cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/22605592
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
163 points (93.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9579 readers
328 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The weight is certainly a large factor in the crumbling of infrastructure. A bridge made 50 years ago was engineered based on traffic loads they extrapolated at the time. In the 1980's, there were around 100 million vehicles across the United States. Today, that number has nearly tripled.
Combine a tripling of the number of vehicles with the increasing average weight - sedan or not - and that's a much larger number than a lot of infrastructure was designed to handle. As a result, roads and bridges are degrading faster and faster.
This is a primary factor in the push to get people into smaller vehicles, which weigh less. As FireRetardant pointed out, CAFE makes this difficult as manufacturers are heavily incentivized to make these longer wheelbase vehicles. Which, surprise surprise, weigh more.