View archived/non-paywalled article here. Heavier vehicles contribute directly to the increase in pedestrian injuries and fatalities in recent years; in the event of a collision, the amount of...
Heavier vehicles contribute directly to the increase in pedestrian injuries and fatalities in recent years; in the event of a collision, the amount of force transferred from vehicle to pedestrian victim increases dramatically if the vehicle causing the collision has greater mass. In addition to being unnecessarily dangerous, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks tend to have poor fuel efficiency compared to lighter and more streamlined counterparts, increasing emissions (whether ICE or electric). Critically, heavy vehicles cause significant damage to roads and increase the likelihood of potholes forming relative to smaller, lighter vehicles. They introduce massive problems in local infrastructure budgets as more money has to be spent constantly resurfacing roadways, as well as overengineering lanes and parking infrastructure to accommodate wider and heavier traffic.
This legislation seeks to discourage people from purchasing bulky, heavy vehicles in New York State—the first of its kind on the state level. The goal is nominally to increase pedestrian safety, especially for small children and animals who may be difficult for drivers to see above their oversized vehicle hoods. However, if implemented, a shift away from heavy vehicles would also prevent infrastructure collapse and dilapidation and allow for more funds to be focused on efficient forms of transit, including trains, subways, and buses. In theory, in a state as populous as New York, lesser consumer demand for heavy vehicles will also entice automakers to shift their marketing away from oversized vehicles and toward smaller, safer, more efficient, and more affordable alternatives.
The legislation would make exceptions for commercial uses, but does not exempt electric vehicles.
New York State already charges weight-based registration fees, but they’re laughably low. Currently, the owner of a 2,877-pound Honda Civic pays $47 every two years, while the owner of a vehicle twice that weight pays $112.50. These fees don’t reflect, in any way, the potential damage that such an increase in weight presents. The legislation announced today would introduce new weight-based registration fees calculated using scientific data, which prove heavier vehicles cause more deaths and serious injuries; one study estimates that for every 1,000 pounds of vehicle weight, the chance of fatality increases by 46 percent. These fees would incrementally increase starting next year until they reach the full rate within six years (during which time car owners could switch to smaller, safer vehicles). This would mean that by 2030, the owner of a Ford Explorer, with a curb weight of 4,345 pounds, would pay $680.40 every two years and the owner of a Ford F-150 Lightning truck, with a curb weight of 6,015 pounds, would pay $1,349.90 every two years. And even though that Ford F-150 Lightning is electric, it would not be eligible for a $1,000 credit given to all EVs because it’s over 5,000 pounds, factoring in the reality that mammoth EVs, despite their eliminated tailpipe emissions, are even more of a threat to the people outside them than their gas-powered counterparts. (The Hummer EV owner would also have to pay full price.) The new fee would only apply to passenger vehicles — drivers who use large vehicles for work can apply for a commercial registration, and all the SUVs purchased by the NYPD, for example, would be unaffected. But part of the goal of this legislation is simply making sure consumers know how dangerous these heavy vehicles are, Miatkowski says.
...
But the other encouraging aspect of the proposal is that the collected fees stay local, by county, and, after the annual dedications to highway, bridge, and transit trust funds are met, a full 75 percent of the funds raised will go toward safety improvements like bike lanes, bollards, road diets, pedestrianization of streets, and raised crosswalks. This means the neighborhoods most impacted by large vehicles are likely to see the biggest changes.
I'll be affected by this and I hope it passes. It's refreshingly well thought out. I know some folks who won't be happy about paying for heavier pickup trucks - if you live in rural NY the big...
I'll be affected by this and I hope it passes. It's refreshingly well thought out. I know some folks who won't be happy about paying for heavier pickup trucks - if you live in rural NY the big trucks are a necessity sometimes. Many of those people would be able to get the commercial license exception, though, because they use the trucks in their small businesses.
