What if there were graduated speed limits based on the class of vehicle? They already have this for passenger vehicles and commercial trucks on some roads. It is silly to think that 70mph is a suitable limit for all vehicles. At that speed a high performance vehicle or even a normal passenger car has a much larger margin of safety than an SUV or truck. Underlying the speed limit is the assumption that it creates a suitable margin of safety. For example, if we determine that to be X then an Enzo can easily travel at a speed over 100mph while maintaining a margin of safety equal to X. On the other hand an SUV can only travel at 70mph or less in order to maintain that margin. Additionally, sports cars are more aerodynamic than SUVs. They can cruise at a higher speed without decreasing fuel efficiency as much. Furthermore, SUVs are heavier and cause more damage in a crash. Limiting their speed will compensate for that and make them equally as dangerous as other vehicles from a kinetic energy standpoint. To make it simple only 2 classes could be created: trucks/SUVs and cars. That policy would encourage more people to drive cars, as they could drive faster legally. It would get more SUVs and trucks off the road, which is better for everyone. The SUV size battle has created a prisoner's dilemma. Each trying to outdo the other, while endangering everyone.
I say give them a whole lane just for fast cars and then sell monthly passes to use it for an outrageously obscene price, I'm talking the kind of fees that would by them the car they're driving every 2 months. Everone wins in this scenario and then you don't get morons that think they're on a motorcycle weaving through traffic.
Why should millionaires get their own traffic lane let’s make the price as unreasonable as possible while still allowing it to be used to relieve traffic. Let’s give it a minimum speed limit as well to prevent rich soccer moms from defeating the purpose of this lane.
Unfortunately the majority of traffic deaths occur when someone veers out of their lane and into cars that are traveling in a different lane. I'd want a large concrete divider or something if I were going to be driving next to the 'rich maniac' lane.
What is the point in SUVs? this seems a largely American phenomenon and I believe its largely down to cheap oil prices in America. I dont understand why someone would want to pollute the atmosphere that much and why do they believe they are safe, safe for themselves yeh but everyone else is gonna lose very badely in a crash with one if the SUV manages not to roll over on impact. They should proportionally tax vehicals to their polluting properties with SUVs getting double the tax of any other private vehical. In Britain we get people driving around in 4x4s that are more polluting than everything else. I hate these vehicals too, they are also very bad in a crash as they roll over. How about a lane that simulates an offroad environment for SUVs and 4x4s? Make them use them for what they were built for: going off road. Idiots. There should be NO limits on motorways since speed and number of deaths has no relation to each other. Speed limits are pointless and can help cause accidents, they also make it easy for the government to rip cash out of your pockets in the form of speed cameras and "safety" camera partnership vans aka mobile ATMs for police use only. Motorways are the safest roads and have been designed to enable high speed travel from A to B, to whack a speed limit on them is nonsence and serves the community one way: by getting everyone ripped off by speed cameras.
You would never get a system of multiple speed limits to work in America. It's already virtually impossible to get truck drivers and car drivers to adhere to different limits -- and trucks are really big and easy to spot. You'd never get SUV drivers, arguably the most arrogant class of driver in America, to drive slower than cars. You'd also never get drivers of Buicks to go slower than Porsches. There's too much animosity between the supporters of the different classes of vehicles, and it's usually the people who prefer the least roadworthy vehicles who think they own the road and everybody else should get out of their way. This would only work on toll roads, where they give you a speeding ticket at the exit booth if your average speed for the trip was greater than the speed limit. Or if they implement electronic speed monitoring of some kind, one of the few laws that could actually motivate car-happy Americans to overthrow their government. We're talking about a country that has no lane discipline, where people who believe that no one should drive faster than 65 mph will block the left lane going 65 mph and make everyone else on the road careen around them on the right -- believing that they're making the roads safer. I've driven in many countries. The rules of the road and the road conditions are slightly better in America than the Third World, but not by much. Our highway conditions and the skill and attitude of our drivers is nowhere near in the same class with western Europeans. You can, after all, still drive nearly halfway across this country, legally, with an open bottle of vodka in one hand. And a cell phone in the other.
Hey - my 7.5 tonne truck needs a lot more space than your car to stop from 70 mph. That doesn't mean its unsafe to drive it at 70 mph on motorways (which I do - all the time). It just means that I have to leave a much bigger clear space in front of me than you guys in cars when I'm travelling at that speed. Which I do. The problem is the guys in teh cars, though. They just don't get the reason for that nice big space in front of me. And they keep filling it up for me. And when I pull out nice and early to overtake something (so that I never get too close to HIM) the guys in the cars that don't want to limit themselves to legal speeds don't understand what this is about. So they pull up my inside and then pull out in front of me. Usually dangerously close in front of me. The real problem with road safety is (a) pillocks who don't allow themselves the stopping space they need; and (b) greater pillocks who don't respect the other guy's stopping space.
Ive went and found some websites that support what I say, here are some: http://www.sense.bc.ca/disc/disc-09.htm http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_2001.htm http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/p-sl.html http://www.roadsense.com.au/factsandfigures.html http://www.consumeralert.org/fumento/speed.htm http://www.mrtraffic.com/65.htm http://www.safespeed.org.uk/speedlimits.html
Regardless of whether or not the car can handle the speed, its more a point of whether the driver can handle the speed. Sure a car can go 120 kph legally, but if the person behind the wheel cant handle that speed, whats the point? Not everyone in a car, sports or otherwise, can handle extreme speeds, most probably just buy them cause theyre pretty.....
