Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 13:06:28 -0500
Reply-To: Bulley <gmbulley@BULLEY-HEWLETT.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Bulley <gmbulley@BULLEY-HEWLETT.COM>
Subject: Hilarious SUV news
Today's SF Chronicle (paper) and SF Gate (on-line) have hilarious columns
about SUVs. Read the SF Gate one on the web, as it's got some photos with
amusing captions.
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
or, once that expires,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/sfgate/object.cgi?object=/chronicle/pictur
es/2000/11/30/suv-rollover.jpg&paper=chronicle&file=notes120100.DTL&dire
ctory=/gate/archive/2000/12/01&type=columnists
www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
Everybody In Tanks!
No end in sight for the crush of thuggish SUV culture
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 1, 2000
(c)2000 SF Gate
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Here's an easy one: monster insurance company blindly and somewhat
inexplicably slashes rates for bloated SUV behemoths because the
road-tanks are considered relatively "safe"-despite how they roll quite
easily and can't brake to save a cow and tend to crush smaller cars in
even the most modest accident caused by incredibly bad handling and
horrible wheelbase maneuverability and general innate 3-ton boorishness.
And let's, just for the fun of it, also mention the pollution and the road
destruction and the utter waste of space and resources and how unsightly
and shoddily built the great majority of large SUVs are-stop me if you've
heard this before-and how they seem to inspire far too many
machismo-jacked drivers to careen about the freeway doing 85 but I guess
you can't insure against bad taste and occasional thuggishness, as the
old saying doesn't quite go.
I've said it before and I'll say it probably a dozen more times-apparently
just to further frustrate myself and get all frothy-because very, very
few people can actually justify the existence of a large SUV in their
lives, very few reasons exist to purchase the mutant monsters except that
advertisers have convinced the public's inner frat-boy they're cool and
everyone has one and it's basically another variant of All-American
penis-envy: who has the bigger more obnoxious toy and who has the least
concern for subtlety or efficiency or class or aesthetics-or treading
lightly on the planet and leaving the least roadkill.
Maybe that's unfair. Maybe that's unnecessarily nasty. Because the trucks
really aren't so bad; their drivers not all cloddish males who wiggle
their tongues at schoolgirls and spit out the window and never pluck their
nose hairs.
Hey, if you've got a construction job or a dozen kids and a dozen dogs and
camping/skiing/biking gear out the wazoo, the elephantine beasts
are downright heavenly, spacious and solid and at least passably rugged so
when you run over the highway median or a small rodent or a Honda
Civic you won't even feel it.
Plus they're great in the snow (unless you have to stop) and quite fun to
take off-road though according to statistics only .0001 of all SUV
owners even know how to put their land-yachts into 4WD much less take their
vehicles onto a dirt road but hey, it's nice to know if the Big One
hits you'll be able to drive over all the rubble and writhing human bodies
to get to the remaining cans of green beans.
And now State Farm says insuring the colossal dinosaurs is cheaper and
easier than ever, and thus buyers might feel even more incentive to rush
right out and nab one of the fun-lovin' hulks so they too can discover just
how poor their parallel parking skills really are.
It's a conspiracy, you can be sure. Big Insurance in cahoots with Big Auto
in cahoots with Big Oil, all with lecherous ties to the Bush family and
probably the bottled drinking water scam and German fetish porn too but I
can't prove any of that; it's all very complicated and goes to the
highest levels of executive money-grubbing and is far too distressing and
labor-intensive, research-wise, to fully investigate at this point, so I
won't. But rest assured, it's all true. Mostly.
Meanwhile, more SUV drivers get to lumber carelessly down the road and
miscalculate those extra-wide turns on narrow SF streets and clog the
cramped parking garages and steal double their allotment of street parking
spaces: as the rest of us wait not-very-patiently for the backlash to
really kick in, for the economy to slump and gas prices to stay high, and
elegant little European cars with actual design ingenuity to become
much more desirable someday, someday (he said, as a Ford Excursion loomed
in the rear-view and blocked out the sun).
Thoughts for the author? Email him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on
SF Gate, just like a special magic bunny of love. He also writes the
Morning Fix,
a deeply skewed daily email column and newsletter. Subscribe at
sfgate.com/newsletters/
(c)2000 SF Gate
and
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/1
2/01/MNW37057.DTL
Big Wheels Will Rule S.F. Roads
State Farm to decrease SUV insurance rates
Rob Morse
Friday, December 1, 2000
(c)2000 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2
000/12/01/MNW37057.DTL
The woman came barreling through the red light, almost leaving me flat in
the crosswalk beneath her behemoth sports utility vehicle. That's bad
enough, but par for the race course of San Francisco streets.
