If there’s anything we should take from Japan, it’s treating cars like second class citizens behind transit instead of the other way around. The cute tiny cars are more a side effect of that.
It’s easy to want to drive one of these cute kei cars. It’s another thing to put your family in them and travel down the highway at 70 mph between a Suburban and an F-150
Brother, Kei cars cannot (should not?) go 70 mph. Don’t do that. Also motorcycles are legal road vehicles and are a fraction of the size of modern American trucks.
I think this is what it looks like when Trump is exposed to something that hasn’t yet been assigned a position in our culture wars.
Yeah. Of course light duty electric vehicles are great. Everyone who has driven a golf cart knows that. You know what else are? Modern trains. You know what else? Bikes. And also ropeways, passenger ferries, funicular railways, and – oh, right – walkable streets!
Driving a one-ton box a half mile by yourself in traffic is pretty much beat by almost any other way of locomoting. The only reason we don’t have these is that urban planners are appointed and promoted based on how car-horny they are.
@andrewrgross @HiddenLayer555 car size absolutely has been politicized into our culture wars. How else could anyone justify driving trucks so large they can’t even notice running over children? Trump is just a dementia-addled old man who doesn’t pay attention to what his underlings are pushing onto the masses
@andrewrgross @HiddenLayer555 Also that urban planners don’t actually plan cities in the US, traffic engineers do. Planners only decide what to do with the land that’s left after people who know nothing about cities have made plans for everyone to speed around in a private car and how much of that space has to be mandatorily devoted to parking the cars.
That’s the stupidest way to do it…what the hell.
Our car companies are the reason we don’t have mini cars. They spent a century setting up regulatory hurdles to block out competition, and they’re not about to let go now that all they can make is trucks. If we allowed tiny cars in America, it would allow competition in the market. They can’t have that.
