Header image by Mehdi Azizi

Yesterday on Twitter, Dutch planner/ engineer (and friend of Greater Auckland) Lennart Nout asked an intriguing question about cars…

OK so you're the head of the organisation that regulates cars. Which rules do you impose? 1. Maximum weight of 2.000 kg for EVs. 2. Limit acceleration 3. Limit max speed.

— Lennart Nout (@lennartnout) July 26, 2022

…and promptly got ratioed, as they say on the internet. As of last night there were over 200 replies and two dozen quote-tweets. As Lennart himself notes, it’s actually amazing how many good suggestions there are!

In the midst of a climate crisis that demands less driving (note: “ban cars” doesn’t actually mean ban all cars), and a growing awareness of the downsides of being locked into relying on cars (note: a certain subreddit has more than quadrupled its membership since the recent spike in petrol prices), it’s good to pause and reflect that, quite simply, cars could easily be so much safer and less damaging than they are.

The replies to Lennart’s question fall into a few key categories, which we’ve bundled up below for your consideration. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments!

With vehicles getting bigger and bigger and correspondingly more deadly and damaging, one of the most common suggestions was to introduce height and width limits.

Also, limits to hood heights for all the obvious reasons. Here’s a visual if you need one.

This was by far the largest group of suggestions, starting with mandated design for better visibility in all directions at all times (see above), and obvious things like:

And how about this: “Cameras filming the driver that take a hard save whenever a crash is detected and send the previous 60 seconds straight to the authorities to check for cellphone abuse and other signs of guilt.”

Or maybe we could try this one neat trick: “Anytime a car kills or seriously injuries a human, $10m fine for the manufacturer. Cars safe overnight.”

Lots of people homed in on the weight aspect, suggesting a charge per km driven that’s indexed to the weight of the vehicle to cover the proportionate damage to the road and environs.

The complementary take: strict weight limits on vehicles. Of course, there were also instant debates about whether you can have workable options within those limits (you can).

https://twitter.com/lennartnout/status/1552031301896704001

There were a whole lot of noise control suggestions, because cities aren’t loud, cars are loud!

For example: “Set new limits on the maximum and typical noise a vehicle or motorbike can emit. Use sound sensors to penalise offending drivers and/or require vehicle to be modified to reduce noise. Quiet zones in urban areas could then be explored.”

Related: horns that sound as loud inside the car as they do outside, and devices that pipe the sound of exhaust and tire noise back into the car at full volume.

(Honk if you love the bonus suggestion to connect the horn to the brakes so that pressing the former activates the latter.)

“You don’t get to buy a car unless you can demonstrate that you have somewhere to park it. (cf. Japan)”

“The car won’t actually turn unless the indicator is on” – this one led to some debate about what this would mean at roundabouts.

How about a built-in pause for thought?

“You have to sit in the car for 10 minutes before being allowed to drive. We’d have far fewer 1 mile driving trips then!”

Related: a requirement for a minimum number of passengers before the car starts. Or, if you don’t like the sound of that, a suggestion to gauge the horsepower to the occupancy rate, so e.g. the car operates at 1/4 power when there’s just one person in it.

Given how many cars sit idle most of the time, how about socialising the means of mobility!

“Buy 20% of the current private cars and make it a public car (with taximeter) that everyone can use. Just a shared car on every street corner, then a lot of people no longer need a private car.”

“Ban car ads” was a popular suggestion. (Maybe we could start with ads for the largest and most destructive vehicles , or the ones that say the quiet bit out loud?)

And actually, why not “health safety warnings and ad restrictions on par with the tobacco industry”?

Alternatively, or as well: “Adverts for cars must show them in traffic with cyclists gently filtering past.”

The only truthful car ad pic.twitter.com/JBFjHCupwg

The irony is that car ads just can’t help telling on themselves, by always telling the one big truth: that cars are best when there are actually very few of them.

Car manufacturers so embarrassed of cars taking over our cities that they leave them out of their adverts.

A thread. pic.twitter.com/t0oJjMAMZJ

— Jon Burke FRSA 🌍 (@jonburkeUK) October 4, 2021

An unapologetically all-encompassing proposal: “They must all look the same and ugly colour I’m thinking trabant-esq. no heater, no radio uncomfortable. Make cars as undesirable as possible oh and add a public transport tax on them to subsidise fantastic comfortable warm PT and finance a bike for every child.”

