The issue is not so much size but height. These things are all over where I am as fleet vehicles and even the good ol’ type will comment that they can not see anything in front. Just look at the door or normal car in the background of that picture and you get an idea. These hoods are no joke 1.7 meters high for no other reason then to look mean.
It’s wild how there’s this kind of evolutionary pressure to turn the grills into ever bigger and more menacing threat displays and it just keeps spiralling out of control because the cars in the rear view mirror only keep getting bigger and more intimidating and you constantly need to buy a new ego prosthetic in the form of a suburban tank like this to keep up with the other drivers that signal “I’M GONNA EAT YOU ALIVE” to you during every commute and grocery run. I’m sure manufacturers love that.
I need a pickup truck for farm work, but I hate how big these things have gotten. I wouldn’t buy anything made in the past 20 years. All this height for no practical benefit.
Old trucks are actual working trucks. The bed is low enough to easily lift heavy objects into. Modern trucks have no practical purpose in mind. They’re purely aesthetic. Nearly any load you’re lifting into that thing can also be hauled in almost any other vehicle easier. You’d need a forklift to load anything substantial, in which case an old truck or a van would be easier.
GMC named their bro-dozers AT-4. AT as in anti-tank. They’re marketing to the suburban tacticool jackasses. Loud exhaust and parking in crowded bus shelters. Yeah fuck these guys.
A used ranger accommodated all of my hauling needs with room to spare when I needed it for work. I drove the company pickup which had the double rear tires once and it was awful and I couldn’t recommend it even just for doing pickup truck things.
It’s so fucking annoying when I’m trying to turn and check for oncoming traffic and one of these or its smaller cousins pulls up next to me so I can’t see
We’re lucky as fuck to have you here to assess the needs of the entire population. Here’s an example. I do concerts for a living. We haul mobile stages. They are quite a few tons. What vehicle to you recommend we tow them with? And should we bring a second vehicle to drive around while the stage is in place for the weekend instead of using the truck that’s already there?
Do you think you’re the only roadie in the world? These vehicles don’t exist abroad. Just check what the fuck they’re doing in Europe. Also you can get a van that doesn’t block your pov (see image) but that wouldn’t look cool would it? Please get your head out of your ass before you comment next time.
You lose just about anyone willing to listen to you (outside this echo chamber) when you go off the rails about how they have no use and none needs them.
Eh, you need them for work and someone who lives out in the countryside probably could make regular use of them.
The blame rests on the automakers though, pickup trucks used to have the same cargo capacity but were smaller. This lack of visibility is 100% an aesthetic choice. Look at the sprinter truck as an example, it can pull and has great visibility.
The reason these have no practical purpose is because all the things it does are done better with a lower bed. Having the bed so fucking high up makes it significantly harder to load and unload. If you’re actually carrying cargo that’s burdensome, you want a low bed, not one of these monstrosities.
Sure, they can do things, but the alternatives that are nearly gone from the market, and these replaced, did the work that a truck is “supposed” to do better. There isn’t a purpose behind making it bigger besides aesthetics to appeal to some people who need to feel bigger for whatever reason.
Larger boats, RVs, helpful if not strictly required for plowing. A 3500 is definitely on the side of specialized though. These are far rarer than a half ton (1500 in dodge branding).
So it would’ve been fine and dandy if the cyclist had been killed by someone driving a Prius?
'Cause that’s what you imply by placing this bullshit emphasis trying to single out big trucks in particular. Comments like yours reek of implied small-car apologism, and I, for one, am getting sick and hired of it!
There’s a reason this community is called “fuck cars,” and not “fuck big trucks” or something. it’s because the problem is cars — all of them!
Any car, even the smallest, can turn a pedestrian or cyclist into a red smear when driven negligently.
Every car, even the smallest, takes up an entire lane on the street and an entire parking space.
Every car, even the smallest, contributes to car-dependent urban design.
