From Bloomberg CityLab:

Since 1990, U.S. pickup trucks have added almost 1,300 pounds on average. Some of the biggest vehicles on the market now weigh almost 7,000 pounds — or about three Honda Civics. These vehicles have a voracious appetite for space, one that’s increasingly irreconcilable with the way cities (and garages, and parking lots) are built.

But a picture’s worth 1,000 words:

“The goal of modern truck grilles,” wrote Jalopnik’s Jason Torchinsky in 2018, “seems to be… about creating a massive, brutal face of rage and intimidation.”

Imagine the splat that kid would make meeting that grille. Would the driver even hear it?

With biking and moving out of corona-torpor, I’ve been thinking about the environmental damage of “fast fashion” a lot.

It requires if not child-, very young labor, questionable factory practices, and a lot of petroleum to keep moving fast fashion out of Southeast Asia and to bring it to the closets of America where it endures but a few wears (rarely more than a season’s duration) before being tossed aside or “donated” and rendered “some other poor country’s problem.”

The solution is: buy less, buy better, and repair over replace. This is, of course, a natural mantra for those of us living in sub-1,000 ft² homes, but it would be so much better for every living human if we were to reject planned obsolescence and embraced fewer, higher-quality goods.