And the infamous “Tullock’s spike” thought experiment gets a few mentions…

Lastly, while we’re doing thought experiments: what if every trip in the car was a teachable moment?

During every car-ride: – show the actual costs in terms of money – show the actual time it takes / would have taken by car, compared to bike, public transport, walking, etc – show the health-effects the same distance would have had on a bike instead of the car

— Jeroen Dirk Paar (@JD_Paar) July 26, 2022

Using GPS to ensure cars can’t speed seems like ab absolute no brainer. If we can do it for e-scooters….

It could go further and ping people for running reds. Something like this could also make congestion charging a breeze and give amazing data for planning.

I guess there’d be some quite reasonable privacy objections.

I think a “black box” system that only gets “opened” after a serious crash, and a mandatory two-class insurance system (i.e if you don’t have a black box, your car insurance rates go way up) would be a good compromise.

In fact, I am somewhat surprised that insurance companies don’t already offer it. “Voluntarily install this, and get lower insurance rates”. But I guess unless they can charge more for those who refuse – which will only work if all insurers do – they have no commercial incentive.

These telemetry solutions are widely used in commercial vehicles- we have the technology

Yea people will scream “my privacy” (while talking about self driving cars and teslas that already do this) but NZ has fantastic privacy laws and it would be very easy to silo this info to just where it needs to be. Also driving is a luxuary activity on public roads, people can (and will) complain every time a safety system is implemented. They can always opt out and build their own roads.

Tower did start a trial of something like this I believe.

They don’t want our government knowing where they are, but google maps is fine. And also using number plate cameras is fine. I am sure there is a way to keep this fairly private. If all the box did was keep data on it for crash purposes, and also sent offence information when committed, then it is only giving your private data (number plate, time, etc) during an offence (no different to a red light or speed camera recording it really)

If you mandate a black box on new vehicles. Give it a few years, and insureres themselves will begin offering lower rates to those cars. I’m sure certified black box installs will become available too.

“I am sure there is a way to keep this fairly private.”

To be honest, I think there isn’t, or at least, it will require constant vigilance. Once a tracking system of ANY sort is implemented, both govts and private interests will want access. We are already seeing this with traffic camera and similar systems being accessed by spy services and police all over the place. In California, there’s a current proposal that police should be able to even access private doorbell cameras (“Ring” brand camera systems, so already all in the cloud)! Of course the proposal claims that it will only used in extraordinary circumstances… blah blah blah.

The privacy concerns are real, and at best we can keep a tenous balance on them.

I have privacy concerns too, and think we need constant vigilance. Just wondering, though, if we should be on guard for another kind of “hyprocrisy in how we treat drivers vs how we treat cyclists”.

As a Guardian article said yesterday, about bike share: “The apps collect a rider’s personal data, and the bicycles use built-in GPS chips and wireless connections to transmit that rider’s location as frequently as every few seconds. A bicycle that spies on its rider –”

A cursory glance at what is known now about access and equity means we can’t brush the issue away by saying that bike share is something you “opt” into whereas driving is not. They are both things some people opt into. They are both things giving access that for some people, isn’t available in other ways.

It seems to me that tracking people in charge of a car, given the injury it can cause, should have more social licence than tracking people in charge of a bicycle.

Black boxes and insurance discounts for using them are already common place in the UK and no doubt elsewhere in Europe. It’s pointless in NZ until compulsory car insurance is made law.

You’ve got to be joking we live in a country where even 3rd party vehicle insurance isn’t mandatory, there is no way you’re going to get black boxes into cars.

In the old days some vehicles had governors installed which limited the speed you could do , so basically when you got up to it that was it ,no matter how much you tried it wouldn’t go any faster , you just wasted petrol .

It’s not just the old days, all vehicles topspeed is limited in Japan to 180kp/h, all those Japanese imports can’t go above this unless the limiter is removed, most electric vehicles also have a limiter.

This is actually extremely easy from the tech side of things now. The NZTA has a (or will soon have) a database for the whole country of all the speed limits on all the roads.

Mandatory wearing hi viz for an hour after driving a ute

So many head injuries during crashes. Why do we pay for that, when there’s such an easy way to protect them? Sure, it will be a bit inconvenient, but if it saves one life?