I wonder if this might finally motivate truck manufacturers to make smaller vehicles. I always thought it was ridiculous that we don't have Australian style utes in the US. The only time you...
I wonder if this might finally motivate truck manufacturers to make smaller vehicles. I always thought it was ridiculous that we don't have Australian style utes in the US. The only time you really need a large truck is if you're hauling a trailer. For all other truck needs, a ute would suffice.
(Though personally I love my Tacoma, and if something similar is passed in my state...I'll just pay the higher vehicle tax)
Americans just like big cars. The really small cars never do well here, and the medium sized ones always seem to grow. You've got plenty of European and Korean small cars but people just don't buy...
Americans just like big cars. The really small cars never do well here, and the medium sized ones always seem to grow. You've got plenty of European and Korean small cars but people just don't buy them.
That's been the predominant mindset for some time, but I have to wonder if it's because European city planners have (very broadly speaking) made a greater effort to design their cities in a way...
That's been the predominant mindset for some time, but I have to wonder if it's because European city planners have (very broadly speaking) made a greater effort to design their cities in a way that encourages walkability, cycling, and transit, and discourages the use of large vehicles. In Europe, larger vehicles are unsupported by local infrastructure and taxed more heavily. In the US, they are supported and hardly taxed.
In the US, the reasons I hear most often for buying a large vehicle are either: "I need to buy groceries," "I need to drive my kids around," "I don't like walking," and "I like being in a big car." Three out of four of those are related to the country's lack of walkability, cycling infrastructure, and public transit — though they're kind of weak arguments. Arguably, #4 is a byproduct of car-reliant infrastructure too, and people only think they like driving big cars because they haven't been exposed to a lifestyle that has more convenient, efficient, and affordable alternatives. In other words, "car culture" is a matter of habit, and that habit can be broken with targeted social, political, and economic changes.
The recent rise in SUVs is 100% a marketing push from the auto industry. For pickup trucks in particular, manufacturers were interested in skirting legislation requiring lower vehicle emissions; light trucks were exempt and therefore companies saw potential profit in selling them to a wider market. (Before about 15 years ago, a pickup truck was a fairly uncommon, fairly specialized vehicle.) SUVs in general received a similar marketing push in large part because they can be sold for more money than sedans. After all, they're bigger. The more steel, plastic, leather, and electronics in your vehicle, the more it's going to cost.
Consumers are not "rational" actors in the purely logical sense of the word. It doesn't make financial sense for most people to own an SUV, nor does it make sense for most people to own an oversized pickup truck (especially a newer model, which tends to have a relatively small bed for the hassle it is to drive). However, greater governmental discouragement from purchasing SUVs — as well as more and better educational campaigns about their safety risks, environmental costs, and infrastructure damage — are likely to change the mindset of an increasing number of Americans.
I’d note that half of new cars sold in Europe are SUVs, and that percentage has been on an aggressive upwards trajectory in the last decade. SUVs are also about half of China’s new car sales and...
I’d note that half of new cars sold in Europe are SUVs, and that percentage has been on an aggressive upwards trajectory in the last decade. SUVs are also about half of China’s new car sales and those are entirely different companies for the most part! SUV love is a worldwide phenomena, and saying it’s all a marketing push gives way too much credit to the marketing capabilities of car companies.
I don't see why Europe and China would have been excluded from auto marketing. My impression from the cities I've been to is that, while larger cars are becoming more popular, the effect is...
I don't see why Europe and China would have been excluded from auto marketing. My impression from the cities I've been to is that, while larger cars are becoming more popular, the effect is dramatically more pronounced in the US. My speculation is that part of that discrepancy is due to their perceived "necessity" in the US as opposed to their obvious practical excessiveness in much of Europe. But I think that SUVs being seen as a status symbol is a unique effect of marketing.
