Lifted Pickup Trucks: An Invitation to Rethink Normal

(Source: Flickr/SoulRider.222.)

Lately, while driving around town, I’ve noticed an increased presence of pickup trucks that have been transformed through a variety of customizations: wider, off-terrain tires, a lift kit, LED lights, and suspension systems, just to name a few. 

Cumulatively, these “mods” make the trucks wider, higher, and generally more intimidating on the road. I spent some time on Quora and Reddit trying to get a sense for why these kinds of trucks are so popular. It seems, with their origin in off-roading, “lifting” is praised by outdoor truck enthusiasts for their improved ability to get over rocky terrain or through water/mud, and by construction professionals who say that the added height leads to less damage on the job. But commenters also pointed out that many people aren’t using these trucks for a hobby or for a job. They’re modifying them simply for the cool factor or in hopes of making an impression. 

Lifted pickup trucks (LPTs) are not unique to Waco, nor even to Texas, for that matter. I’ve discovered that there are entire Quora threads dedicated to decoding “truck bro” behaviors like aggressive driving, illegal parking, tailgating, and roll-coaling. For many others just trying to get around the city, especially anyone not in a car, these trucks can be a source of constant high blood pressure and worry about how to manage their negative externalities. The increased likelihood of large and lifted trucks to cause a fatality in the event of a crash is well documented.

Do municipalities have the right to mandate how citizens use their private property (like LPTs) in the public sphere? Should there be a limit to the size of privately-owned vehicles? Should there be a fine for owning or driving them? Should they be banned in some pedestrian-heavy parts of town? Some municipalities seem to think there is a place for this kind of response. One proposal in DC would require owners of vehicles over 6,000 pounds pay a $500 registration fee.

These questions are worth considering. But as I’ve explored the controversy about LPTs, I’ve started to worry that the real danger about LPTs is the way their abnormal size makes it easier for us to normalize smaller cars as “safe.” In other words, if we treat LPTs as a unique problem for our cities, are we implicitly treating other, “normal-sized” cars as the standard of “okay,” as the standard of “safe”? As long as LPTs make an easy villain for street safety advocates, we may fail to push further and ask the bigger questions about the relationship between our means of transit and our vision of a flourishing community. 

Rethinking “Normal” 

“Why can’t they just drive a normal-sized car?” I found myself thinking, as I waited behind an LPT at a stoplight. This is when I realized I was falling for it: the “normal” illusion. Yes, these trucks with their decreased ability to execute emergency maneuvers, low acceleration times, higher center of gravity, and limited visibility are extremely dangerous to everyone else on the road. But another danger of pickup trucks lies in how they make us think about cars in general. In our frustration about these kinds of dangerous vehicles, it’s normal and natural to hold up a “normal” F-150 or a Honda Pilot (my husband’s car) as an example of a more acceptable vehicle. 

But is this really the solution? In the shadow of an LPT, normal cars look quaint, safe, and inviting. But it’s worth remembering that nearly 100 years ago, they were the most dangerous objects to enter the public sphere. Before private vehicles, people got around using less dangerous modes of transit: walking, bikes, and street cars, to name a few. Streets were seen as shared space for a variety of users; no one user had a monopoly. That changed thanks to an aggressive behavioral modification campaign around jay-walking in the 1920s. 

In the decades since then, we’ve been conditioned to accept the street as “for cars only” and driving as the only legitimate way to get anywhere locally. Despite the fact that we all pay for roads and parking lots, we’re seen as intruders if we claim road space on foot or on a bike. Despite the high health and psychological costs associated with constant commuting, we’re seen as crazy or helpless if we opt for walking or biking.

Unacceptable Tradeoffs

In the early car years, the public outcry in cities around cars wasn’t that they existed. Mobility is one of humankind’s biggest challenges. The need to move large burdens or to traverse large distances has spurred innovations for thousands of years. The problem wasn’t that the car was suggesting something other than walking, but rather that it came with tradeoffs the public found unacceptable: exponentially increased noise, congestion, danger, and threats of death to children, the city’s most vulnerable population. With these tradeoffs in mind, urban Americans saw widespread adoption of the automobile as a threat not only to the unofficial harmony of multiple users, but to the community, itself. 

To Americans encountering cars in cities for the first time, nothing about them was normal. A century later, many of their complaints remain valid. It shouldn’t be considered normal to only have one high-cost, high-risk way of getting someplace around town. It shouldn't be normal to not be able to walk to a friend’s house. It shouldn’t be normal for children to not be able to play outside their homes. It shouldn’t be normal to give up thousands of dollars and hours every year just to conduct the normal errands required of life. It shouldn’t be normal to waste millions of dollars on wasteful land practices just to accommodate parking requirements and the perceived need for more lanes on our highways. 

Despite years of technological improvements, cars continue to make up one of the most noisy, polluting, and dangerous presences in our communities. Less visible are the costs car-centric design inflicts on individual households (an average of $12k a year), as well as to our collective social fabric by pushing people further apart. Also worth thinking about are the costs to our communities’ economic vitality due to land-use practices that all but mandate driving and parking, not to mention the $340 billion we spend collectively in America cleaning up car accidents.

To a time traveler from the 1920s, the difference in size between my husband’s Honda and a lifted pickup would not be even remotely the most shocking thing about today’s streets. I suspect our time traveler would be much more startled by the sheer extent to which we’ve given over the public realm to motor vehicles of any size.

A Desperately Needed Re-evaluation

It’s so easy to wish the folks buying LPTs would just stick to normal cars. But what’s needed is more than a reevaluation about the size of trucks or what ought to “be done” about them when they speed through neighborhoods and downtowns. What’s needed is a re-evaluation about the relationship between the means of transportation we choose and the ways they might affect the quality of life in a community.

The two are linked, but for decades now, we’ve treated them as two separate issues. When it comes to the planning and design of American cities, the priority has been on serving single-occupancy vehicles, with little to no vision for how organizing a city around this mode of movement might affect the public sphere and the public life of the community. As a result, we have public spaces governed by various behaviors that are individually advantageous, but that turn the public sphere itself into a dangerous, chaotic, and hostile environment. 

Case in point: I’m writing this from a smoothie café in Richardson, Texas. Wanting to enjoy the nice weather, I chose a seat outside, but for the past 10 minutes, I’ve wondered if that was the right decision because barely 50 meters from me is an extremely busy six-lane stroad, down which flows a non-stop river of cars going 40–50 mph in each direction, filling the air with the shockingly loud roar of traffic. I’ve seen only two or three people walking around on foot; on the way here, I watched in horror as a teenager made a risky dash out in front of traffic to get to a strip mall across the street. This is an environment in which the private activity of driving and parking has been so elevated that the public space has no sense of place on its own. Existing outside of a car here is stressful, uncomfortable, dangerous, and lonely.

This is a pattern common all over North America and it reveals a view of mobility as mostly a private, individual matter. But the reality is that these private choices play a massive role in defining the culture of our communities, in shaping our individual and collective qualities of life.

Perhaps here is the upside to LPTs. In protesting and lamenting them, we are realizing the need to question not just what’s acceptable about the size of private vehicles in our communities, but to also rethink what we have accepted as normal about public space, mobility in general, and the relationship between how we get around and the flourishing of the community, at large.

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