This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn’t fit in many places around here it’s owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
What the fuck is a Miata? That’s an MX-5
That’s what the US call them, I’m just pleased they didn’t jam a U or an extra Z in somewhere
Well technically the Miata (and that’s what I’ll call it) was designed by Mazda’s California branch which named it the Miata. But it was changed by Mazda Japan to the Eunos Roadster, which was just the Roadster or MX-5 in other markets.
But can you fit four 200kg people in the Miata?
I’m working my way back from 125kg, it was miserable living that heavy. I can’t imagine being 200kg.
put a note on the windshield: “please take care to better manage your genders affirming vehicle.”
Emotional support vehicle
Funny enough the right front fender of the Miata has a bunch of trans rights stickers. I’d rather not make assumptions about the Denali owner but it would sure make for an even more stark contrast.
Funny enough the right front fender of the Miata has a bunch of trans rights stickers
Well yeah, it’s a “hairdresser’s car.” Obviously, all Miata owners are inferior girly men, so of course the trans rights sticker fits right in!
(I own a Miata myself, so I’m entitled to make that joke. BTW, other cars I’ve owned include a VW New Beetle and two minivans, so I’ll let folks draw their own conclusions about my confidence in my masculinity. But just to be clear, anybody else trying to make that joke without heavy, obvious sarcasm is gonna get banned for violating rule 2, though.)
Also, maybe there could be an ambiguity between “trans[gender] rights” and “[manual] trans[mission] rights,” LOL. “Save the manuals” is a big deal among Miata owners, after all.
That gives me an idea for a new bumper sticker, for a very specific kind of car owner. Not 100% sure where it lies on the line between funny and insensitive, though, so I’m gonna put the quick mockup I just made in a spoiler tag so folks don’t see it unless they specifically want to.
hopefully clever and not offensive
Or maybe, someone who has the strength of character to choose a car on merit, without needing a tank to make them feel safe, is more likely to NOT be hostile to those who may be different from the norm, again because they’re not scaredy little fucks who are afraid of everything and have to appear intimidating all the time.
am transfem, can barely drive a stick, but you get a pass from me
I think you’re allowed to make a bunch of assumptions about the Denali owner here. That’s kinda what they did all that for in the first place.
They’re clearly being a dick with nothing more than a parking job, so it’s far more likely they are actually dicks IRL and noticed the same thing on the miata and chose to be dicks about it.
Sometimes, the other person being an intolerable, selfish, bigoted asshole, is exactly the thing we can and should assume about people in certain situations. Situations like this one.
i’ve got dozen++ neighbors with that kinda vehicle.
I guess some people are scared to drive in the USA without covering every inch of themselves in steel, fake carbon fiber, and Truck Nutz.
In all fairness, I’d be terrified to drive that Miata with that monster sitting in front of me. It makes you realize just how crazy the size difference is between these monstrosities and everything else on the road. If this Denali hits this Miata, it’ll decapitate anyone in the Miata. Full stop.
Crash testing needs to account for people outside the car, both in other size classes of vehicle (including bicycles and scooters) and pedestrians. This is policy failure. The Denali should not share road space with the other modes of transportation! Even if this person is an unrealistically perfect driver, their low beams are so high they’ll blind anyone in a shorter vehicle.
I can sort of understand huge semis and delivery vans since they literally need the storage space and they’re generally driven by people with CDLs. But even those should be smaller in urban environments (and suburban, and small towns).
Tragedy of the commons. How many people drive big SUVs because they’re blinded at night by tall vehicles otherwise, and they’re afraid of their children (or themselves) being killed in a crash in a small car? The only way to solve this is government, lawmaking, and enforcement.
I want a japanese kei car. They make the mazda look like it’s a monster truck. Something like the Daihatsu Copen.
At this point the only way you’re ever getting me into a truck is one of those cute little fuckers
My problem is I LOVE cars. I didn’t realize this was c/fuckcars when I posted. Woops. Legitimately, I understand the consternation at huuuuuge SUVs and trucks like this. I drive to work (and I love it) - but the truck/suv to car ratio on the road is like 10:1. In the middle of the city… it’s fucking stupid - and I look inside the vehicles. Always driven by a single person with no cargo. Ideally, I want a 1-person, 1-seater car. I want the stability of 4 wheels, the cage for protection/air conditioning, etc and nothing beyond that.
My problem is I LOVE cars. I didn’t realize this was c/fuckcars when I posted. Woops.
