SUVs and pickup trucks are now too big for already gigantic garages

The few I did find were lovingly restored classics with a surprisingly high price tag.

I had a friend who mocked it relentlessly. "It's not much of a car, but then again it's not much of a truck either."

I have to unload a few before I have clearance to back up our long driveway.

It's doubly weird because I rent cars from Enterprise and Budget all the time and they've never asked me for it.

But anyway, once that was done with, yeah the 75-minute truck rental was just what the doctor ordered. I picked up a bunch of industrial auction items, dropped them at my friend's place and my place, and had the truck fueled and returned with several minutes to spare.

Everything I've ever bought from HD itself, including 10' pieces of conduit and Unistrut, 8' pipe and lumber, numerous bags of cement and aggregate and mulch, has fit just fine in my Prius.

I wouldn't mind owning a pickup for full sheets, but in practice everything I've made has tesselated just fine into 32x48 one-third-sheets so I just have 'em ripped on the panel saw in-store.

You think that is a small pickup? WOW.

  I have a '94 Toyota Pickup(right before they rebranded them to the Tacoma) 

Plus, they are cheap used because they are the anti-status symbol: nobody is going to daily drive a "___-van" unless absolutely necessary.

An F-150 can hold 2500lbs in the bed saving a driver four trips relative to the aforementioned Honda Fit. Granted, that’s often a rare activity that doesn’t necessarily solely justify truck ownership (as if it’s needed).

I would probably rather have a hatch if I didn't love this car though, fair point.

It's meant for customers who need a truck but don't have one.

You fit that exactly so there's something I'm missing - are you buying those really long 2x4 - 4x4 or the like?

If so, a lot of people do that, so you need to stand out with the staff.

So this is what I do - buy a $11 big drywall and then tell them to call me when the truck's available.

It works every time. I have no clue why. I even use it to rent trucks for towing cars on a trailer bed.

The drywall will sell on CL like hot cakes once you're done with the truck but see my previous post.

I don’t see many luxury vehicles here, but I see quite a few $80k+ trucks.

I had a coworker that had a $1,200 month truck payment.

If I’d had more money, I could afford a coupe.

And if I had more money still, I could afford a 2 seater sports car.

An under utilized vehicle may be a hallmark of the middle class, but a desirable vehicle that is only exactly what you need at that moment is a hallmark of the upper class.

On top of being more expensive, it’s also far more likely to be a secondary vehicle.

An F-150 with a long bed is expected to get 25.25mpg. The new Ranger is expected to get 30.25mpg. The F-150 actually gets 22, and the Ranger gets 26.

My understanding is that it's difficult to build a smaller truck that gets the required mileage. The result is that the new Ranger is the size of the F-150 from 15 years ago or so. You simply can't buy a compact pickup truck like the 90s Tacoma or Ranger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy (scroll down to Agreed standards by model year, 2012–2025)

So because the birth rate is lower in aggregate, people with three kids don't exist? Or that they should need less space somehow? I don't understand the relevance to either the post you replied to or even the article itself.

Seems like you're responding to a point nobody made, including yourself.

> They're cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and people feel safer in them. They're reasons, but not especially good ones.

Why did you even reply to a post when you're ignoring what it said? If you want to grandstanding about this topic, by all means reply to the thread as a whole. That's what top level replies are for.

Why reply to a specific post if you have no interest in discussing that post's content or ideas? Nothing you replied to even came close to being relevant, I'm not even sure you read the post you replied to.

Minivans are expensive, selection is limited and there's not that much competition. If you want a crossover or midsize SUV the opposite is true.

Like the pickup truck, our minivan is an extremely versatile vehicle, but there's just no way I'm going to put loose gravel, wet bags of mulch, or trash bound for the landfill in the back of it. Furthermore, I sometimes need to tow a trailer, and minivans simply aren't built for this.

Everyone's situation is different and many people live where they need a car to function. My commute averages about 2 hours each way by car. That would be 4 hours by bicycle according to Google Maps. Sorry, but there is nothing you can say that would convince me to spend 8 hours per day commuting by bicycle.

- Riding on a bike/pedestrian overpass going OVER an intersection. - Riding on a bike path that is separated by grass from and parallel to a road. - Waiting at a crosswalk light for my turn to cross an intersection (while traveling on a bike path).

Cyclists are a frequent place for irrationally angry folks in cars to let out their anger.

If those drivers drive around smaller/slower cars do they get equally frustrated/angry?

Even if they do, what gives them the right too get angry at other participants in traffic that are legally using the road?

As to why in the US a lot more bike commuters are also into recreational biking, it's because of a feedback loop created in combination with bad bike supporting infrastructure and urban planning: the current situation means that in many places commuters have to share the road with cars, which means that only those that really like bike riding and/or are comfortable with a high level of stress/risk do it which, as it happens, it overlaps largely with the traits of those that enjoy recreational biking. With a lot of these riders on the road drivers get a sense of "these bikers are enjoying themselves and annoying me at the same time so they don't deserve respect" which further reinforces the current situation.

In the late 1970s-early 1980s when cyclists started calling for bike lanes and changes to laws, part of the deal was that cyclists would adopt smart habits AKA the rules of the road, that helped them become part of a shared car-bike system. Things like wearing helmets, signaling turns, riding in the same direction as traffic. A lot of the rules are designed to make cyclists' behavior less unpredictable and thus safer.