It would also be worth looking at European data in cities vs. non-cities. I doubt that the urban population is buying SUVs at the same rate as suburban or rural areas; many urban inhabitants are car-free and will always be — because they have alternatives, and because the infrastructure is multi-modal rather than car-oriented — so the "uptrend" in the data is probably tilted toward people in low-density areas who correlate more closely with the American demographic, despite not necessarily representing the overall populations of their countries per se.
In other words, while car sales worldwide are shifting toward SUVs, I wonder how much of that is because people who don't want an SUV are exiting the car market altogether. I'm not sure if anyone has studied this particular question or where to find clean data about it.
Huh, I have seen a few around and they do look small, but you're right they actually weigh about as much as a Civic. I think the only really lightweight car that's popular here is the Miata, and...
Huh, I have seen a few around and they do look small, but you're right they actually weigh about as much as a Civic.
I think the only really lightweight car that's popular here is the Miata, and that's far too impractical to own unless you have another car as well.
Hah, a family member had a mini cooper for a while. He loved it, but he has an SUV now. Didn't have a particularly good reason to get one — kids were grown up and he worked from home — just caught...
Hah, a family member had a mini cooper for a while. He loved it, but he has an SUV now. Didn't have a particularly good reason to get one — kids were grown up and he worked from home — just caught up in the social phenomenon of "big car," I guess. :/
This picture makes me wonder why car hoods in the US need to be so large. As far as I can tell, it's mostly aesthetic? Or do the engines really have to be that massive? (And what about electric vehicles?)
I know there's some value in engineering crumple zones into cars, but the hoods are so long and high that it's a safety hazard to drive. A friend of mine has a Tesla and seems to just use the front for storage, which makes sense to me, but in my layman's opinion that would be a good place for regulators to focus on if they want to discourage vehicle length/weight.
A lot of it is just being easy to work on. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790752029109780491/1123060789247492167/IMG_20230626_184145126.jpg This is what it looks like under the hood of a...
This is what it looks like under the hood of a Fiat 500 Abarth. If you look at pictures of these cars, the front section is very small. The whole front section is very compact, and an absolute nightmare to do any maintenance on. If you want to change anything it feels like you have to take half of the car apart. This means going in to the mechanic for a job you could otherwise do with a basic toolset at your house, and that when you do go to the mechanic it will be more expensive. Or if you do it yourself anyway it'll be much more time consuming and require a lot more tools that you may have to buy specifically for this car.
This is the engine in a Toyota Forerunner. Its not the biggest SUV in the world, but it does have a noticeably longer hood than the Abarth. Part of that is from the 4.7 liter engine compared to the 1.4, but a lot of the reason is that there's just a ton of space. This makes maintenance super easy, saving you time and money every time you need to do any sort of work on the car.
Also, I don't really see that the bigger hood makes the car that much more dangerous, the height definitely does but the length is something that you get used to. I guess there's theoretical situations where you slam on the brakes and stop a foot away from somebody, and with a longer car you would have hit them, but that is hardly a common occurence.
Or even just normal sized trucks. I drive a standard-sized, mid-2000s F-150. It looks like a Ford Ranger next to today's F-150s. Everything is higher and wider by default it seems. (And by drive I...
Or even just normal sized trucks.
I drive a standard-sized, mid-2000s F-150. It looks like a Ford Ranger next to today's F-150s. Everything is higher and wider by default it seems.
(And by drive I really mean leave parked in my driveway and occasionally haul yard waste to compost.)
Honestly it's not the weight I want - it's the durability and power. It should not be impossible to make a truck that is rugged as hell and still not a monster truck that ruins every road it touches.
Honestly it's not the weight I want - it's the durability and power. It should not be impossible to make a truck that is rugged as hell and still not a monster truck that ruins every road it touches.
One of the biggest reasons we do not have cars like Australian Utes is because their was a law passed some time in the 1970s to increase fuel efficiency in vehicles. It was aimed at sedans/cars,...
