The latest thing
The brainless euphemism strikes again.
Parking spaces ‘too narrow for modern vehicles’
Oh that’s what they are – not way too big, not monstrously out of proportion and dangerous to others and a boost to global warming – they’re modern. It’s so dull and old-fashioned and clueless not to drive monstrous trucks instead of small cars or god forbid just taking a damn bus.
A council is widening parking bays in some of its car parks “to accommodate the larger size of modern vehicles”. Colchester City Council is making the changes at its St Mary’s and St John’s car parks as part of a £1m improvement scheme. “Many of our city centre parking bays are underused simply because they are too narrow for modern vehicles,” said Martin Goss, portfolio holder for neighbourhood services.
That’s not “modern,” chum, that’s consumerism ratcheting everything ever upwards while the planet we live on gets less hospitable to life.
My car fits just fine in parking spaces; it’s a compact. The only time I have trouble parking it is when the ‘modern’ vehicles take up more space than they are entitled to, often parking over the line on purpose, not because their car won’t fit, but because they feel entitled to not have someone parking next to them.
I had thought cars were getting smaller, but apparently not. I found a helpful graphic via a search. One of the reasons stated is that car manufacturers have to meet emissions standards, but those standards vary by size of the vehicle, so it is easier for the manufacturers to make and promote larger cars. Something seems wrong about that, though, in that I thought emissions standards were tied to the average over all sold cars. So I’m confused.
Sackbut, part of it is that consumers actually like SUVs (I don’t personally understand why) and sales of small cars, sedans, and wagons have been plummeting for years now. Most car makers have abandoned those market segments because they need massive scale to continue to compete against cheaper cars (SUV’s and light utility trucks – ‘Utes’ in NZ) beginning to flood their markets.
The combination of body shape, improved crash protection, and market preference all drives towards bigger vehicles. The fact you can now get a ‘mid’ sized SUV with better fuel economy than a small family sedan from 30 years ago has softened peoples angst about fuel prices too.
My 2008 ‘large’ wagon fits just fine in standard car parks, and holds more load than an SUV of the same size, and drives better, so I really don’t get the SUV preference frankly.
We are getting more and more SUV-like things on the roads in Japan nowadays. It’s not much fun as a pedestrian (I don’t have a car) on a narrow back road (generally without pavements) when one of these things nearly grazes you. And of course if there are two of these beasts coming from opposite directions they find it difficult or impossible to pass each other.
Sackbut, another thing that happened is that many SUVs are built on a truck chassis, which gives them truck standards for emissions…which are much more lenient. That’s because of the farmer’s lobby in large part, coupled with the teamsters.
As for consumers preferring big cars, that was a direct marketing strategy in the late 80s, early 90s. The American manufacturers couldn’t compete with the Japanese in the compact car market, so they started building and marketing bigger cars. It didn’t take much to convince Americans that they needed larger cars, and that SUVs and monster trucks were status symbols. I don’t know about other countries, so someone else from one of those countries could possibly add to this, but the American car market is really screwed up.
Not to mention how many times I go to a parking garage and the ‘compact car only’ spaces are taken up by SUVs that are marketed as ‘compact’ but are still larger than a regular size car. Being a smaller SUV does not make you a compact car. I suspect most of these drivers know that; there are a lot of people (at least in the Midwest) who actively hate compact cars and will do anything they can to disrupt the system that promotes compact cars in any way. They see compact cars as European liberalism, not suited for a real American.