Nah, you’re fine. Don’t tell anybody, but…
spoiler
…I’m secretly a “car guy” myself. There are dozens of us!
In all seriousness, there’s absolutely no dichotomy between being a car enthusiast and hating how cities are designed to force normies to overuse cars. You are very much welcome here and in the right place.
My problem is I LOVE cars. I didn’t realize this was c/fuckcars when I posted. Woops.
Honestly, you are still in the right community.
Making sure that there are plenty of public transit options, and making it so that a car is not the only possible form of transportation helps get people who don’t want to be a part of traffic out of traffic.
People who love to drive should really be the ones most loudly pushing for the end of car-dependency.
I had a smart car for a while. I wish they had caught on, but they were seriously hampered by price and the goddamn transmission was indescribably bad. 1 person car is great and all but by the time you’ve got cargo space, a second seat is reasonable.
The slogan “fuck cars” is for grabbing attention, I think most of us understand that cars can have their place and many of us, me included, own a car. But cars as the de facto mode of transport and the de facto determining element in infrastructure design is incredibly harmful to society, especially in cities. Kei trucks are a great example of a car adapted for urban use and frustratingly, in the US there is a lot of legislation specifically against their use and they’re essentially luxury vehicles due to the high import fees levied against them (Which is just insane, they’re stripped-down utilitarian vehicles!). A lot of SUV and truck owners in cities would prefer a kei, yet they’re made unobtainable by intentional legislation that incentivizes these huge blimp trucks.
The upcoming slate trucks are looking promising. About the size of a Kei truck, and absurdly customizable.
Hate the low default range though. 150 miles, and I have not yet researched the adoption rate of EV chargers for highway gas stops.
Also the affiliation with Amazon sucks =\
150 is plenty for a truck that size. It’s a round-town car, not a highway cruiser.
However, if you charge to 80% and keep 20% in reserve, you’ll get 90 miles out of that 150mile battery. You’d be stopping about every hour and a half to charge for 15 minutes or so if you were doing a long trip.
80% of 150 is 120 which is much more reasonable for an around the town car
Yes. Don’t forget about a 20% reserve. Deep discharge is bad for the battery too.
Fair point. Depends on how often it’s happening
Check out Telo. :)
If I see Telo, Aptera, or Slate, I upvote.
I considered them too. They got everything nearly right, and then they put the HVAC controls on the touchscreen. If they fix that before mass production, I’ll look again.
These vehciles should be banned for personal use and only allow businesses to buy them. That will reduce the amount of morons doong shit like this
Honest question is what businesses would ever buy a jacked up and off dude bro truck for anything other then to make an executive feel like they have a bigger pp?
These things are not even good at being a truck, short bed that is too high to load/unload and a fuel economy of if you have to ask you can’t afford it does not make a good fleet truck.
But they need the 2500 HD Super Duty Ultra Platinum Tungsten edition with 4 inch lift to tow their lawnmower. Or maybe a pressure washer.
We need a height limit. I have a 2010 1500. Even stock height on that was unnecessarily high. I lowered with a 2/4 kit. Perfect height and I can still do all the truck stuff, legit truck stuff, that I want. No issues in snow either.
The 1500 line has only gotten taller since. Again, completely unnecessary. There are tons of douche mobiles like the OP pic around here. Tons of idiots with those 2500s, or equivalent, around here. Those are usually because “muh diesel!”
Even businesses though. Why? The AF buys 1500s. Those haul auxilary power carts that weight the same as a VW bug. It takes 2 or 3 of us to push them.
Also, why would I buy a raised on as a business. I’ve just made it very difficult to get shit out of the bed for my employees now. I’ve just raised the chances that my employee is going to cause an accident because they can’t see shit around them.
“but I wanna off road!” I’ve done it in an 05 Colorado, stock height, at a local ORV park. That includes those ruts, driving up difficult inclines and even through a puddle almost up to the windows. If I can do that in one of those, you don’t need to raise your doucheness above for the world to see.
Interesting that drop kits are an easily-sourced thing nowadays, I’ve looked at modern trucks and genuinely wondered how one is supposed to access the bed without a stepladder as they come from the factory. I think it’s subtly damning that GMC, among others, has been marketing their multi-position tailgate’s ability to function as a bed step. They’ve made trucks so tall as a vanity thing that it negatively impacts the their ability to actually work as a utility vehicle.
