Paris votes to crack down on SUVs | Non-Parisians will be charged almost $20 per hour to park large gas or hybrid vehicles within the city center in a bid to address pedestrian safety and air pollu…::Parisians have voted to increase parking charges for out-of-town SUV drivers as part of the city’s efforts to address road safety, air pollution, and climate change.

  • @[email protected]
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    310 months ago

    I’d love to see how they calculated those 20%. If it’s merely a statistic of which type of car was involved in what share of deadly accidents with pedestrians, it says nothing about the car but rather about the drivers.

    Once a car reaches a certain speed, it really doesn’t matter if it’s an ultralight vehicle or a tank.

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      Less mass means less momentum, so less force is required to slow it down, which means it can slow down faster in the time between noticing the pedestrian and colliding.

      Higher hood means less visibility directly in front of the vehicle. It also means it’s more likely to hit the centre of mass so the body takes the full force and falls on the ground the vehicle is moving towards, rather than lower so that the legs get pushed out and the body ends up falling on the hood.

      On the flip side, they are more visible and generally louder, so pedestrians might be making fewer mistakes on their end.

      The differences aren’t about when they hit someone at a high enough speed any vehicle will likely kill them, it’s about the thresholds between a harmless bump and a fatal injury.

      And even if the driver is the main factor, that’s all the more reason to increase the burden involved in driving them.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      Indeed, but the cost of acceleration up to that speed is heavily influenced by mass.

      And I don’t know many cities where you can cruise endlessly without traffic, stops, red lights, etc. Especially Paris where you would be lucky to attain 50km/h.