Yeh that is exactly the point and I would have no speed limit on a motorway but I would make everyone have a refresher instruction every two years and only those you passed it would be allowed to drive. Im not saying speed limits are always bad, they are needed in town due to the fact that there are alot of pedestrians and hazards.
They're cheaper to make. Specifically, in the 1980s, Congress reworked impact and safety standards on automobiles. Exempted from the tightening standards was a class called "light truck" which included SUV's. At the time, there were only a few, and we didn't use the phrase "SUV." Essentially, SUV's do not have to be as safe as a coupe or sedan, and that's why the auto companies like them. As to the people ... there are many reasons from the superficial to the downright stupid.
Tsk tsk. Originally, what we now call the SUV existed as pure workhorses and there were 2 models; the Jeep and the Chevy Blazer. 4-wheel drive work vehicles that could handle duties the other vehicles could not. Just like the pickup truck and the van these vehicles built up a particular image which then became popularized. The type became a stereotype, many models reflecting only the image and little of the capacity of the originals. There are still good reasons to own an SUV just like there are good reasons to own pickup trucks and vans, it's just that not everyone who owns one really needs one. What amuses me is how demonized they have become. ~Raithere
My brother is 6'1. He drives a Ford SUV because he can sit comfortably in it. There's about the best reason I know for someone who doesn't require such a vehicle for its storage capacity. Strangely enough, he also has what we call a "Volvo concern." At the time that Volvos were consistently the safest cars on the road (a Chevy would top them in the 1990s, I know), my brother made the observation that people who drove Volvos were driving insanely. "They know they're the safest," he reasons, which is why a bunch of people presume that their 1970s green box ought to pull out in front of, say, a delivery van or even a speeding police car with its emergency lights on. It was sort of a joke, because Camaro drivers are to this day among the worst on the road up here. But the mentality has crept into the SUV market. I mean, when Ford released the "Eddie Bauer" Bronco II, we all knew the things were coming into fashion. But I know one or two fo the proverbial women who like to be surrounded by a big car on the road because they feel insecure otherwise. I actually know one guy who doesn't take any questioning of his SUV; it's his right as an American and that's all he says about it. One person I know who claims to need the capacity never has anything in the back. The demonization became acute recently with a coincidence of factors: • The Petrol Bush Wars. • The irony of putting a sticker that says, "I support our Troops!" on a Ford SUV that is too large to fit in the parking garages so everyone can read it and see the filthy American flag hanging from the ski rack while you sit in traffic guzzling gas and everyone around you realizes that you're not in the HOV lane because you're yet another single-occupancy vehicle designed to seat as many as 7. • Running safety concerns about the vehicles themselves. • Cadillac, Mercedes, and others in the SUV market. (I realize that Mercedes makes vans and trucks, but the idea that they or BMW or others hope to sell large numbers of SUV's to Americans ... it's a change for us.) When I see a Seattle Police Officer driving around in a RAV-4, yes, I laugh. It looks ridiculous. I mean, if we kick back to the era of meter maids on the parking enforcement, all that's missing is a matching handbag and a courtesy lipstick. It looks like a police car from the Barbie® line of products. It's just one of those things. At some point, one comes to take comfort in despising these things. They're symbolic of a cultural debate in which one side scientifically insists that oxygen and CO2 are the same thing. SUV's generally make themselves contemptuous. They're remarkably closely tied to a number of current sensitivities among the culture.
Is an SUV the same as what they sell here as a 4X4? There are huge arguments about wether people in the city need "Torak Tractors" Its a CLASIC piece of idiocy to see a mum driving down to school in a 4x4 because they are "safer" when in actual fact they are more dangores to both the people (cars AND peds) around you as well as the ocupants than a commodor, felcon, corolla, or ANY of the normal cars
I have an uncle that drives one for the same reason. Perhaps a, "Because I don't fit in a VW, asshole" bumper sticker? Mmm... an ethical battle indeed. I think you're forgetting some of the real reasons: • The typical SUV costs about $10,000 more than a similarly marketed car. Of course the guy in the Dodge Neon is cussing out the accounting executive driving the Explorer for global warming and funding terrorism. Of course you know he'd be driving a Hummer or a Lexus Rx if he had the bucks but for some reason he can't get a job that pays more than $22k a year despite that he graduated with a Summa Cum Laude in Art History. • When you're in a car it's difficult to see past the behemoth in front of you. So you get angrier and angrier staring at a sticker for 45 minutes a day. Eventually your anger gets displaced and you become infuriated every time you see ol'glory waving. You register for the Green Party, buy a pair of Birkenstocks, and burn your bra even though you're a guy. • You're convinced that your '88 Taurus is easier on the environment and gets better gas mileage than that 2005 Mercedes M Series despite the fact that you've let your registration lapse because you can't pass emissions and you have to refill the oil twice as often as your gas-tank. • You're tired of having the interior of your car become as bright as the surface of Mercury every time someone pulls up behind you at night. Besides, your eyes are sensitive at night. • You're sure as shit not worried about the other guy's safety but you piss yourself when one of those fuckers comes up behind you going 25 mph faster than you. Of course, you piss yourself when your cat screams after you stomp on its foot with your Birkenstocks. It's still George W's fault. That's funny, I laugh every time I see a RAV-4. Sometimes I laugh so hard I piss myself. And the other thinks that civilization would survive in peace if we all rode bicycles and ate tofu. Indeed... indeed. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ~Raithere
Why do you think that if i had unlimited money i would be driving a 4 wheel? i would have a commador HSV with ALL THE TRIMINGSPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! much safer and more fun to drive