I’ve been begging (sometimes literally, I know a guy who works at Ford) for a small Maverick or Ridgeline-sized PHEV pickup for years now, and the Big Three seem to be specifically avoiding making such a thing. I don’t need to be able to tow a guided missile cruiser, I don’t need to sit ten feet in the air to feel safe, I don’t want dual 30-gallon fuel tanks in case I need to drive to Cape Horn without stopping for some reason. I just want to be able to commute in town on electric power, handle small home-improvement hauling tasks (mulch, appliances, lumber, etc), and still be able to road trip or pull a small trailer in a pinch. And there are dozens of us, at least! I see people asking “PHEV Maverick when!?” anytime I search the Net for news on the topic. But nope, no PHEV pickup for you, unless you want to buy a Ramcharger – and deal with being associated with the kind of person who drives a Ram product. No thank you!
It sounds like the “vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living” is a self solving problem as long as the police actually enforces traffic regulations: if people chosing excessivelly large vehicle for the environment were they live keep on getting repeatedly fined because such vehicles in such environments “pressure their owners to continually break traffic law” they’ll chose differently.
This is probably part of the reason why such vehicles are very rare in European cities: in such places it’s even more likely that they have to break the law to park such a vehicle (smaller cities and parking space) and were the police is probably more likely to enforce such laws with a stern hand (in some countries fines even grow proportionally to one’s income), especially in some countries were it’s far more common for people to simply phone the police to denounce a vehicle parked in a way that outrageously breaks the rules.
I find that a lot of Europeans entertain the delusion that they arrived at safe, livable transit and streets by calling the cops a lot. I guess that’s an easy misconception to pick up if you grew up with those safe streets, where all that was left to maintain them was to pay taxes and occasionally call the cops, and when there’s a decent chance that those cops aren’t murderous racist fascists who don’t respond to the call.
But Europe, western and northern in particular, got their infrastructure by pitching a long and eventually successful political fight against automotive culture as a whole throughout the 60s - 80s. They redesigned their cities to accommodate walking and cycling, they staged mass protests, they passed automotive regulations to mostly ban the sorts of personal vehicles that are fundamentally incompatible with that sort of city. They didn’t oust motor culture from their city centers by calling the cops a lot. No, that’s just maintenance upkeep long after the win. The boomer-aged Europeans of today had to take up a long hard fight in an organized fashion to create that world for themselves and their kids.
It’s the exact same reason why Europe has better Labour Laws: decades ago the many fought to change the system so that they were not being constantly fucked up by the few.
The cops are just a mechanism for applying said good laws that people fought for in the past.
This is also why as many such laws have regressed in the last couple of decades, the utility of the cops for the general public regressed with them, and more and more what’s visible as the utility of the cops is the only kind of use of the powers of the state that has never wavered: the protection of the property and physical integrity of the wealthy and powerful.
None of this is transport specific, though it definitely gets reflected in transport (partly in terms of traffic laws, their application and the size of the penalties when they are broken, but even more so in general transportation policies such as public transportation and even the very design of streets putting more importance on non-car transportation and less on car transportation, which is why, for example, sidewalks are more common in Europe) because of its outsized impact in quality of life.
In fact I would say that the much broader availability of public transportation in Europe too is the product of the very same fights in the past to put the interest of the many above the interests of the few.
calling the cops about small things in the US can very easily destroy lives. Only do it when something is life or death.
One of my coworkers has something like this, big ass 150 thats bigger than our parking spaces that fit 12 seater vans. He’s got 4 kids, lives in town and regularly complains about struggling to pay bills. No shit dumbass all your money is tied up in liabilities and he takes any excuse to skip work he can get.
Why does GMC Denali, the largest one, not simply eat the other one?
Indigestion in the form of a Mini Pooper.
I guarantee that the mx-5 has carried more passengers and more cargo then that truck ever has or will.
I bet those tires would make one hell of a whooshing sound…
Without the Child killer 9000 to not be able to see anyone under 7 feet tall who might be in their path, how is Bob gonna take his kids to school?
Where I live the speed has recently been reduced from 30 mph to 15 mph in an effort to make the area more livable. Roads have been narrowed with more room for trees, sidewalks and bike paths. As well as artificial choke points and high speed bumps, all in an effort to improve life for the people living there. This is done alongside an effort to create larger high speed roads around the area and push cars to use those, which are the long way around but since they are higher speed still faster.
