The driver probably chose to buy that specific vehicle with the additional danger it poses to everybody else.
If you buy and drive a vehicle with a design which makes it far more likely to not see and thus is more likely to kill children and people in wheelchairs, and which in general is almost twice as likely to kill pedestrians in a collision, then it’s your fault when it does.
Yes, they definitely share the blame… But far less than the auto industry that is not only making increasingly big and dangerous cars, but also creating an arms race on the road
It was irresponsible to buy such a dangerous truck, but the buyer probably didn’t recognize the scale of the danger. The salesman probably didn’t demonstrate that feature. The manufacturer certainly knew, and yet despite growing demand for tiny trucks, they just keep making them bigger
It’s a systematic issue, you can fault individuals for their part in it, but you can only solve the problem systematically
Personally I think that the highest blame is on those who are supposed to regulate it.
Even big-sized market actors like automakers aren’t going to adjust their profit-seeking to avoid systemic issues like “arms race on the road” unless they’re forced to: it is well known and more than proven in Economics that Negative Externalities like this (and like the most obvious example of a Negative Externality: Polution) are invariably created by market actors if it makes them more profit, unless they are actually forced otherwise by an external entity with more power than them.
If the Economic system is Capitalism, then don’t be surprised when the capitalists optimize their actions for personal upsides, and as bigger car mean more profits automakers will carry only pushing them unless they’re they’re forced otherwise.
Seems like what you are getting at is that the incentives are the root problem, which is true
And that means the regulators are not properly regulating
But I think when it comes to blame, it should primarily be pointed at the auto makers. If we rely on regulation for prosocial behavior, the regulations meant to limit the bad tend to become the target for the regulated.
IE They’ll just make trucks that are exactly the maximum allowed size, which does still need to be pretty big since there are legitimate uses for a massive trucks
So I think we should blame auto makers, and fix the incentives to fix the problem. What if they shared liability for pedestrians hit inside a blind spot? That would hit them in the wallet and make them think twice moving forward
The driver probably chose to buy that specific vehicle with the additional danger it poses to everybody else.
If you buy and drive a vehicle with a design which makes it far more likely to not see and thus is more likely to kill children and people in wheelchairs, and which in general is almost twice as likely to kill pedestrians in a collision, then it’s your fault when it does.
Yes, they definitely share the blame… But far less than the auto industry that is not only making increasingly big and dangerous cars, but also creating an arms race on the road
It was irresponsible to buy such a dangerous truck, but the buyer probably didn’t recognize the scale of the danger. The salesman probably didn’t demonstrate that feature. The manufacturer certainly knew, and yet despite growing demand for tiny trucks, they just keep making them bigger
It’s a systematic issue, you can fault individuals for their part in it, but you can only solve the problem systematically
Personally I think that the highest blame is on those who are supposed to regulate it.
Even big-sized market actors like automakers aren’t going to adjust their profit-seeking to avoid systemic issues like “arms race on the road” unless they’re forced to: it is well known and more than proven in Economics that Negative Externalities like this (and like the most obvious example of a Negative Externality: Polution) are invariably created by market actors if it makes them more profit, unless they are actually forced otherwise by an external entity with more power than them.
If the Economic system is Capitalism, then don’t be surprised when the capitalists optimize their actions for personal upsides, and as bigger car mean more profits automakers will carry only pushing them unless they’re they’re forced otherwise.
Seems like what you are getting at is that the incentives are the root problem, which is true
And that means the regulators are not properly regulating
But I think when it comes to blame, it should primarily be pointed at the auto makers. If we rely on regulation for prosocial behavior, the regulations meant to limit the bad tend to become the target for the regulated.
IE They’ll just make trucks that are exactly the maximum allowed size, which does still need to be pretty big since there are legitimate uses for a massive trucks
So I think we should blame auto makers, and fix the incentives to fix the problem. What if they shared liability for pedestrians hit inside a blind spot? That would hit them in the wallet and make them think twice moving forward