Singling out big trucks as if they’re materially worse than all the other death machines is nothing but a distraction from the real problem at best, and an active disinformation campaign at worst. Our goals should be to get people out of cars entirely, not just into smaller ones!
No, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
Monstrous behemoths like this should be prohibitively expensive to own for personal use and/or be restricted to industrial/ag use only. Fuck your camping or hauling one chair or whatever the fuck you do twice a year. You can rent for something that seldom.
They are last time I checked “prohibitively expensive” but people are dumb enough to pay $100k over 8 year financing. These things are also no better for “industrial/ag” then a truck from 30 years ago that was 4 feet less tall, had an 8 foot bed and a similar towing capacity at a fraction of the price.
These things are the crystallization of our hubris.
No, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
[X] doubt
If big trucks were banned, muderous MAGA psychopaths would just mow down cyclists using Dodge Chargers or whatever instead.
I’m pretty fucking far as anti-car sentiment goes but to think that a meaningful amount of cyclists killed via cars is people doing it intentionally is insane. You can kill a man dead in a Smart ForTwo easily but let’s not pretend the giant driving blind spots and especially the cultural messaging that goes along with HUGE ANGY TRUCK (/ CAR) doesn’t help
The thing is, they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles. They do all the bad things but more, and their normalization makes it all worse for everyone – have you seen the size of parking spaces in Europe?
they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles
Not in the way that actually matters, which is their effect on low-density zoning and minimum parking requirements. A parking space is a parking space is a parking space — they’re all (roughly) the same size!
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
2023 Dodge ram 3500 shortest length is 232", longest is 260.8".
2023 VW golf is 168.9".
That’s over 5 feet longer at minimum and over 7.5 feet longer at worst. That’s a huge amount of wasted space.
They’re wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked).
There’s no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than “I like them” and that’s fine, you’re allowed to like them. Leave it at that. They’re objectively terrible for the safety of everyone around them and are a complete waste of space.
I drove a Jeep Comanche for years and that’s as big a pickup as 99% of pickup owners would ever actually need.
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? (See, two can play the “bad-faith compound question” game.) Now fuck off with the childish insults.
They’re wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked)
A lane is a lane! The narrowest car and the widest car both take up one whole lane each. Unless it’s narrow enough to split the lane two abreast, it doesn’t fucking matter how wide it is!
There’s no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than “I like them” and that’s fine, you’re allowed to like them. Leave it at that.
Get some reading comprehension skills! The claim that I’m defending compensation-mobiles is a goddamn lie. I’m not defending large automobiles; I’m attacking all automobiles and questioning why others are not.
What’s actually happening here is that others are trying to conjure up some artificial distinction between big trucks and the rest of the automotive infestation, most likely in order to deflect blame for their own still shitty and car-dependent midsize sedan (or whatever) lifestyle, and are butthurt that I’m not uncritically accepting it.
The bottom line is that cars ruin cities. All cars, without exception! Anybody who denies that — i.e. anybody who tries to only complain about only a subset of the cars — is part of the problem.
no they arent lol, you try parking one of those american cars in this city…
you can get away with owning one in the suburbs, but just parking on the side of the street like most people do? forgetaboutit
i do agree with the wider point though. get rid of all of them, nobody needs private cars. in fact, life on earth desperately needs us to ban private cars.
You know what increases pedestrian fatalities? Vehicles that are too tall to reasonably see pedestrians immediately in front of you. Make better arguments instead of “trucks don’t kill people, all cars do” because it’s absolutely not equal, and there’s real reasoning as to why.
A subcompact takes up exactly the same “one parking space” as a truck
Yes, short term that is absolutely correct. What the other person meant makes more sense long term.
When parking lots are built, or design specifications are layed out, the size of cars in use is taken into account. If average car size increases, average parking lot size follows. Just recently I heard that parking lot size has to increase due to the increase in car sizes, driven by SUV popularity.
