It would quickly fall apart or look and cost a completely different model. The Current Model is build out and don’t worry about Maintenance :-p Let the stuff decay while building farther away.
Don’t get me wrong Houston was not very appealing from what I saw (beyond some good food) the city wouldn’t exist at all anywhere close to the way it does without the car.
My only point is Houston is cheaper even with increased transportation costs. (and sucks in a way that is hard to overcome :-p)
Something we knew, but now we know even more than we knew. Increasing traffic enforcement doesn’t make the roads any safer. Pulling over more drivers and handing out more tickets isn’t going to work if we actually want cars to kill less people. The only answer is to use cars less and to redesign the roads themselves to be safer.
If we can’t ban cars, at least ban any car that is unnecessarily large.
Finally, a part of this I can sincerely agree with. The gradual swelling of utility vehicles, driven by the US market, is an absolute blight on the vehicular landscape. There is practically no utility served by having a fucking huge truck, that is not served equally well by a normal ute of a more realistic size - down here, for decades, thousands and thousands of tradesmen did perfectly well with normal sedan-sized utes and one-tonners, and many still do, even as new utes slowly get bigger and bulkier, to no real additional benefit.
There are a handful of use cases for those larger vehicles, I will admit - but there’s always been the option to buy a more suitable model for that purpose, rather than making that model the standard.
It seems to be impossible to buy a 1990s sized pickup truck with two or three seats at least in the us. People now “want” them to transport a family of four and have a misshapen bed too small for practical use.
At least in the US it has become possible to get the smaller vans used in Europe.
Which is really a failure on the part of automakers - they were around down here, sold as Dual Cabs and similar, and they were always extremely popular choices. It’s just basically adding a little more car into the half car half truck equation. You still had plenty of bed space, plenty of towing and carrying capacity, just some extra seats.
It’s not a failure from their perspective. It’s a huge overwhelming success. Their marketing departments successfully intentionally altered the desires of a large portion of the world’s vehicle-buying population. They made, and continue to make, people want large trucks and SUVs. It’s has, and continues, to make them fucktons of money. It’s about as close to AoE mind control as you can get, and it’s working incredibly well.
Less than you’d think. Pretty much everywhere outside of the US, most people aren’t as keen on them, and buy them because they’re what you can get. You want a normal sized ute? Buy an old one, or…that’s it. No other choice, regardless of what people want. The US market is big enough that the customers they lose, because people are buying old vehicles or vehicles from other(hypothetical) manufacturers who want to risk low sales in the huge american market, are negligable enough to ignore.
Just to chime in, its not about utility of the Utility vehicle its about what might be “secondary” considerations like feelings of power/prestige and “safety” with the big dumb suv-truck that drive the segment in America. Just picture the “Its Toasted” scene from Mad Men but with Hemi engines and luxury amenities for your 5 person 4 door cab truck.
I have no idea what “It’s Toasted” is, but I’m picking up what you’re putting down, and yeah, I think you’re right.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Mad Men but the “It’s Toasted” scene is both incredible and very apt here.
Jaloponik did a similar article that was in work before the VICE article published.
American Trucks And SUVs Are Nearly As Large As Some WWII Tanks
Reclaim that whole area for trees. WTF
Welcome to the War on Cars… BORIS JOHNSON???
It’s really not anything new. Him biking to work was one of the main images of his time as mayor of London. He kickstarted the London cycle path “superhighways” project. He doesn’t want similar projects elsewhere being removed, and it’s no surprise he’d throw a little bit more weight behind cycling as PM.