That is what highly skilled race car driver wear, so it must be important.

I remember once hearing that mandatory car helmets would save more lives than bike helmets.

You’re missing the point. Have another look at that Tullocks Spike in front of Driver B. Don’t get drivers to wear a helmet. Get drivers to feel very very vulnerable, so that they behave themselves at all times. You’ll see veeeeerrrry careful driving then.

Highly skilled Race car drivers are MEANT to be going as fast as they possibly can. Ordinary badly-skilled drivers going to work along suburban streets need to be going as slow and carefully as they possibly can. The two categories are not the same.

We are not missing the point. We are making the point that there is a hyprocrisy in how we treat drivers vs how we treat cyclists (and pedestrians).

For driving, and and for the people killed and maimed by other drivers, or through their own driving, as society we tend to be much more “Oh, that’s a necessary evil, a cost of doing business”.

For people on foot and bike, we tend to make them responsible, despite them actually being far less in the wrong, on average, during crashes (MoT’s own data), and despite them causing a lot less havoc on others.

Also, I think you might miss the psychological impact of having to strap on a helmet to engage in a day-to-day activity. The whole point is “You are now entering a danger zone”.

Instead, we have cars that are designed to comfortably isolate yourself from any feeling of risk. So the helmet is a psychological Tullock spike too, just as bike helmets have been a “don’t cycle, it’s not safe” signal to people here in NZ for decades now.

Yeah, naa. Helmets make you feel safer, and let you go faster.

Precisely – this cartoon summarises it.

https://colvilleandersen.medium.com/the-case-for-motorist-helmets-d1d6c4ae3ed2

“Yeah, naa. Helmets make you feel safer, and let you go faster.”

So do racing stripes and fuzzy dice. Lets make them mandatory 😉

Another local discussion of ‘obese vehicles’ https://lowcarbonkapiti.org.nz/blog/ and Genesis in its climate newsletter talks about the new giant EV utes arriving. And as the article says most will be used on urban streets https://www.genesisenergy.co.nz/about/sustainability/climate-change-hub/yourself/when-will-ev-utes-arrive-in-new-zealand?

I like the “obese vehicles” terminology.

But I doubt it will change people’s behaviour.

The constant race between social shaming of certain behaviours VS display of status symbols is not something that can be “won”. In fact, to some degree it can entrench some behaviours (“I’m not going to be told by this nanny state / these damn greenies what I can drive!”).

[So really, we DO have to take some steps to regulate the worst excesses, because voluntary change won’t happen.

I get the freedom of choice argument, but people’s freedom stops where they infringe on others (including their road safety, and their and their kids ability to live in a sustainable future world).

My teenage self’s favourite author Robert Heinlein would be disappointed with my non-Libertarian stance, but then he didn’t live through a world getting essentially used up, and he didn’t really live in a marginalised social group.]

Haha. Miss read the “No Screens” as “no wind screens”. Would bring down max speed and range.

And make your hair look like you drove even faster. Win Win.

Lost a windscreen on the way North tears ago and found if you leave all the windows up in the car the wind doesn’t have any effect but wear a pair of glasses and a mask as all the flying bugs will get in all the facial orifices .

“OK so you’re the head of the organisation that regulates cars. Which rules do you impose?”

a) they pay the full fuel tax required to maintain the roads properly

b) they pay congestion tolls & direct road charging

c) they pay what ratepayers currently pay, as the level of service & speed increase from a 1m wide dirt track (suitable for peds & cyclists) to a 14m carriageway is almost all to the benefit of drivers – other modes have to be provided safe space so they dont get killed’

d) they pay developer contributions towards transport as its the vehicle users not the developers that cause the issues

e) they pay the cost taxpayers currently pay towards road crash costs

f) they pay a vehicle air pollution levy

g) they pay the cost of noise mitigation on all existing roading to bring the noise down to acceptable levels – either through noise fences or low noise ashphalt

h) they continue to pay the ETS carbon tax

Anyone still want to drive a car (& pay the true real costs) ?

