One of my new neighbors bought a huge-ass truck and it literally takes up the entire parking space. The top of the hood is level with the roof of the sedans on either side of it. I’ve never seen a truck this big before in my life.
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They: But that can’t work in (location)!
Me: So, you are saying that Utrecht is better and more competent than (location)? I say no. I say (location) is the best place, and we can, and should, do even better than Utrecht.
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I mean actually I would say that the Dutch on the whole are better and more competent at building green infrastructure than anyone else on the planet.
But we should learn from them and copy their ideas.
Big truck is def dumb, but I can’t help but be impressed they managed to parallel park so close to the curb in such a tight spot (for their vehicle) though maybe they just pulled in before anyone else parked.
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Up until recently, the spot in front of the mammoth truck has been empty, so it was pretty easy for him to pull in and out.
Now, he’s pretty much fucked unless he’s an amazing parallel parker.
I just noticed the sideview on the curbside was folded in 
, but I guess you gotta protect that 150k plus vehicle investment.
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This is basically the default size of trucks now.
I did learn an interesting thing recently that your photo reminded me of. Almost all pickup trucks sold these days are crew cabs. That is they have four doors and a full back seat. The bed is actually pretty short. Much like how SUVs sort of started out as pickups with an added roof covering the bed, these are the opposite. They are SUVs with the rear roof removed.
Crew cabs, however, are largely kind of useless for actual work. We all know the stats about how most trucks and SUVs are just being driven without cargo or passengers. The crew cab is even worse. In having such a short bed, it’s often not even a suitable vehicle if you wanted to do actual work with it. Go to the hardware store and buy some lumber, it’s going to stick out the back of that short-ass bed!
As for towing anything, crew cabs are also bad at that. Sure, you’ve got a big old engine in there, but a lot of its power is wasted hauling around the back seat and the rest of that giant truck. That reduces the total max weight of the trailer you can tow behind it. A smaller truck with the same engine could pull a much larger load.
People who need a truck to actually do real work and haul things around are not served well by these kinds of trucks. In fact, you see a lot of contractors and such these days using cargo/utility vans because they are actually vastly superior for doing work than the pickups that are on the market. You also see a big market among people who do real work for old pickup trucks. If they’re in good shape, they don’t come cheap, especially since parts are hard to find.
An easy common sense policy, that obviously doesn’t go far enough, is to simply ban the crew cab pickup as a class of vehicle. It serves no practical purpose in this world. The only reason it exists is because awful human beings want to drive around a large truck, but their actual transportation needs are to have a sedan. All pickups should have just have either two seats (driver/passenger) or a single bench. That’s it.
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Oh, I forgot to mention, when I was talking to the neighbor a couple weeks ago, he said that he had to park the truck out front because it literally did not fit in the garages that came with our townhouses.
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I’ve read multiple articles about how the big-ification of the us luxury Truck has across the board reached this point where existing garages are too low/narrow to reliably park so I believe it.
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Our Honda Odyssey, a goddamn minivan, is a more useful work vehicle than these modern crew cab trucks. I can literally fit 4x8 sheets of plywood in the back, something that a number of trucks being made right now cannot manage.
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Having driven a lot in a crew-cab 150 I do understand that it absolutely would suck in any sort of urbanized environment, but anywhere that isn’t an actual bona-fide city it’s a much better driving experience than any of my compact economy cars I’ve driven/owned or any of the minivans I’ve driven. Now, for the money a crew cab F-150 had better be a nicer driving experience than an economy shitbox so it makes sense.
I imagine most families can’t justify in their mind a luxury vehicle, I think many can justify a truck for the perceived utility. Since they’re gonna have to spend big money for a truck, it had better be nice for that money. So it ends up being their nicest vehicle, and they get used to just using it all the time since it beats out their shitbox compact for comfort and handling and performance. Then when its time to replace the truck you don’t say “well lets just get a luxury sedan for all the same niceties but less fuel burn” you get another truck since that’s the paradigm.
And outside an urban area there really isn’t an appreciable downside to driving a larger vehicle so they wouldn’t have had many experiences (if living outside a city) where the truck was too much
People who want that despite being in a city maybe are obtuse; but anyone else driving a truck isn’t exactly running into any negatives for that decision, regardless of the external costs.
Our car-centric society is structured in such a way that driving a car is heavily subsidized. Most of the costs of actually driving a car are not paid directly by the driver, but invisibly absorbed by the rest of society. Sometimes as money, sometimes as pain, and sometimes as death. While true for any car, it is much much more true for this kind of car.
So, like most things, capitalism or not, it comes down to whether a person recognizes and acknowledges the harm they do to others, even indirectly, and if they care. If they are ignorant they can be informed. If they don’t care, they can go fuck themselves.
A year or so ago, I was watching one of those terrible Netflix Christmas movies. You already know most of the plot ahead of time:
Country boy moves to the city for a job and turns into an asshole, and then comes back home for some reason and gets stuck in “Real America” for the holidays.
What I thought was kind of funny was that at least three times during the movie, people were commenting on what a “fancy” car he was driving, as proof that when he went to the City, he became a terrible person and a liberal. The only thing was that in the movie, he was driving an Audi A4 or whatever, and pretty much everyone else was driving huge honking Ford F150s that probably cost more than his A4.
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The fact he’s driving at all means the city diddn’t get to him that much. (Tho I guess it depends on which)
But yeah almost sounds about accurate.
And along with that, most tradesmen here drive either smaller one-tonner utes, or vans. Tradesmen in the UK almost universally drive vans. Even in the US, most contractors and tradesmen pick vehicles with more utility than that god-awful ute with an inflation fetish.
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Kansas City, for example, has basically no public transit. We’ve been trying for many many years but angry whites in the suburbs are terrified of the “criminal element” coming into their neighborhoods. So, we get nothing except a VERY sprawled metro.
Good video putting a name on a thing that many people who are dissatisfied with city design emphasis on auto accommodation experience and complain about. Namely, stroads.
The question I am left wondering is, can these mistakes ever be realistically corrected in the US short of radical governmental & popular revolution in how cities are designed and zoned? It just seems like this is how we have built the vast majority of our cities and changing it (whether going forward or re-doing existing infrastructure) seems unlikely.
/rhetorical question
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