PedestrianError :vbus: :nblvt:

@MisterFrog @azimir And keep driving faster and more distracted and encouraging the government to widen the roads to speed up traffic.

@Not_mikey @Wxfisch Yes, the average consumer is quite susceptible to marketing and follows trends in everything from clothes to food & drink to toothbrushes. Many will look around at their peers and try to “keep up with the Joneses”. Rather than evidence that car companies are simply responding to consumer demand, that shows they’re creating the demand that most benefits their bottom line and looser regulation on vehicles classified as light trucks is a big part of why they market what they do.

@Not_mikey @Wxfisch I know unfortunately many people who own mid-sized SUVs. No one I choose to associate with has one a status symbol. They’re motivated by lack of smaller options (particularly for parents who need to fit multiple car seats in a vehicle) and fear of them or their kids being injured by other drivers in comically oversized vehicles.

@Not_mikey @Wxfisch Go to a Toyota or Honda dealership and you’ll find that longstanding models like the Civic and Corolla are much larger and less affordable than they were at the peak of their popularity. Ford no longer makes sedans and GM makes few. All the car companies aggressively market trucks and SUVs to the exclusion of sedans and hatchbacks. That’s not because consumers decided they wanted “status symbols,” it’s because SUVs & trucks have higher profit margins.

@ChairmanMeow @Archangel1313 There are already lots of things that keep people from getting driver’s licenses, from disabilities they have no control over like visual impairment or epilepsy to relatively minor and not directly safety-related civil matters like failure to pay child support or overdue court fees. A reasonable society would do a lot more to protect innocent lives from having people drive when they’ve demonstrated they can’t do so safely regardless of the reason.

@trufiassociation @phr Leading with sexism and ageism isn’t a great way to promote your product or point of view.

@SwingingTheLamp @kitnaht In a functional community, kids can get to all those places by walking or biking. Sorry your parents raised you in sprawl hell instead of a real neighborhood.

@VinesNFluff @A_Random_Idiot Yup, and yet the US and its consulting firms desperately try to export this failure to other countries and expect to be paid for their “expertise” in how to destroy cities.

@TheTechnician27 @Vittelius Why bother vandalizing something that’s just going to fall apart on its own within a few weeks or months?

@x00z @talzag Traffic engineers often consider themselves much more expert than they actually are on a lot of things and their traditional methods of setting speed limits are little more than astrology which all but ignore the needs of non-car road users, but if there’s one group less expert than traffic engineers on safe driving speed, it’s cops.

@beefbot @TheTechnician27 Firetrucks are inanimate objects. Humans make decisions about how to design, deploy, market, and accommodate them. A local fire chief just parroting industry dogma may be less responsible than someone with more power who chose not to sell reasonably sized fire trucks for suburbs and small towns in the US, but the trucks aren’t buying themselves or testifying against safe street designs at the planning board.

@SqueakyBeaver @ji17br Funny how such items enter chats a lot more frequently than they enter the bed of the typical suburban driver’s pickup truck.

@mozz I would just try to mix it up a bit: Kamala Harris, VP Harris, the vice president, etc. Compare it to however you refer to male/white politicians in everyday speech and just try to balance it. If you’re calling Biden Joe or referencing a conversation between Bernie and Kamala or whatever, no problem. What really shouldn’t happen intentionally or not is unequal parallels like “the VP debate between Kamala and Vance” or “Biden and Kamala need to articulate their message better.”

@mozz I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying that having a potential presidential nominee who is most frequently referred to by the public at large by a first name only is unusual and sets her apart from previous (male) nominees in ways which may unwittingly add to some voters’ already present feeling that perhaps she’s not really serious or experienced enough because she’s a woman.

@mozz I don’t think everyone intends for it to be sexist at all, it’s just that it takes places within a context in which female professors and medical doctors frequently report being on conference panels or introduced at meetings and have someone doing the introductions talk about, ‘Dr. This, Dr. That [both male], and Amy.’ It’s just one of many subtle ways women’s professional expertise and authority are quietly diminished.

@mozz Everybody needs to stop untitling the Vice President. It does not help move us toward a society that doesn’t discriminate in hiring for senior positions if we keep talking about women (especially if they’re women of color) as if they’re children while simultaneously referring to male peers by last names and/or titles.

@PapaStevesy IMO active voice includes focusing the sentence on the subject that did the action, not the one that was acted upon but by all means let’s argue about grammatical definitions instead of the problem of motorists killing people and journalists normalizing it. 🙄

@MacGuffin94 @ByteOnBikes Drivers can be unfit &/or negligent at any age. The focus should be on a safe system: streets that naturally limit speed so that crashes that do happen are less severe, vehicles that are appropriately sized and simple to operate, required features like automatic braking and speed limiters, and attractive options like walkable destinations and efficient transit.

@apfelwoiSchoppen But functionally, the victim didn’t die on her own, she died as the direct result of the driver hitting her. For the purpose of accurately portraying who took an action and who was acted upon, it should emphasize the driving, not the dying.

@apfelwoiSchoppen @ByteOnBikes Active voice would be, “A driver killed…”