You forgot that they should pay a return on investment. We don’t expect cost price food or power or banking to be provided by government because it creates all sorts of problems (such as in Venezuela where they use subsidised power to mine bitcoin). Imagine if road users had to pay a return on the value of all that land covered in tarmac, we might see some more sensible decisions on better ways to use it. Another one is paying for parking – anywhere on public land. In fact that is the worst subsidy of the lot.

i) Dynamically priced parking charges for all on-street parking or council provided off-street parking as it is a service. Ideally the minimum parking return should cover costs of that service (& possibly a return on capital given parking could theoretically be sold off and provided by a competitive market alone)

Not so sure about making a +ve return on capital (financial measure alone) when we expect transport improvements to make a wellbeing return ((economic + social + environmental return) / financial cost.) If we wanted a capital return on transport, then why not every other government service?

We are already seeing a massive change in the advertising of cars, from some manufacturers anyway. Mitsubishi Outlander is now being advertised, essentially, as an accessory to match your hand-bag, as the advert concentrates on matching nail polish, wheel trims, lipstick, pet pug dogs, coloured side mirrors etc. Hardly mentions that there is a car involved – its all about the look. Weird to male eyes, but effective in playing to the person in the family who apparently makes the majority of car-buying decisions.

In contrast we also have the unreconstructed male adverts for things like Jeep, Ford Ranger, Nissan D-Max etc. All about thumping through bush, beach, sea, mountains, and crafting a table out of an old tree with a chainsaw and a ute. All rather stupid, really, no matter what your gender is. Appeals to the bloke who still thinks Barry Crump is funny. Surely their time has been and gone.

Living rurally now, I can assure you that there’s still a lot of younger and older blokes like that.

I’d prefer them to eventually drive e-utes rather than fossil fuel utes, but clearly that can’t be the standard vehicle in town. I wish there was a non-gameable way to price urban ute driving higher than rural. Congestion charging might sort of work, but only sort of.

The e Utes are not going to work as tradie work horses. And probably going to be marginal outside cities. These things are going to have tiny carrying capacity, likely only a few 100kg.

Eute are going to be “perfect” for central Aucklands many accountants.

There’s e-trucks and buses already, why do you feel that electric utes HAVE to have tiny carrying capacities? Ignore vehicles marketed to urbanites who dream of barreling through the bush – are there any reasons why electric utility vehicles with both range and capacity for tradies and (actual) farmers are not possible? Sure, battery weight will remain an issue, but surely it’s not impossible to be overcome to create practical vehicles?

Anyway, not our urban problem… rural traffic IS important, but not the A priority for climate or safety, in my view.

“There’s e-trucks and buses already,”

There are city busses, with short runs. A Wellington to Auckland bus is not happening any time soon. The e trucks are mostly “light” trucks, that you can drive on normal license. Ecars sort of work, because cars are massive overkill so bing 50% heavier doesn’t matter.

“why do you feel that electric utes HAVE to have tiny carrying capacities? “

Because they need to carry a ton plus of dead weight batteries rather that a max 100kg of petrol. Engine may be lighter, but it’s still a lot heavier and weird opportunity costs. If it needs range, that means more batteries=Less capacity. More capacity =less range. The things cant really be ballanced. A few 100kg, stacks up fast. A ute which can’t tow a boat 100km or take a half cube of gravel in the tray, is not very useful, as a ute.

Like I say a car adding 50% of its weight is manageable, the heavier the vehicle the less this is true.

I reckon the, e Utes will end up as accountant urban runabouts (their worst possible use).

Until our rural roads are safe for walking, cycling, horse riding – ie we have separated paths for them, utes aren’t appropriate on rural roads either. Perhaps they work best on farms. E-utes there allow you to carry around the electric tools in the tray and power them from the battery. But generally farmers will not need the double cab, and will want them to be lighter, so they dig into the soil less, and compress it less too.

The simple answer is charges for parking.

On the same logic that electric vehicles could be issued with differentiated number plates to allow camera-based systems to apply different policies to them, heavier vehicles could be issued with plates qualifying them for higher parking charges.

Ute ads now come in two forms:

1: (traditional narrative) “Be a MANLY MAN!!! Make fires, grow a beard, catch fish and buy a ute – right now!! Your mates (who all have identical utes) will respect your rugged individuality.”

2: (new narrative) “This car is the sophisticated, urban tool that you need to go shopping, or to the espresso bar, right in the centre of the city. You friends will think you are super cool. There will always be a parking space right outside the cafe. Honest.”