There are also parking situations where there are no discrete parking spaces, but one continuous space to park, for example along a street. In these situations, bigger cars directly translate to more space being occupied.
Who cares if the parking spaces are 8x18 or 10x20 or whatever? That doesn’t matter. What matters is dipshits continuing to insist on building fifty of them when they ought to be building zero!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they’re still fucking driving. That means, for example, you’re still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they’re still fucking driving. That means, for example, you’re still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Very true, you have the correct long-term vision. If we compare the two “strategies” (smaller cars vs urban design), the latter clearly has the bigger impact, big time.
But it’s also more costly to reach. It requires much more time, more political effort, infrastructure changes, …
Opting for smaller cars has none of these strings attached. And they aren’t mutually exclusive.
It requires different strategies that efforts toward smaller cars (or electric cars, or autonomous cars, for that matter) do not contribute to and could in fact distract or detract from.
After all, folks might think “why keep trying to make me change my car centric lifestyle when we’ve ‘already solved’ the pedestrian safety problem (or the environmental problem or whatever),” not realizing there are so many more interconnected problems that only a change in development patterns can address.
Yes, it is funny that folks here apparently just want to circlejerk scapegoating big trucks while downvoting any actual urbanist who dares to point out that they’re focusing on the wrong problem.
I find as cars get either bigger or more expensive or both, the driver’s get proportionally more reckless, ignorant, and entitled. It’s always the big trucks, bmw’s, and teslas that seem intent on running me off the road or flat when I’m biking to work. I don’t know about the more recent ones but the early Prius I rented on a vacation before had shit visibility so I wouldn’t give that one a free pass at least. All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
Sidewalks and bike lanes don’t get used unless (a) destinations are packed closely enough together for enough trips to be in reasonable walking or cycling distance, and (b) the experience is reasonably pleasant (i.e., not a no-man’s-land sandwiched between a stroad and a bunch of parking lots).
In other words, it’s the zoning that has to be fixed first, by increasing density and removing minimum parking requirements.
Here is a Google image of Dodge ram 3500. EVEN IF YOU NEED A CAR, NO ONE NEEDS A VEHICLE THIS BIG.
But how else can you ensure a 100% fatality rate of everything you run over.
And also make sure that you don’t have to see the poor people as you run them over.
The issue is not so much size but height. These things are all over where I am as fleet vehicles and even the good ol’ type will comment that they can not see anything in front. Just look at the door or normal car in the background of that picture and you get an idea. These hoods are no joke 1.7 meters high for no other reason then to look mean.
Obligatory…
This is a lot of space to tell me what I already know, that driving my Abrams tank is very safe for me and pretty safe for others
Got me thinking, why don’t they put forward facing cameras? Like how we have backup cams.
I mean no offense by this. It’s not that it is a bad idea, but an amusingly typical American ways of problem solving.
These already exist. A lot of the luxury trucks and SUVs will have a camera or two mounted on all four sides of the vehicle.
They don’t want to think about safety
It’s wild how there’s this kind of evolutionary pressure to turn the grills into ever bigger and more menacing threat displays and it just keeps spiralling out of control because the cars in the rear view mirror only keep getting bigger and more intimidating and you constantly need to buy a new ego prosthetic in the form of a suburban tank like this to keep up with the other drivers that signal “I’M GONNA EAT YOU ALIVE” to you during every commute and grocery run. I’m sure manufacturers love that.
I need a pickup truck for farm work, but I hate how big these things have gotten. I wouldn’t buy anything made in the past 20 years. All this height for no practical benefit.
Legit, like i understand having a use for that big open storage solution but seeing how they are now too tall to reach is odd as heck.
Old trucks are actual working trucks. The bed is low enough to easily lift heavy objects into. Modern trucks have no practical purpose in mind. They’re purely aesthetic. Nearly any load you’re lifting into that thing can also be hauled in almost any other vehicle easier. You’d need a forklift to load anything substantial, in which case an old truck or a van would be easier.