I see this system breaking down when cyclists do dumb things like riding the wrong way on a street and swerving across lanes. (I'm probably showing my age but I mostly notice this from fixed-gear cyclists).

As a mostly car driver myself now, I want to ensure that bikes are safe. But it requires the cooperation

The vast majority of roads are ill suited for bikes in our area (Asheville NC). The roads are narrow, curvy, blind and there is rarely even a shoulder. Bikers are in danger so much I don't know how they stomach it. I see them a lot of side walks which just endangers pedestrians.

It seems they cause traffic build up (people wanting to pass safely) which just enrages drivers and want to lash out at these "idiots" for being on these kinda roads in the first place.

Also it should be mandatory for bikers to wear lights - not just reflectors - so as to be almost painfully visible. It's not difficult to put rear blinkers + front light on a bike.

> Open to having my views changed on this.

If you agree that a world with more cyclists would be better (for the environment, for safety, maybe for public health), how do you suggest we get there? Encouraging change towards a better world often requires swimming upstream, shouldering some stress and discomfort and pressure, in order to exert pressure back on the system one wants to change.

Nobody will build safer bicycle infrastructure if nobody rides bicycles.

It simply doesn't match the reality of how drivers behave.

First, motorists often just have no idea how to drive sensibly around bikes and do weird things that contravene road laws and common sense - not leaving any passing margin, passing way too close right before red lights, cutting off bikes that they've just overtaken to turn right.

Second, motorists will get aggressive and impatient with cyclists that are riding in the most perfectly considerate and legal way. I've seen motorists get irritated with cyclists if they get delayed more than a second or two. That happens all the time with other cars - if the car in front of you is turning, it's going to delay you the same amount as if you have to slow down to safely overtake a cyclist. It goes both ways too - some motorists get upset if you ride in a textbook manner (occupying a lane as needed, doing hook turns, etc) and some get upset if you don't do that (they think you should be riding in the gutter or the sidewalk or whatever).

Third, if you look around, you'll see cars breaking minor traffic laws more frequently than people. In my old neighbourhood I kept an eye on how often different vehicles blew through stop signs, and cars did it with frequency and in far more dangerous ways than bikes. Just look at the statistics about how many deaths are attributed to cars behaving badly versus bikes.

The only way I can explain it is two things. First, people get confused when they have to interact with cyclists, because they don't really know what they're doing, and as a result get frustrated and angry. Second, motorists are primed to be annoyed at cyclists because they're different. It's hard to get annoyed at the car in front of you delaying you by a few seconds by its simple presence, because you yourself are also a person in a car.

The complaints about cyclists doing this that and the other are red herrings - if cyclists stopped doing them, the people complaining would find another way to rationalize their frustration.

I think all road users should up their game, but it's cars that are the big problem.

From the biker's perspective, your driving a car on the road is increasing the risk of something bad happening to both of you.

I'm not disputing that you have no choice but to drive a car on the road, but it's quite possible that the biker is in the same situation.

My experience is that I used to bike often and now I don't. So this probably alleviates my surprise at say an inexperienced biker riding in the gutter, coming up on a parked car, and jutting out at the last minute. But a little bit of riding would get you this sense too - its probably the best way to change your perspective. It will also give you the superpower of knowing when a car is going to change lanes before it puts on its blinker.

When riding, my biggest worry was being creamed from behind on non-city roads where traffic is going much faster, and drivers tend to space out or expect to pass within inches. But this tension is totally on the specific drivers themselves, and the easy answer is for them to explicitly pass rather than viewing a bike as some kind of roadside decoration.

FWIW I wasn't a fan of bike lanes in general. They're redundant and constraining, creating an expectation that you'll ride in the door zone or through road hazards, backed up by a solid white line. I'd rather explicitly share the right lane with cars rather than have a fake division. (Well-done bike lanes like modern NYC obviously change this)

A U-Haul would have cost more, have done more damage to the road, have done more damage to the environment, would have been far more difficult to get over the pass (which was under chain controls during one of the trips), would have been far more dangerous to other drivers, and would have been far more difficult to park in reasonable proximity to both the old apartment and the new one without being a massive nuisance to my neighbors.

Regardless, that's just one example. Other examples (among many, many, many others):

- The time I bought a couch from IKEA (not to mention other large pieces of furniture) and hauled it home entirely on my own, which was possible because I own an SUV

- The multiple times I've hauled hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of IT hardware between sites for a company, which was possible because I own an SUV

- The multiple times I've lugged home piles of computers I bought on the cheap, which was possible because I own an SUV

That is, there have been enough times that my SUV has been an absolute godsend that it's more than justified its own existence. All three of those things would've been easier with a pickup truck or cargo van, granted, but a pickup doesn't also allow hauling as many passengers (without significantly sacrificing bed space or making the truck obnoxiously big), and cargo vans (or even minivans with fully removable seats) with 4WD/AWD seem to be less affordably available (else I would pick one up in a heartbeat).

It's almost funny how so many large SUV and truck owners actively project the attitude their vehicular choices imply: "I don't give a shit about anybody but myself."

It is $100+/day out the door around here. Where are you where it is "exceedingly cheap" and what is your definition of that?