Hmm, these huge trucks are killing pedestrians, causing worse crashes due to crash incompatibility, destroying the climate, and now smashing through guard rails and flying off cliffs. We'd better change our entire country's infrastructure to accommodate them.
It's the good Christian thing to do
Amen
Isn't this just the road trying to solve the problem for us? I say we should have more ditches and guardrail barriers!
Tax the heavy cars much more, they cause more dammage in crashes and way more wear and tear in general.
Fuck that. The problem isnt that people want bigger cars. The problem is that NHTSA's CAFE standards favor manufacture of larger cars.
CAFE slowly reduces the amount of emissions that vehicles can have, but they fucked it up: the required reductions are greatest on the smallest, most efficient cars, and lowest on the largest vehicles. Manufacturers "comply" with these standards by dropping their smallest cars from their lineup, and increasing the sizes of everything left on the market.
Fix the fucking standards to favor smaller cars, and manufacturers will follow.
It would be great if the standards could be loosened a bit to allow more sedans to exist. A modern crown vic would be awesome, but it's impossible to make with the current rules.
I'd like a new, S10-sized truck, or even smaller, perhaps closer to a Japanese Kei truck. The current crop of "compact" pickups are larger than the "full size" trucks from the 1990's.
At least here in Cali we do. My HD truck gets an extra $500~ a year tax on top of the Gas guzzler tax I paid when new. Plus the fuel costs/taxes for that. Compared to my other cars I pay about $600 more for newal on it. The Average car is like $245 a year but the truck is like $840.
Definitely fine with paying the extra taxes though. I use more infrastructure and I also require additional strengthening of crash systems and cause road damage so I’m not opposed.
Meanwhile in Wisconsin I have to pay an extra $100/yr for registration because I drive a hybrid.
Why?
Because, I shit you not, driving a hybrid apparently costs the state too much money, because we have to fuel up less, and so they get less tax.
What the fuck.
Rather than tax them a bit more, which won't actually improve safety if people just opt to pay the tax and drive them anyway, why not just straight up legislate weight limits for private vehicles, with commercial licensing as done with cargo trucks expanded to fit more conventional vehicles driven for commercial purposes that have to be large and heavy? Car companies will start making smaller cars again real quick if they're not allowed to sell them otherwise
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds
Seems like yet another case of a flawed study or a flawed article based on a misunderstanding of the study.
Statements like the quote above make no sense as "withstanding a 5,000lb vehicle" makes no sense. A 5k lb vehicle traveling at 70MPH is carrying several orders of magnitude more energy than a 5k lb vehicle traveling at 5MPH. Likewise a direct, perpendicular hit will impart more energy than a glancing parallel blow, so what are they really rated for?
In any case, these guardrails are used in places where 100k lb semis are traveling at highway speeds, and there have never been any other doom and gloom articles written about that. I don't think we need to completely rebuild our highway system simply because heavier cars exist.
And they're not meant to stop cars but rather redirect them
It would be 5k lb at high speed. I would say higher than the speed limit just to be safe. There would also be specs for height, etc.
Maybe car sales taxes should scale by vehicle weight.
If you consume more of the road, you pay more
In the Netherlands you pay a road tax every 3 months. The amount is based on weight (because a heavier car does more damage to a road) but also on eco label. So an electric car that has the best eco label can have less tax than an old (but much lighter) diesel car.
we obviously need to take money from Amtrak and public transport grants to rebuild the interstate system. Guardrails upgraded everywhere, new lanes would be added to reduce congestion
New lanes don't reduce congestion. When you add new lanes, drivers who had previously avoided those routes suddenly think "oh more lanes, it'll be less congested" and it just fills back up to capacity. Except it's worse because there's even more cars now in the extra lanes you just built. Adding lanes makes congestion worse, not better.
What we need to do is get people off the roads and onto public transportation. That's how you reduce congestion - get people off the roads. Unfortunately that means actually investing in public transportation, so that'll never happen in the US.
I agree with you but also woosh because OP also agrees with you.
It's called induced demand
The guard rails are pretty good enough as is. When you hear of something like this it's very often caused by lack of maintenance/poor installation/assembly. There is a guy on youtube that has videos of a whole bunch of guardrails that are simply unsafe because they are missing bolts or were assembled incorrectly.