GMC named their bro-dozers AT-4. AT as in anti-tank. They’re marketing to the suburban tacticool jackasses. Loud exhaust and parking in crowded bus shelters. Yeah fuck these guys.
But what if you want to run over all your children in one go?
We already have horses for that, and you don’t even need to drive them yourself.
Self-driving horses are the future.
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I got a family!!!
A used ranger accommodated all of my hauling needs with room to spare when I needed it for work. I drove the company pickup which had the double rear tires once and it was awful and I couldn’t recommend it even just for doing pickup truck things.
Look, I’m terribly insecure and fragile. You expect me to drive something reasonable?
how else are they supposed to haul around their ego?
It’s so fucking annoying when I’m trying to turn and check for oncoming traffic and one of these or its smaller cousins pulls up next to me so I can’t see
How else am I supposed to haul all of my groceries for a week? \s
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It just screams micro peen
I prefer to say, “masculinity crisis.”
Everybody knows what you mean, but you don’t offend anybody with a small wiener.
None taken.
they’re compensating.
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We’re lucky as fuck to have you here to assess the needs of the entire population. Here’s an example. I do concerts for a living. We haul mobile stages. They are quite a few tons. What vehicle to you recommend we tow them with? And should we bring a second vehicle to drive around while the stage is in place for the weekend instead of using the truck that’s already there?
Do you think you’re the only roadie in the world? These vehicles don’t exist abroad. Just check what the fuck they’re doing in Europe. Also you can get a van that doesn’t block your pov (see image) but that wouldn’t look cool would it? Please get your head out of your ass before you comment next time.
You lose just about anyone willing to listen to you (outside this echo chamber) when you go off the rails about how they have no use and none needs them.
Eh, you need them for work and someone who lives out in the countryside probably could make regular use of them.
The blame rests on the automakers though, pickup trucks used to have the same cargo capacity but were smaller. This lack of visibility is 100% an aesthetic choice. Look at the sprinter truck as an example, it can pull and has great visibility.
BS you genuinely do not need it. Go look at what long time contractors are driving, it’s mostly smaller toyota trucks or vans.
You need a huge truck to haul some huge shit for the day? Rent it, duh
I’m not renting a truck to tow my car or motorcycle 50 runs a year 🤷♂️
You can tow a car with a small(er) Tacoma easily. For a motorcycle it will fit in the back, and probably has more room than your Ram.
I’m also skeptical that you truly tow them around 50 times a year.
If you do, then congrats you may have one of the rare actual use cases for a truck. Hopefully you don’t also use it for errands.
👌
The reason these have no practical purpose is because all the things it does are done better with a lower bed. Having the bed so fucking high up makes it significantly harder to load and unload. If you’re actually carrying cargo that’s burdensome, you want a low bed, not one of these monstrosities.
Sure, they can do things, but the alternatives that are nearly gone from the market, and these replaced, did the work that a truck is “supposed” to do better. There isn’t a purpose behind making it bigger besides aesthetics to appeal to some people who need to feel bigger for whatever reason.
Why would you need that specific truck? It looks like it is gigantic for the sake of being gigantic.
Larger boats, RVs, helpful if not strictly required for plowing. A 3500 is definitely on the side of specialized though. These are far rarer than a half ton (1500 in dodge branding).
People towed boats with “normal” sized trucks before these were a thing. There is no need for them to be this large.
So it would’ve been fine and dandy if the cyclist had been killed by someone driving a Prius?
'Cause that’s what you imply by placing this bullshit emphasis trying to single out big trucks in particular. Comments like yours reek of implied small-car apologism, and I, for one, am getting sick and hired of it!
There’s a reason this community is called “fuck cars,” and not “fuck big trucks” or something. it’s because the problem is cars — all of them!
Any car, even the smallest, can turn a pedestrian or cyclist into a red smear when driven negligently.
