What part of “the research you posted in your follow-up comment does indeed show collisions here are deadlier because of the taller vehicles” did you not understand? You just spent a bunch of effort on a rebuttal to a claim I didn’t make!
You’re literally preaching to the choir mod of !fuckcars. I get it.
All I’m saying is that if we have the choice between lessening the severity of a crash by replacing a tall truck with a smaller car or avoiding it entirely by replacing the truck trip with a bike or transit trip — and we do! — the latter is clearly superior.
Take your citation #4, for instance:
Replacing SUVs with cars would have averted over 3,000 pedestrian deaths in US cities (2000–2019).
3000 over 10 years. That’s the maximum benefit of the policy change you’re proposing (getting rid of tall trucks and SUVs). Compare that to the 40,000 total traffic deaths per year that we could put a big dent in by making zoning changes to reduce total car trips and vehicle miles traveled. Even just a 10% reduction in VMT (and even without reducing our ridiculously high rate of deaths per VMT) would save 4,000 people a year, which is an order of magnitude higher than your 3000 per 10 years best-case.
Obviously, we could do both. But if you have a limited amount of time/money/effort/political capital to spend and you had to choose only one, zoning reform for walkability has a way higher potential upside.
Face it: you’re chipping around the edges of a vastly larger problem.
What part of “the research you posted in your follow-up comment does indeed show collisions here are deadlier because of the taller vehicles” did you not understand? You just spent a bunch of effort on a rebuttal to a claim I didn’t make!
You’re literally preaching to the
choirmod of !fuckcars. I get it.All I’m saying is that if we have the choice between lessening the severity of a crash by replacing a tall truck with a smaller car or avoiding it entirely by replacing the truck trip with a bike or transit trip — and we do! — the latter is clearly superior.
Take your citation #4, for instance:
3000 over 10 years. That’s the maximum benefit of the policy change you’re proposing (getting rid of tall trucks and SUVs). Compare that to the 40,000 total traffic deaths per year that we could put a big dent in by making zoning changes to reduce total car trips and vehicle miles traveled. Even just a 10% reduction in VMT (and even without reducing our ridiculously high rate of deaths per VMT) would save 4,000 people a year, which is an order of magnitude higher than your 3000 per 10 years best-case.
Obviously, we could do both. But if you have a limited amount of time/money/effort/political capital to spend and you had to choose only one, zoning reform for walkability has a way higher potential upside.
Face it: you’re chipping around the edges of a vastly larger problem.