Both narratives are equally daft, but are clearly effective at convincing people to buy utes.

Nr 2 is really why people like Daniel Newman (AC Councillor) oppose AT’s parking strategy. “It’s already too hard to park in town”. Well, yeah buddy.

That’s because Auckland has stopped being a town decades ago, but you still haven’t realised it’s a city now, and cities can’t effectively work with cars as the primary way of getting around.

Indeed. In a city, there isn’t the space for everyone tor travel by car…even less so by ute. Space efficient transport is the only way to do this:

https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/introduction/why/designing-move-people/

You guys are missing one tiny point on why utes are popular. TAX! As a business owner you essentially have 3 vehicles that are fully tax deductible, Utes, vans and a station wagon if you permanently remove the back seats.

Want to see more business owners have reasonable cars? Make all Private vehicles the same tax wise.

Tax hugely influences behaviour. If something makes financial sense, it’ll happen. Taxes can tip the balance either way, depending on what is sought.

As you point out, the current tax system incentivises utes for all businesses.

I know a lot of people who own utes, only one of them is a business owner. Utes are popular because they are really practical, my sister and her husband own a ute, they have active kids, mountain biking, sailing, winter sports, they have a caravan, the ute is the best possible vehicle for the lifestyle they have.

Don’t be reasonable mate. Utes are evil and must die get with the program.

Why is the noise of EVs considered a problem? I thought that the vision-impaired community’s main problem with EVs is you can’t hear them coming and wanted them adapted to make the same noise as a petrol engine.

All a bit strange, eh? Any noise benefits of ev’s cut out above about 20 km/hr or so, and heavier vehicles with wider tyres are noisier than lighter vehicles with narrow tyres. So I think the point is that e-vehicles create noise pollution too. The vision-impaired community might have a point that e-vehicles are too quiet to hear in very low speed environments where the vehicles are required to be light and small… but surely the benefits of such an environment would be massive for all. In any case, should we be relying on noise to warn us, given the number of hearing-impaired people?

My EV noise drops out at 70km/hr as by then tyre noise and wind noise are louder than the hum. I don’t get to drive much at 70+km/hr and I enjoy the EV hum with the window down when the weather allows. I’m 50% by bike and 50% by EV. My wife is 90% EV Moped in Spring/Summer/Autumn. We are getting closer to our goals but I’d like to be 100% EV cargo bike…….

As a pedestrian, Ecars appear just as loud as most normal ICE cars. I sometimes look to see if they really don’t have exhaust pipes.

Here in the UK where EVs are now very common, I’ve noticed just how quite they are after a day at the work place. Many actually generate a noise at low speed as they are hard to hear in rural locations and impossible in London with all of the citie’s other noises.

Don’t think the blog said electric vehicle noise is a problem. The blog suggested that vehicles should have noise maximums – and electric vehicles would probably meet them much more easily.

That said, an electric vehicle driving 100 kph on anything except a super-flush high quality road will still make some noise. So while 30 years from now, living directly next to a motorway will be much healthier than it is now, noise issues won’t quite go away there, I suspect.

Just make any car over a certain weight require a special license class, same if you are driving minibus, HGV etc. Will soon eliminate anyone who is just buying a Ute for show. Add to that Clean Car standard, congestion charging and the like and they will suddendly stop being the most sold car type in New Zealand.

Unless you make that license requirement retroactive, you’d still have a huge social group who is either driving the vehicle, or will be legally forced to abandon their beloved super-size vehicle once their current one starts breaking down. Recipe for years and decades of of political pressure to undo the license requirement again. I think the only realistic way is a combination of regulating (prohibiting) some extreme aspects of ute-type cars (like blind spots, max weights etc) and also slowly price them higher and higher (even though it means that larger utes will again become a “real folks” display of conspicuous consumption (think Hummer) rather than a middle class status symbol again).

Please can we spell this correctly? It’s a licence. The noun form has a “-ce” ending.

A driving licence A liquor licence Artistic licence …etc

It’s only “a license” in the USA.

The verb form is correctly spelt as “license” (e.g. “The council will license the liquor store”.)

