This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn’t fit in many places around here it’s owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
Follow up: We had PBOT patrolling the neighborhood today for the first time ever. This block, specifically. I have to assume that one of you called them up and told them about this truck. Well guess what? A few dozen cars on this block got ticketed for things like parking contraflow, expired registrations, unapproved window tints, etc. Literally about half the cars on this street, yellow cards on every other windshield. You know who didn’t get a ticket? The big white Denali, which was parked about 5 feet behind the stop sign this morning. Too close by law, but apparently not close enough for PBOT to issue a citation. So to whatever fucking dumbass thought that cops are the solution, you didn’t improve our safety at all and you cost my safely-parked neighbors probably around $1000 in petty citations. I said multiple times in this thread that cops really aren’t the solution, even when they’re enforcing on your behalf they’re biased by culture. You didn’t help at all, in fact you arguably made the situation worse, and I hope you call you council members / PBOT office and request local restrictions on oversized vehicles or a road diet re-design of your street as penance.
In all fairness, I’d be terrified to drive that Miata with that monster sitting in front of me. It makes you realize just how crazy the size difference is between these monstrosities and everything else on the road. If this Denali hits this Miata, it’ll decapitate anyone in the Miata. Full stop.
Crash testing needs to account for people outside the car, both in other size classes of vehicle (including bicycles and scooters) and pedestrians. This is policy failure. The Denali should not share road space with the other modes of transportation! Even if this person is an unrealistically perfect driver, their low beams are so high they’ll blind anyone in a shorter vehicle.
I can sort of understand huge semis and delivery vans since they literally need the storage space and they’re generally driven by people with CDLs. But even those should be smaller in urban environments (and suburban, and small towns).
Tragedy of the commons. How many people drive big SUVs because they’re blinded at night by tall vehicles otherwise, and they’re afraid of their children (or themselves) being killed in a crash in a small car? The only way to solve this is government, lawmaking, and enforcement.