The War on Cars - Fixing America’s Car Culture with David Zipper
This is a banger full of really good sound bites.
5 min mark:
“At some point, you have to make a choice of whether it’s more important to save lives or to facilitate fast car traffic.”
- 85th percentile, right on red, parking minimums. All “feels rightish” starting points that have proven to be key to the negative reinforcement cycles in safety on roads.
15:40:
“due to some federal regulations like the CAFE loophole that allowed SUVs to be treated as light trucks, and there are some other federal rules, but a lot of that is due to the car companies trying to figure out how to make more money from a given sale. SUVs and trucks are more expensive and more profitable than smaller cars, sedans and station wagons. That is a big part of it.”
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Zipper’s article from 2022 noting just how much worse the growing size of vehicles is for anyone not in a vehicle: https://slate.com/business/2022/11/suv-size-truck-bloat-pedestrian-deaths.html
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Interesting public sector actions:
- speed governors on the public fleet can cause a noticeable impact in average speed when non emergency vehicles can’t speed.
- Weight based car fees
The War on Cars - Fixing America’s Car Culture with David Zipper
https://overcast.fm/+AAO31o3BirI
https://thewaroncars.org/2024/01/02/fixing-americas-car-culture-with-david-zipper/