@davidzipper
When I owned a muscle car, I only wanted loud exhaust when I really stepped on it.
But lately it seems like so many cars (I'm looking at you Dodge) sound like they're trying to make the back straight at Daytona when they're just going 12 miles an hour. Why?
And there is a huge upturn in open exhaust cars screaming down the road, that's just not acceptable on public roads. Go to a race track.
In Bloomberg CityLab, I interviewed engineering prof Wes Marshall about his new book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer, and the reasons why US road designers prioritize car speed over street safety.
@Slyence@cykonot@davidzipper I think an important clarification is "Americans who buy new cars" as that's the only customer that car makers care about, despite the used market being twice as large. Another point is the data is hard to read with CAFE and tarrifs manipulating the margins of profitability. I predict these trends are going to accelerate with the hemespheric competition going on as well as inflation.
@Slyence@cykonot@davidzipper that being said, the used market reflects the new market, and 2023 top sold 1-5 year old models is mostly trucks and SUVs. Also I think Hatchback > sedan, so I'd be okay with better smaller hatchbacks too.
"'We are so used to subsidizing cars, treating streets as car parking, we don't even recognize what we've lost in doing so.' [Zipper] suggested using spaces once occupied by cars for bike lanes, gardens or cafés."
In Vox, I explained how federal policy encourages car bloat, making American vehicles more enormous, polluting, and dangerous than they'd otherwise be.
That's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
@davidzipper Looks good. I found the book at the publisher's website:
"civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture."
“If we’re serious about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, we have to be serious about reducing transportation emissions, and in order to do that we have to address the main source of those emissions, which come from cars and trucks on highways."
“And to that extent, we need to rethink how much we want to expand highways.”
@davidzipper Imagine if our leaders had the courage to not waste billions rebuilding the Key Bridge, and reallocate the land used by that highway for better purposes?
"No one I spoke to for this piece could name a recent sizable pedestrianization or traffic-reduction scheme that had been reversed once it had been given time to have an effect."