She flipped me off with her well-manicured finger. That's worse, but
expected. I had almost slowed her down on her way to Nordstrom. Besides,
flipping off those you fail to kill is required by the rules of Bay Area
driving.
The worst, though? The woman's insurance rates will be going down.
She's being rewarded because of how flat she can make me, while my crummy
old fuel-efficient Honda Civic will cost more to insure because it
isn't even a speed bump to her SUV.
Now this woman can afford to make even more trips to Nordstrom, while I'll
be making fewer trips to Target. Someday maybe she'll finally get
that little silhouette of a pedestrian painted on the side of her
battlewagon, and maybe it will be mine.
What do we expect from insurance companies, the people who gave America the
HMO and all of us a bad case of HMOphobia?
State Farm has decided to reward the overwhelmingly wealthy drivers of SUVs
for owning cars rated as safe for occupants. Forget those who get
in their way.
What kind of rate can I get on a Sherman tank?
America is ruled by big wheels, literally as well as figuratively. This is
especially true in the Bay Area, despite its goody-two-hiking-shoes
environmental pretensions.
We put "Save the Environment" on the rear bumpers of our Explorers and Land
Rovers. The front bumpers are reserved for pedestrians and
small foreign cars.
We pretend we like bicycles more than cars, then we put our mountain bikes
on top of our cars and drive to the nearest mountain-where we
complain about all the smog we see below.
We all support mass transit and carpooling-for other people.
Then what happens? We are rewarded for our hypocrisy with gifts of money by
the insurance companies and time by the bridge authorities.
With the new FasTrak electronic toll system, single occupant vehicles can
breeze through the tollbooths of the Golden Gate Bridge much faster
than carpools can get through for free.
It's not clear, however, that FasTrak will do anything for the Bay Bridge.
It's on permanent slow track.
But let's get real here. When insurance companies lower rates for SUVs and
other luxury cars, and bridge authorities start FasTrak systems, life
becomes more untenable on the streets of San Francisco. Drivers are being
rewarded to come to the city and run over people.
Then, as happens all too often, city authorities don't even prosecute them.
And then they want to sue gunmakers for hurting people? The
hypocrisy never ends.
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who usually tools around in a limo
escorted by a half dozen motorcycles, is always pushing San Francisco's
"transit first" policy. Transit first is a great idea, but first there has
to be transit.
What's the best way to get good mass transit? Make it the mother of all
necessities, the only way to get around besides shoe leather and muscle
power.
Almost 15 years ago, then-Supervisor Bill Maher advocated closing off all
of downtown San Francisco to private automobiles, replacing them
with squadrons of vans. I thought it was just Maher waxing visionary. But
the idea has kept coming back in a variety of forms, including an
abortive plan by Mayor Brown a few years ago to exclude private traffic
from Market Street.
It's time San Francisco got serious, and instituted a transit-only policy,
at least within the core of the city. And the core is a constantly
expanding
core, with parking lots replaced by highrises, and traffic jams interrupted
only for moments of accelerating terror.
I'm serious about this. Downtown San Francisco and most of its
neighborhoods are now paved with cars-parked, double-parked and parked
on the sidewalk.
Drivers internally combust, so when they finally get moving, they move way
too fast. They see red, but not red lights. Then they flip us off as
they fly by.
This isn't America, or even Los Angeles, so why should we be crushed under
the wheels of, well, wheels.
Just think. When cars are evicted from downtown San Francisco, the
bicyclists, skaters and scooter idiots can all take to the streets. Walkers
can
enjoy the mayhem from the sidewalk, which once again will be theirs alone.
Chronicle columnist Rob Morse appears on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and
Sundays. His e-mail is rmorse@sfchronicle.com.
(c)2000 San Francisco Chronicle Page A25
G.M.Bulley
Bulley-Hewlett Corporate Communications
Mount Olive, NC
+1.877.658.1278 tollfree
http://www.bulley-hewlett.com
We can do better than sprawl. Educate yourself:
http://www.uli.org
http://www.smartgrowth.org
http://www.cnu.org
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