However fucking idiots driving these huge trucks can just go across the speed bumps at 45 mph and they rush all the choke point no matter if they have the right of way or not. When such a huge thing comes rushing at you, you move out of the way. They also regularly cut across parts where cars aren’t supposed to go. For example tight corners where the side walk is lower so larger delivery trucks and busses can still make the corner by cutting across the side walk a bit. Regular cars are supposed to just drive around them and in a regular car the kerb will make sure people don’t normally do that. The big trucks however use them all the time as they don’t even notice the kerb.
Since car brains experience the efforts to slow everything down as obstacles to overcome, more and more choose to drive these huge trucks and drive any speed and route they want. This actually goes against all the efforts to make the area better for pets, bicycles and people.
We desperately need max weight and size limits for cars.
Your city is doing riiiiight! I hear you regarding the growing pains, but the successes are glorious. I’m proud of you!
Time to start hucking bricks at passing trucks
Get the city to install chicanes with trees planted in them. You can’t just roll over those and a landship like that is going to have to slow down a lot to maneuver through them.
But yeah, I’d love tax brackets depending on car size. Huge trucks pay more, kei cars pay less. That would make a lot of sense for city liveability and road maintenance.
But yeah, I’d love tax brackets depending on car size. Huge trucks pay more, kei cars pay less.
Ironically, that effort is what landed us in our current predicament. There was a clean air push, and the government wanted to start regulating fuel efficiency in vehicles. They were going to start requiring vehicles to hit certain efficiency minimums. But auto manufacturers lobbied to add a tiny little “efficiency can reduce as vehicle size increases” provision. They said it was because larger cars were naturally less efficient, so they needed that exception to be able to reasonably hit the efficiency targets.
In reality, what happened is the auto manufacturers started making larger and larger cars, so they didn’t have to deal with making efficient vehicles. Because the less efficient engines are cheaper to produce at scale and they can sell them for more. They started doing huge advertisement and astroturfing campaigns, to get people into the “bigger is better” mindset for cars… And it fucking worked. Americans almost universally drive massive cars now, purely because auto manufacturers didn’t want to be held to efficiency standards.
Well, yeah, if the car makers can add exceptions to the law and turn it upside down then the law becomes useless.
I explicitly wouldn’t allow that exception. If larger cars are less efficient then disincentivizing their use by means of higher taxes is clearly beneficial to society. If you want to drive that three-ton gas guzzler then you can surely afford that 30% higher vehicle tax. If you can’t, might I interest you in this comparatively efficient and tax-reduced Subaru Sambar?
Mind you, I would apply different rules to things like semi trucks that (at least in my part of the world) you can’t drive without a special license. But if you can drive it with a regular European class B license then the tax should scale progressively with size and mass because making larger and less efficient cars unattractive is specifically the point.
Holy shit, TIL about Chicanes! I’m definitely going to lobby my city for those!
Why post here instead of calling traffic/parking enforcement?
Because I do not feel that neighbors snitching on each other is a viable, equitable, or practical solution to state or federal scale regulatory and infrastructure issues.
This isn’t snitching, this is a person who parked their vehicle dangerously and getting a ticket or towed would probably go a long way towards changing their behavior. Sometimes it’s ok to get 3rd parties involved when you’re unable to solve it yourself. If someone has the money for that dumbass truck they have the money for a parking spot for it.
Like it’s their fault for owning it and parking it there.
I get your sentiment, I just feel like in this case the person who has that truck is really just plainly wrong. But I do agree with you, I will talk to my neighbors or really anyone to try to resolve an issue before bringing anyone else in.
Is it really a regulatory and infrastructure issue? I would have guessed the truck owner is just an entitled asshole.
Assholes exist everywhere. But if you regulate against this sort of vehicle and design infrastructure that does not accommodate them, the local assholes can not / will not asshole in this specific way.
I assume you live in the US? How likely do you think such a regulation is in your lifetime?
Likely enough that it’s worth ignoring pessimism to the contrary, though if I had to bet on what ends luxury jumbo trucks I’d wager that the economic entropy of the market takes the prize first, and I am confident that will happen in my lifetime.
But it’s a potentially viable solution to this specific jackasses jackassery
You posted this and then did nothing else for the entire day, didnt you?
im at work.I posted that reply during lunch.
regardless Im not able to address this problem but OP can
Because Portland, OR traffic enforcement doesn’t really exist and if they did see this they would just be amused because Portland LEOs are all CHUDs who live in the southwest Washington suburbs
Construction foam
