Category: Infrastructure

The Observer view on SUVs: they are too dangerous and too big, their drivers should be made to pay

Britain is facing an unusual crisis: carspreading. Our road vehicles are getting bigger as people buy more and more SUVs of increasing dimensions and weight. At the same time, our streets and parking places remain the same size. A study by the European Transport Safety Council found that in a collision between a modest-size SUV […]

A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

It’s a nightmare situation on a highway: Your car hits a patch of ice and starts to skid. Unable to regain control, you panic as you veer toward the roadway’s edge. In emergencies like this, guardrails provide a failsafe. As explained in a federal memo, a guardrail will “deflect a vehicle back to the roadway [or] […]

Ever-wider: why large SUVs don’t fit, and what to do about it

Spurred on by rising sales of large SUVs, newly-sold passenger vehicles (i.e. cars) are getting one centimetre wider every 2 years (see figure 1 below). All the indications are that this trend will continue without regulatory action by European law-makers. The current EU maximum width applied to all vehicles, 255 cm, was enacted to limit the expansion of buses […]

More than 150 car models too big for regular UK parking spaces

Fears over safety as analysis by Which? shows ‘autobesity’ epidemic means cars getting wider and longer More than 150 car models are now too big to fit in average car parking spaces, according to analysis conducted by Which?. While the size of the standard parking bay has remained static for decades, cars have been growing […]

Electric cars too heavy for old multi-storey car parks, engineers warn

A review found that older buildings should either be strengthened or a vehicle weight limit of up to two-and-a-half tonnes imposed https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/05/electric-cars-too-heavy-old-multi-storey-car-parks/