One of the biggest reasons we do not have cars like Australian Utes is because their was a law passed some time in the 1970s to increase fuel efficiency in vehicles. It was aimed at sedans/cars, but not trucks. Vehicles like the El Camino had to be turned down to get the fuel efficiency up, which turned off peoplenwho enjoy trucks.
It's a tow capacity thing. The need to pull a small trailer to haul say furniture while moving, is different from needing to move livestock or heavy machinery like farm equipment. In my area in...
It's a tow capacity thing. The need to pull a small trailer to haul say furniture while moving, is different from needing to move livestock or heavy machinery like farm equipment. In my area in the Midwest, horse farms are common, and all of those people need larger vehicles to move their horses safely. As the horses are largely a hobby and not a business, they likely wouldn't get an exception with similar legislation. I don't know NY's farming demographic, but if it's similar to my state, I could see many rural people being upset at the mandate of smaller vehicles.
This legislation applies to New York State, which includes New York City, but the state has a rural population of about 4.2 million, or 21.5% of the total state population. Agriculture in NYS...
This legislation applies to New York State, which includes New York City, but the state has a rural population of about 4.2 million, or 21.5% of the total state population. Agriculture in NYS apparently employs about 55,000 people directly and approximately 200,000 indirectly.
Anyway, this legislation doesn't apply to commercial vehicle use. That exemption probably includes horse farms, if those farms are operating as businesses or non-profits.
New York City is a teeny tiny part of New York State in the geography, even including the suburbs. I think the entire UK is just about double the size of New York State, which should help put in...
New York City is a teeny tiny part of New York State in the geography, even including the suburbs. I think the entire UK is just about double the size of New York State, which should help put in perspective just how much you have to drive in America. NY is big, but it's also only the 27th largest state by land area, almost dead in the middle of the pack.
Unlike many of the other larger states, though, it is one hundred percent covered in green - desert climate is just about the only one missing. There are an uncountable number of bodies of water, lakes are everywhere and don't outnumber the waterfalls by much. That includes the finger lakes (also known as paradise if you love country living) and two of the great lakes. People waste their time on a tour of New York City when they could be here or here or here or here instead. Here's a cheat sheet. NY got in on the conservation thing early and went hard, even banned fracking. Just take a Finger Lakes Wine Tour, you'll have more fun than NYC and save money.
We have NYC, then the rust belt cities along the old Erie canal of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany (the capital), and a dozen smaller cities, couple dozen more smaller towns... and the rest is wild, private nature preserves, state parks, temperate forests, or farmland. We also have a pair of old, worn down mountain ranges that make for phenomenal skiing and hiking.
There's also the meme map. I'd say it's pretty on point. All this is to say if you're out in the country, you'd better learn to do things for yourself, and you'd better have dependable transportation. The guy with a big truck will get to know his neighbors, because they are going to want to borrow it from time to time.
It depends on how much you need to haul, how heavy it is, how far you need to move it, and over what kind of terrain. Roads aren't always part of the picture. The bigger trucks make hauling very...
It depends on how much you need to haul, how heavy it is, how far you need to move it, and over what kind of terrain. Roads aren't always part of the picture. The bigger trucks make hauling very heavy things like a payload of tree trunks much easier, and they are great for plowing snow. They can do decent damage with a pull chain too, if you just want to yank a stump out of the ground. Better than dynamite anyway. Then there's towing larger stuff like boats. It's very hilly in parts of this state so you are always going up or down a 10-30' incline. Small trucks die fast on those uphill stretches.
Yes, please do this, in the city at least. I walk several miles through Manhattan every day, and the number of HUGE vehicles I see has skyrocketed in the last two years. With so many people...
Yes, please do this, in the city at least. I walk several miles through Manhattan every day, and the number of HUGE vehicles I see has skyrocketed in the last two years. With so many people driving crazy since the pandemic started (running red lights, blowing through stop signs, speeding down crowded one-way streets, etc.) it really does feel dangerous out there. And I also don't understand why anyone would want one of those monstrosities in a city where it's so difficult to find parking and people are always complaining about gas prices.