And remember - guard rails are meant to slow you down enough to try and prevent a worse situation rather than always turning you back into the roadway to create a larger accident with other traffic or stop you completely.
I know America has an obesity epidemic, but did it really have to be extended to our cars?
fuel eff requirements tied to weight
just another oil company + car company scam
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of today’s SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold.
MGS being what I've known as W beam guardrail.
But he noted that in the real world, a guardrail is much more likely to be placed next to a steep [drop-off] than a concrete barrier.
Thankfully it was a test, but there's probably already instances where an over-weight vehicle has smashed through safety devices.
There's a guard rail guy on YouTube who investigates how the guard rails have been fitted. They often have bolts and the tension wire incorrectly installed so much so that they don't even effectively stop small vehicles. That guy lost a family member to this type of accident and so is on a crusade kinda.
My kinda superhero
https://m.youtube.com/@TheGuardrailGuy
It's sad because you can hear the frustration in his voice that for the sake of better training lives could be saved.
I'm willing to bet the super tall pickups and SUVs are more likely to hop over those steel guardrails, too. Related: Those sloped concrete dividers that have a slightly shallower slope at their wider bottom? Those are super effective, because that bottom slope deflects the vehicle's front wheel, causing it to turn slightly away from the barrier instead of continuing to smash through it.
It's called a Jersey barrier.
They have other issues though. They cost more to produce, cost more to install and cost more to maintain. They also accumulate snow, which would otherwise blow through an open W guard rail.
A third option are wire guards. They're cheaper on all accounts, don't get tagged with graffiti and statistically save more lifes. They work best on long straight stretches, but because of the flexibility, they are not ideal for inner city streets where it's best to avoid any lane breaches at all.
Guardrails, much like the crumple zones of cars, are designed to give way to dissipate energy. This is a safety feature which saves lives. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all-traffic guardrail. It's about statistically improving outcomes, but unfortunately they aren't going to help in all cases. Maybe they need to be updated, but it's going to take time to adjust to changing average vehicle weights.
Velomobiles weight 35kg (77 pounds) and offer very good protection compared to normal bicycles. Theoretically you could design single seat cars not much heavier. Of course for higher speeds you'd want more protection and a little bit wider.
I imagine the ideal self driving car or robo-taxi to be two seats that face each other, so when you get one alone you have plenty of space to stretch your feet or put your groceries. It could be totally luxurious, simple to call and use and fast too. And the embodied energy would be very small and the "mpg" would be insane.
It's just sad how badly we are tackling climate change by just letting the free market run wild.
Eh, non-issue. Just slap a surgeon general warning that the car will go through guardrails if it is over 5k lbs. And put a big roadway improvement tax on pointless large SUVs, minivans, and massive trucks, which nobody actually needs. We've had smaller variants of vehicles for decades. Even kei vans can hold many grown ass adult men.
All this aside, we have ultra heavy truckers whose trucks already would and do go through guardrails. We should be de-emphasizing car and highway investment anyways, putting more funding towards rapid mass transit and rezoning metro areas to be walkable. Fuck $30 / hr street parking.
new vehicle weight tax to fund the new guardrails
They should regulate the weight of cars. There's no reason passenger vehicles should be as heavy as they are. For EVs they honestly shouldn't have as much range as they do. 150 miles and improved charging infrastructure, make charging easier for folks who park on the street, is a better way to go. Folks who need to drive more than that a day should have a hybrid or ICE vehicle. Ideally a small fuel efficient one. Folks who need pickups for work should be able to buy the small European versions or work vans.
150miles is no where close to enough range for people who travel regularly. In a 3 hour trip I can do 150 miles. Depending on weather, battery degrading, and elevation that trip now requires charging multiple times which just isn't acceptable. Let alone if you were trying to do a real road trip where you drive 1000+ miles, the amount of charge time is insane. And I want an EV for those road trips, extremely convenient for car camping.
250mi is a good number. Enough to do a lot of errands and medium trips in a day and charge overnight.
Bolt EV/EUV has that and it's a compact.
Better to charge higher registration fees by weight.
I can think of no better way to kill EV adoption than to intentionally make their usage less appealing than the alternative.
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