America has a love affair with pickup trucks. In 2022, the top three best-selling vehicles in America were pickup trucks, and among them, the Ford F-series reigns supreme. The Ford F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for more than 40 years, and for that reason, it’s a useful proxy for pickups overall.
It’s worth noting that the success of the F-series isn’t due to the overall popularity of pickups. Pickups have only recently become ~20% of the market. They’ve never been the largest market segment.
Instead, for several reasons pickup sales have been concentrated into comparatively few models for decades.
First, we’ve had a 25% protectionist tarrif on foreign-built pickups since the 60s. The excuse for passing it was as retaliation in a trade war with France and Germany over frozen US factory farmed chicken, so it’s called the chicken tax. So there’s a number of foreign cars and SUVs on the market, but very few foreign pickups.
Second, companies like Ford and Chevy focus their pickup sales into fewer models than SUV/car makers tend to. Ford buckets all of the F150, F250, F350, etc. sales into the “F-series”. The F-series includes 2 door and 4 door trucks, long bed, regular bed and short bed trucks, regular trucks and their luxury trucks, etc. The lions share of trucks they sell are F-series.
Pickups have been getting steadily larger and less practical, sure, and the F150 is a great poster child for the trend. But the fact that pickups are consistently best-selling models has much more to do with industry shenanigans than any real American “love affair” with them.
In Toronto shared paths are limited to 20Kph, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
If close calls or accidents were happening, we should study the causes. Is it due to bikes going faster than it is safe? Due to pedestrians walking in the left/middle of the path? Due to poor visibility around tight corners? Each of those problems have different solutions.
We barely study the cause of accidents on our roadways in Canada and refuse to believe we could design them safer and instead consider fatal interactions with cars as “accidents”. I doubt governments are willing to study this in active transportstion paths given they barely want to fund the paths anyway and most municipalities still consider bicycle gutters as safe.
yeah, i think some people go too fast in crowded areas of mixed use paths. but that’s just my opinion, are people actually getting injured?
i don’t think so, but i admittedly don’t know for sure. my guess is motor vehicles kill more people per mile than fast bicycles injure or kill on shared paths.
When you skip the sponsor-ads it’s only about 35 to 40 min, max of actual content. So if you have premium or vanced I don’t think their episodes are much longer than they should be
Story time. I was going back home yesterday when I saw this lifted F250 tailgating a Chevy sedan for going 5 over the speed limit (clearly the pickup wanted to go faster), so I can guarantee you that the Chevy driver will get something bigger if they can for their next car because having a monster truck right behind you seems t scare the shit out of most people so they feel safer in a larger vehicle.
I can’t even bother to give a shit if that were happening to me.
I’m in your camp for sure, but I can certainly understand the feeling of needing something bigger to protect yourself too. Those massive trucks driving like idiots are a safety hazard. That, and the fact that when your face is at bumper level, if something happens, no matter how correct you are, you’re still going to be pulling your teeth out of their fog lights.
Exactly. Even if we can’t ban cars everywhere, there should at least be restrictions on the bumper height of a vehicle as well as the headlight height. I know here in South Carolina, they just banned modified trucks called Carolina Squats but lately I’ve seen more of them (because “fuck the libs” or whatever), but the punishment is a ticket, they need to be impounded and the plates only returned once the modifications are removed and pass a safety inspection.
There’s a huge amount of parking garages here, but many of them are also disguised to not be super obvious. There is so much parking, and it’s never enough for the cars.
It’s also going to depend a bit on the city. More suburby sprawling places will probably not build as many parking garages.
I have often had this thought when driving around for parking at a mall in rural America. Wouldn’t a parking garage greatly reduce walking time into the store and save enough space to add more stores? But you see tons of small towns in America with laws against parking structes to “protect their small towns appeal”. Because as we all know the reason why people more to small towns is for the love of driving in a parking lot.
TLDR or TLDW: the government did it by making incentives for suvs and trucks. Cars are regulated harsh for efficiency while suvs and trucks are exempt.
This made profit margins for suvs and trucks large, and smaller cars are almost non-existent.
In real life, the system is screwed, and vehicles are not measured just by their energy consumption, but by their energy consumption compared to other vehicles of similar weight, so in the end there are heavy SUVs with much better ratings than compact cars.
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