View archived/non-paywalled article here.
Heavier vehicles contribute directly to the increase in pedestrian injuries and fatalities in recent years; in the event of a collision, the amount of force transferred from vehicle to pedestrian victim increases dramatically if the vehicle causing the collision has greater mass. In addition to being unnecessarily dangerous, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks tend to have poor fuel efficiency compared to lighter and more streamlined counterparts, increasing emissions (whether ICE or electric). Critically, heavy vehicles cause significant damage to roads and increase the likelihood of potholes forming relative to smaller, lighter vehicles. They introduce massive problems in local infrastructure budgets as more money has to be spent constantly resurfacing roadways, as well as overengineering lanes and parking infrastructure to accommodate wider and heavier traffic.
This legislation seeks to discourage people from purchasing bulky, heavy vehicles in New York State—the first of its kind on the state level. The goal is nominally to increase pedestrian safety, especially for small children and animals who may be difficult for drivers to see above their oversized vehicle hoods. However, if implemented, a shift away from heavy vehicles would also prevent infrastructure collapse and dilapidation and allow for more funds to be focused on efficient forms of transit, including trains, subways, and buses. In theory, in a state as populous as New York, lesser consumer demand for heavy vehicles will also entice automakers to shift their marketing away from oversized vehicles and toward smaller, safer, more efficient, and more affordable alternatives.
The legislation would make exceptions for commercial uses, but does not exempt electric vehicles.
...
I'll be affected by this and I hope it passes. It's refreshingly well thought out. I know some folks who won't be happy about paying for heavier pickup trucks - if you live in rural NY the big trucks are a necessity sometimes. Many of those people would be able to get the commercial license exception, though, because they use the trucks in their small businesses.
I wonder if this might finally motivate truck manufacturers to make smaller vehicles. I always thought it was ridiculous that we don't have Australian style utes in the US. The only time you really need a large truck is if you're hauling a trailer. For all other truck needs, a ute would suffice.
(Though personally I love my Tacoma, and if something similar is passed in my state...I'll just pay the higher vehicle tax)
Americans just like big cars. The really small cars never do well here, and the medium sized ones always seem to grow. You've got plenty of European and Korean small cars but people just don't buy them.
That's been the predominant mindset for some time, but I have to wonder if it's because European city planners have (very broadly speaking) made a greater effort to design their cities in a way that encourages walkability, cycling, and transit, and discourages the use of large vehicles. In Europe, larger vehicles are unsupported by local infrastructure and taxed more heavily. In the US, they are supported and hardly taxed.
In the US, the reasons I hear most often for buying a large vehicle are either: "I need to buy groceries," "I need to drive my kids around," "I don't like walking," and "I like being in a big car." Three out of four of those are related to the country's lack of walkability, cycling infrastructure, and public transit — though they're kind of weak arguments. Arguably, #4 is a byproduct of car-reliant infrastructure too, and people only think they like driving big cars because they haven't been exposed to a lifestyle that has more convenient, efficient, and affordable alternatives. In other words, "car culture" is a matter of habit, and that habit can be broken with targeted social, political, and economic changes.
The recent rise in SUVs is 100% a marketing push from the auto industry. For pickup trucks in particular, manufacturers were interested in skirting legislation requiring lower vehicle emissions; light trucks were exempt and therefore companies saw potential profit in selling them to a wider market. (Before about 15 years ago, a pickup truck was a fairly uncommon, fairly specialized vehicle.) SUVs in general received a similar marketing push in large part because they can be sold for more money than sedans. After all, they're bigger. The more steel, plastic, leather, and electronics in your vehicle, the more it's going to cost.
Consumers are not "rational" actors in the purely logical sense of the word. It doesn't make financial sense for most people to own an SUV, nor does it make sense for most people to own an oversized pickup truck (especially a newer model, which tends to have a relatively small bed for the hassle it is to drive). However, greater governmental discouragement from purchasing SUVs — as well as more and better educational campaigns about their safety risks, environmental costs, and infrastructure damage — are likely to change the mindset of an increasing number of Americans.