But what if my principle at school never told me? 😉

[I’m not a Kiwi by birth or education so sometimes my second language regional spellings get mixed up, mate]

So why does New Zealand pick and choose when it wants to use american terminolgy and pronunciation? Talk about confusing..if you know what the person is saying then get on with your life and stop whinging on a blog.

Firstly, changing the spelling alters the meaning of the word. For licence/license this is pretty minor, but for other words it has a greater effect.

Secondly, spelling mistakes detract from the quality of the content. This is a high-quality blog, after all.

Here in the UK where EVs are now very common, I’ve noticed just how quiet they are after a day at the work place. Many actually generate a noise at low speed as they are hard to hear in rural locations and impossible in London with all of the citie’s other noises.

Geez who cares. English is full of words that are both the noun and the verb.

The object of this comment is to clear up confusion in the English language. “I object!”, I hear someone say. And fair enough. Object (noun), and objEct (verb). Same spelling but two different pronunciations and two different meanings. English is full of this. sUbject (noun), subjEct (verb) prOtest (noun), protEst (verb)

Once you have read {red} these examples, you can read {reed} them again.

You can take that stuff and stuff it.

Treat cars as art. If you’re going to have them in the city centre, make them interesting. Put them up on plinths as monuments to the engineering achievements that many of them actually represent and showcase them on that level.

I’m only kind of kidding. Close Queen Street and place glass boxes with historically sigificant NZ cars along it as part of an art trail. Ex Possum Bourne rally cars, McLaren Can-Am cars, that sort of thing. Give them the KZ1 treatment.

Those are the cars I want to see in the city centre.

Cool mind experiment. How do we make cars so appalling that they are as bad as being on a bike? Loving all you suggestions above.

Cars are already worse — they cost more to buy, more to run, more to licence whether you use them or not, kill more people, and pollute massively — and perhaps because of these things attract people like yourself who are more excited by the disapproval of others than leaving the world better than you found it.

Require all cars to have a certificate of entitlement (CoE) in order to drive on the road. Limit the number of CoE’s and have them expire after 10 years. Emissions test all vehicles for every WoF, such that they must me maintained to original specs for CO, NOx, unburnt HC and PM10. Introduce GPS and time based taxing for distance driven. In car black box monitoring hard acceleration, braking and cornering, and providing a “driving style score”. Have a progressive tax system for distance and rego based on more tax for: higher fuel consumption, lower vehicle safety, lower pedestrian safety, higher vehicle weight and worse “driving style score”.

If I was going to change one thing in the design requirements for cars it would be to require fit for purpose speedometers.

Digital ones that display the speed to the nearest km/h in large digits are fine, but the analogue dial and needle type really do need improvement. If they were fit for purpose then 80% of the swept range of the needle would be used for speeds between 0 and 100, whereas in most modern cars the 0-100 is squeezed into less than the first half of the dial while the majority of the space is wasted displaying hypothetical driving speeds all the way up to 200-300km/h depending on the car manufacturer. Displaying those speeds has no place outside of cars built specifically for motor-racing.

Agree that there are privacy concerns here, however its not really a drivers vs cyclists thing. Its a private ownership vs corporate ownership issue. Cyclists who buy their own bike don’t get tracked (and if anything have greater privacy than private car drivers because they can’t be tracked by number plate recognition). Drivers who used car share services or drive vehicles owned by corporate fleets are tracked, because its about keeping track of the asset and holding the person currently using it accountable for their use of it. If there is an issue here its not drivers vs cyclists, its whether privacy concerns are a barrier to getting people to move to shared ownership models rather than choosing to own a private vehicle.

Yes, that’s true. So the equity issue is different to what I said, and maybe opposite, actually. Looking at all the transport options available, and who is likely to be using them, moving into the future, the privacy issue does have an equity angle, but more to do with wealth.

Bike ownership is generally cheaper than using share bikes, so anyone wanting to bike can opt out of being tracked by owning their own bike and it’ll be cheaper anyway. But car share is cheaper than car ownership, for anyone using a car at a low, sustainable level, so to opt out of being tracked you have to own a car, and a place to park it, and this will be out of reach for many people as move forward.

Probably the “ability to opt out” is less important than the overall system becoming “easy to track”.

Sorry that second post was intended to be a reply to something Heidi posted way further back in the discussion chain, but it didn’t attach as a reply.

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