Every car, even the smallest, takes up an entire lane on the street and an entire parking space.
Every car, even the smallest, contributes to car-dependent urban design.
Singling out big trucks as if they’re materially worse than all the other death machines is nothing but a distraction from the real problem at best, and an active disinformation campaign at worst. Our goals should be to get people out of cars entirely, not just into smaller ones!
No, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, because the driver of a sensibly-sized car can see things that are less than fifty fucking feet ahead of the dash.
Monstrous behemoths like this should be prohibitively expensive to own for personal use and/or be restricted to industrial/ag use only. Fuck your camping or hauling one chair or whatever the fuck you do twice a year. You can rent for something that seldom.
They are last time I checked “prohibitively expensive” but people are dumb enough to pay $100k over 8 year financing. These things are also no better for “industrial/ag” then a truck from 30 years ago that was 4 feet less tall, had an 8 foot bed and a similar towing capacity at a fraction of the price.
These things are the crystallization of our hubris.
Part of “prohibitively expensive” would mean that such financing arrangements would not be legal.
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[X] doubt
If big trucks were banned, muderous MAGA psychopaths would just mow down cyclists using Dodge Chargers or whatever instead.
I’m pretty fucking far as anti-car sentiment goes but to think that a meaningful amount of cyclists killed via cars is people doing it intentionally is insane. You can kill a man dead in a Smart ForTwo easily but let’s not pretend the giant driving blind spots and especially the cultural messaging that goes along with HUGE ANGY TRUCK (/ CAR) doesn’t help
The thing is, they are materially worse than other consumer vehicles. They do all the bad things but more, and their normalization makes it all worse for everyone – have you seen the size of parking spaces in Europe?
Not in the way that actually matters, which is their effect on low-density zoning and minimum parking requirements. A parking space is a parking space is a parking space — they’re all (roughly) the same size!
Have you never had to street park a vehicle or are you a complete moron?
2023 Dodge ram 3500 shortest length is 232", longest is 260.8". 2023 VW golf is 168.9".
That’s over 5 feet longer at minimum and over 7.5 feet longer at worst. That’s a huge amount of wasted space.
They’re wider meaning they cramp the roads horizontally as well (while driving or parked).
There’s no logical defense of these compensation-mobiles other than “I like them” and that’s fine, you’re allowed to like them. Leave it at that. They’re objectively terrible for the safety of everyone around them and are a complete waste of space.
I drove a Jeep Comanche for years and that’s as big a pickup as 99% of pickup owners would ever actually need.
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? (See, two can play the “bad-faith compound question” game.) Now fuck off with the childish insults.
A lane is a lane! The narrowest car and the widest car both take up one whole lane each. Unless it’s narrow enough to split the lane two abreast, it doesn’t fucking matter how wide it is!
Get some reading comprehension skills! The claim that I’m defending compensation-mobiles is a goddamn lie. I’m not defending large automobiles; I’m attacking all automobiles and questioning why others are not.
What’s actually happening here is that others are trying to conjure up some artificial distinction between big trucks and the rest of the automotive infestation, most likely in order to deflect blame for their own still shitty and car-dependent midsize sedan (or whatever) lifestyle, and are butthurt that I’m not uncritically accepting it.
The bottom line is that cars ruin cities. All cars, without exception! Anybody who denies that — i.e. anybody who tries to only complain about only a subset of the cars — is part of the problem.
no they arent lol, you try parking one of those american cars in this city…
you can get away with owning one in the suburbs, but just parking on the side of the street like most people do? forgetaboutit
i do agree with the wider point though. get rid of all of them, nobody needs private cars. in fact, life on earth desperately needs us to ban private cars.
There is evidence that these shit wagons are largely responsible for a major increase in pedestrian fatalities.
EVs are also a cause, because of their heavy batteries. It’s like getting hit by a tank.
You know what causes pedestrian fatalities? The presence of cars of any size.
You know what eliminates pedestrian fatalities? Deleting parking lots and pedestrianizing streets.
I’d like to see more streets limited to people. I guess it’s hard to pull off due to politics/economics. But you can hope.
And there is data showing that bigger cars have driven up rates of pedestrian fatalities. I can get info on that.
Classic
You know what increases pedestrian fatalities? Vehicles that are too tall to reasonably see pedestrians immediately in front of you. Make better arguments instead of “trucks don’t kill people, all cars do” because it’s absolutely not equal, and there’s real reasoning as to why.
No, not all cars are created equally. Some require much more public space and some are also much more efficient at killing.
My truck is a good boy, he wouldn’t harm a fly. It’s all about upbringing, genetics has nothing to do with it.
Bullshit. A subcompact takes up exactly the same “one parking space” as a truck, and is therefore just as bad.
Yes, short term that is absolutely correct. What the other person meant makes more sense long term.
When parking lots are built, or design specifications are layed out, the size of cars in use is taken into account. If average car size increases, average parking lot size follows. Just recently I heard that parking lot size has to increase due to the increase in car sizes, driven by SUV popularity.
There are also parking situations where there are no discrete parking spaces, but one continuous space to park, for example along a street. In these situations, bigger cars directly translate to more space being occupied.
Who cares if the parking spaces are 8x18 or 10x20 or whatever? That doesn’t matter. What matters is dipshits continuing to insist on building fifty of them when they ought to be building zero!
Switching fifty people from driving big trucks to driving small cars does nothing but chip around the edges of the problem because they’re still fucking driving. That means, for example, you’re still building suburban-style strip malls for them when you should be building walkable main streets instead.
The issue here is that we need to switch (back) to an entirely different style of urban development, and the size of cars does precisely fuck-all to help with that!
Very true, you have the correct long-term vision. If we compare the two “strategies” (smaller cars vs urban design), the latter clearly has the bigger impact, big time.
But it’s also more costly to reach. It requires much more time, more political effort, infrastructure changes, …
Opting for smaller cars has none of these strings attached. And they aren’t mutually exclusive.
It requires different strategies that efforts toward smaller cars (or electric cars, or autonomous cars, for that matter) do not contribute to and could in fact distract or detract from.
After all, folks might think “why keep trying to make me change my car centric lifestyle when we’ve ‘already solved’ the pedestrian safety problem (or the environmental problem or whatever),” not realizing there are so many more interconnected problems that only a change in development patterns can address.
“one parking space” is not a universal measurement unit, they come in many different sizes.
Fuck cars but trucks and SUVs are more dangerous than cars to pedestrians, and to argue otherwise just makes you look silly
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?t=521
Relax
This community is so fucking funny.
Yes, it is funny that folks here apparently just want to circlejerk scapegoating big trucks while downvoting any actual urbanist who dares to point out that they’re focusing on the wrong problem.
I just wish that those of you with actually good points were capable to conveying it without coming across as a fucking insane person.
That’s fair. My frustration about the truck circlejerking has been building for a while, and I was venting.
https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/
I find as cars get either bigger or more expensive or both, the driver’s get proportionally more reckless, ignorant, and entitled. It’s always the big trucks, bmw’s, and teslas that seem intent on running me off the road or flat when I’m biking to work. I don’t know about the more recent ones but the early Prius I rented on a vacation before had shit visibility so I wouldn’t give that one a free pass at least. All this shit seems so futile though. I just want the jumbo sidewalks with a bike lane to be everywhere.
Sidewalks and bike lanes don’t get used unless (a) destinations are packed closely enough together for enough trips to be in reasonable walking or cycling distance, and (b) the experience is reasonably pleasant (i.e., not a no-man’s-land sandwiched between a stroad and a bunch of parking lots).
In other words, it’s the zoning that has to be fixed first, by increasing density and removing minimum parking requirements.