I’d note that half of new cars sold in Europe are SUVs, and that percentage has been on an aggressive upwards trajectory in the last decade. SUVs are also about half of China’s new car sales and those are entirely different companies for the most part! SUV love is a worldwide phenomena, and saying it’s all a marketing push gives way too much credit to the marketing capabilities of car companies.
I don't see why Europe and China would have been excluded from auto marketing. My impression from the cities I've been to is that, while larger cars are becoming more popular, the effect is dramatically more pronounced in the US. My speculation is that part of that discrepancy is due to their perceived "necessity" in the US as opposed to their obvious practical excessiveness in much of Europe. But I think that SUVs being seen as a status symbol is a unique effect of marketing.
It would also be worth looking at European data in cities vs. non-cities. I doubt that the urban population is buying SUVs at the same rate as suburban or rural areas; many urban inhabitants are car-free and will always be — because they have alternatives, and because the infrastructure is multi-modal rather than car-oriented — so the "uptrend" in the data is probably tilted toward people in low-density areas who correlate more closely with the American demographic, despite not necessarily representing the overall populations of their countries per se.
In other words, while car sales worldwide are shifting toward SUVs, I wonder how much of that is because people who don't want an SUV are exiting the car market altogether. I'm not sure if anyone has studied this particular question or where to find clean data about it.
I think the most egregious example of this is the US mini cooper. They're supposed to be small, dammit, not just a normal sized car!
Huh, I have seen a few around and they do look small, but you're right they actually weigh about as much as a Civic.
I think the only really lightweight car that's popular here is the Miata, and that's far too impractical to own unless you have another car as well.
Hah, a family member had a mini cooper for a while. He loved it, but he has an SUV now. Didn't have a particularly good reason to get one — kids were grown up and he worked from home — just caught up in the social phenomenon of "big car," I guess. :/
This picture makes me wonder why car hoods in the US need to be so large. As far as I can tell, it's mostly aesthetic? Or do the engines really have to be that massive? (And what about electric vehicles?)
I know there's some value in engineering crumple zones into cars, but the hoods are so long and high that it's a safety hazard to drive. A friend of mine has a Tesla and seems to just use the front for storage, which makes sense to me, but in my layman's opinion that would be a good place for regulators to focus on if they want to discourage vehicle length/weight.
A lot of it is just being easy to work on.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790752029109780491/1123060789247492167/IMG_20230626_184145126.jpg
This is what it looks like under the hood of a Fiat 500 Abarth. If you look at pictures of these cars, the front section is very small. The whole front section is very compact, and an absolute nightmare to do any maintenance on. If you want to change anything it feels like you have to take half of the car apart. This means going in to the mechanic for a job you could otherwise do with a basic toolset at your house, and that when you do go to the mechanic it will be more expensive. Or if you do it yourself anyway it'll be much more time consuming and require a lot more tools that you may have to buy specifically for this car.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790752029109780491/1123060788576403506/IMG_20230626_184233528.jpg
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790752029109780491/1123060788932903032/IMG_20230626_184227772_HDR.jpg
This is the engine in a Toyota Forerunner. Its not the biggest SUV in the world, but it does have a noticeably longer hood than the Abarth. Part of that is from the 4.7 liter engine compared to the 1.4, but a lot of the reason is that there's just a ton of space. This makes maintenance super easy, saving you time and money every time you need to do any sort of work on the car.
Also, I don't really see that the bigger hood makes the car that much more dangerous, the height definitely does but the length is something that you get used to. I guess there's theoretical situations where you slam on the brakes and stop a foot away from somebody, and with a longer car you would have hit them, but that is hardly a common occurence.
Or even just normal sized trucks.
