than they actually need just because they might get visitors once or twice a year i mean i don't know hotels exist right so let's quickly cover the reasons why this just doesn't make sense compared to the average car pickup trucks cost more get worse mileage produce more emissions they're harder to navigate and park in an urban environment they cost more to insure and they carry fewer people unless you pay even more to get a crew cab now some of these are personal choices if you want to spend more on fuel and insurance and depreciation it's kind of on you but if you're going to drive a vehicle around that negatively impacts my safety well then i'm probably gonna have something to say about it so i'm gonna talk about safety but before i get into this i just wanna acknowledge that anti-schmidt does really good journalism in this area particularly with respect to pedestrian impacts so i'll leave a link to the article she wrote for the atlantic down in the description if you haven't read it you should i'm going to approach this a bit differently though and just apply some newtonian physics nothing too complicated i'm going to keep this fairly simple motor vehicle crashes are complex they come in a lot of gruesome varieties a lot depends on the angle of impact whether the vehicles involved have modern safety features or good crumple zones and a bunch of other variables but in its simplest form the severity of a vehicle crash is a function of how many g's a vehicle experiences or put another way how much acceleration or deceleration or change in velocity occurs over the very small time increment of the crash event so car crashes are essentially an example of newton's third law of motion which is when two bodies interact they apply forces to one another that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction so what is force remedial physics here but force equals mass times acceleration so if two vehicles have the same mass like say two honda civics and they get in a head-on crash they're both gonna experience the same change in velocity over the very small time increment of the crash event which means they'll both be experiencing the same number of g's and roughly the same crash severity but if the crash is asymmetrical say a honda civic and an f series pickup that weighs twice as much the math is a lot different all other things being equal the civic is going to experience twice the change in velocity as the f series which makes it a much more severe event for the driver of the smaller car so when you see a graph like this that shows pickup trucks getting heavier and heavier and you know they're the top selling vehicles and they actually represent over 20 percent of new vehicle sales now what we're really talking about here is a massive systemic involuntary transfer of additional risk to people who choose to drive lighter more efficient more environmentally friendly vehicles and that's just how it is apparently there's no recourse this is america freedom of choice is king and the government generally isn't gonna get in the way of you being as big of an anti-social jerk as you wanna be so yeah i'm gonna give you a couple more takeaways on this but first quick reminder that if depressing content like this is what passes for entertainment in your life it does help out the channel if you drop a like on the video express yourself down in the comments and subscribe if the mood strikes and checking the total this week we now have enough subscribers to fill estadio de la ceramica home ground of current euro league cup holders villarreal and come on who doesn't love a yellow stadium surrounded by tapas bars you know there's this idea out there that people who complain about enormous heavy vehicles going 50 miles an hour or more on city streets is really just a cultural war thing like the only reason i could possibly have to criticize pickup trucks isn't because they're significantly more likely to maim people but because i'm an elitist and i might not agree with the politics of the median pickup truck driver i'm just trying to make a rational argument though there are valid reasons for the existence of maybe 20 to 30 percent of the pickup trucks that are on the road the rest of them though well let me just leave you with a couple of quotes from what i think is a really excellent academic paper on this subject it's pounds that kill a 2013 paper by michael l anderson and maximilian of hammer from cal berkeley i'll leave a link down in the description but they say the net benefit of vehicle weight on traffic fatalities is smaller than the private benefit of vehicle weight on traffic fatalities and consumers are incentivized to purchase heavier vehicles than is socially optimal or more succinctly heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for other vehicles that's all the depressing content i have for you today folks keep the great topic suggestions coming and i'll be back with a new episode next week i'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 267,074

Keywords: pickup trucks, heavy vehicles, unsafe at any speed, urbanism, urbanist

Id: aIy5uv5-VrE

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022