491
TIL the number of pedestrians killed by drivers in the U.S. rose by 70 percent between 2010 and 2023
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
491 points (99.0% liked)
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Vehicles are getting way too big on average, I mean the F150 is North America's best selling vehicle (*edit: I have since learned as of 2024 that spot actually belongs to the RAV4) since forever. It's a problem of misaligned incentives.
There's an exception carved out for large vehicles in the EPA guidelines that hold them to less stringent emissions standards which incentivizes building larger vehicles 1
Large cars are also incentivized by our crash safety rating system which only takes into account the mortality rate of those inside the car as apposed to average related fatalities. This means it will prioritize safety of those in the vehicle, which has led to our average fatalities increasing. 2
As an unintended side effect this also damages roads much faster because vehicle weight per axle determines the magnitude of the damage a vehicle does to the road. 3 anecdotally this makes me concerned for the additional weight that electric cars add.
Also as vehicles increase in weight the amount of microplastics put into the air as a by product of tire wear increase. 4
As cars increase in size (and therefore weight) the downsides are exponential.
All that plus everyone is going 10 over on their phones. If operating a motor vehicle is so disinteresting to you, that you need to look at your phone every 10 seconds, DON'T DRIVE.
I didn't drive for many years because I always lived in cities with good public transport. When I drove again for the first time in 2021 I was shocked by how basically everyone went 10 over. I really feel this has gotten way worse in the last 20 years. Going 60 where the speedlimit is 50 seems to be the rule, not the exception nowadays.
huh? i've been driving since the 90s and it's always been that way. speed limits are not typically enforced until you are going 20+ over the limit.
Where do you live? Where I am, they act like you murdered and ate a toddler if you go 5 mph over. I had a cop give me a $180 speeding ticket for going 30 in a 25, in a gated active adult community at 10:30 at night, and the cop had the nerve to tell me it was to protect "the children." It's an active adult community, children can't live here, and it was 10:30 at night. Not a lot of little kids playing in my neighborhood at 10:30 at night. Yet the cop actually said that with a straight face. I was already getting the ticket, so I made sure to remind him how absolutely absurd that excuse was, and he should just man up and admit that the county wants my Christmas money, and they're taking it.
They've got red light cameras everywhere around here, and now they're putting them in every school zone. I already got a $110 ticket in the mail for going 6 mph over in a school zone.
This week it was announced that they've been gaming the system by making the school zone area too big, and theyve been giving out tickets to people who weren't in the legal school zone. They should have to return the money from EVERY ticket.
That isn't new either. They already got in trouble for manipulating the timing on the yellow lights in intersections with red light cameras, so they can nail a few extra people each day, that didn't actually violate the law.
And by the way, I've learned to be a LOT more careful around the holiday season. Most of the tickets I've gotten in my life, especially the really stupid ones, have happened in December. The cops are always out on full force, and they must be trying to hit their annual quotas, or perhaps they just know that people have been saving their money for gifts, so they know they can pay a ticket instead.
Predatory pigs.
Thank you for putting these links together! I'm about to be in the market for a truck and have been researching current models, and noticed the trend of larger and larger vehicles for a few years now, and wondered why. It couldn't just be because of lifted truck culture. I'm about to just go to a junk yard and try to restore an old one.
It sucks too because the old trucks with a low bed were so much better for actualy doing work if you care about your back at all.
We should try to use AI to manipulate culture into making low trucks popular again.
/not sure if serious