I drive a standard-sized, mid-2000s F-150. It looks like a Ford Ranger next to today's F-150s. Everything is higher and wider by default it seems.
(And by drive I really mean leave parked in my driveway and occasionally haul yard waste to compost.)
Honestly it's not the weight I want - it's the durability and power. It should not be impossible to make a truck that is rugged as hell and still not a monster truck that ruins every road it touches.
One of the biggest reasons we do not have cars like Australian Utes is because their was a law passed some time in the 1970s to increase fuel efficiency in vehicles. It was aimed at sedans/cars, but not trucks. Vehicles like the El Camino had to be turned down to get the fuel efficiency up, which turned off peoplenwho enjoy trucks.
The Hyundai Santa Cruz is not bad for that niche.
It's a tow capacity thing. The need to pull a small trailer to haul say furniture while moving, is different from needing to move livestock or heavy machinery like farm equipment. In my area in the Midwest, horse farms are common, and all of those people need larger vehicles to move their horses safely. As the horses are largely a hobby and not a business, they likely wouldn't get an exception with similar legislation. I don't know NY's farming demographic, but if it's similar to my state, I could see many rural people being upset at the mandate of smaller vehicles.
Well, the famer population in NYC is almost zero. There is a farm museum (Queens County Farm Museum), but that's about it.
This legislation applies to New York State, which includes New York City, but the state has a rural population of about 4.2 million, or 21.5% of the total state population. Agriculture in NYS apparently employs about 55,000 people directly and approximately 200,000 indirectly.
Anyway, this legislation doesn't apply to commercial vehicle use. That exemption probably includes horse farms, if those farms are operating as businesses or non-profits.
New York City is a teeny tiny part of New York State in the geography, even including the suburbs. I think the entire UK is just about double the size of New York State, which should help put in perspective just how much you have to drive in America. NY is big, but it's also only the 27th largest state by land area, almost dead in the middle of the pack.
Unlike many of the other larger states, though, it is one hundred percent covered in green - desert climate is just about the only one missing. There are an uncountable number of bodies of water, lakes are everywhere and don't outnumber the waterfalls by much. That includes the finger lakes (also known as paradise if you love country living) and two of the great lakes. People waste their time on a tour of New York City when they could be here or here or here or here instead. Here's a cheat sheet. NY got in on the conservation thing early and went hard, even banned fracking. Just take a Finger Lakes Wine Tour, you'll have more fun than NYC and save money.
We have NYC, then the rust belt cities along the old Erie canal of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany (the capital), and a dozen smaller cities, couple dozen more smaller towns... and the rest is wild, private nature preserves, state parks, temperate forests, or farmland. We also have a pair of old, worn down mountain ranges that make for phenomenal skiing and hiking.
There's also the meme map. I'd say it's pretty on point. All this is to say if you're out in the country, you'd better learn to do things for yourself, and you'd better have dependable transportation. The guy with a big truck will get to know his neighbors, because they are going to want to borrow it from time to time.
New York is not just the city that shares the first two words in its name.
It depends on how much you need to haul, how heavy it is, how far you need to move it, and over what kind of terrain. Roads aren't always part of the picture. The bigger trucks make hauling very heavy things like a payload of tree trunks much easier, and they are great for plowing snow. They can do decent damage with a pull chain too, if you just want to yank a stump out of the ground. Better than dynamite anyway. Then there's towing larger stuff like boats. It's very hilly in parts of this state so you are always going up or down a 10-30' incline. Small trucks die fast on those uphill stretches.
Yes, please do this, in the city at least. I walk several miles through Manhattan every day, and the number of HUGE vehicles I see has skyrocketed in the last two years. With so many people driving crazy since the pandemic started (running red lights, blowing through stop signs, speeding down crowded one-way streets, etc.) it really does feel dangerous out there. And I also don't understand why anyone would want one of those monstrosities in a city where it's so difficult to find parking and people are always complaining about gas prices.
Good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo