By Kimberly Mayer, Journal contributor
The year-round population of San Juan Island is a little over 8,500. In summer, it swells to twice that, which makes it easier to get around the town of Friday Harbor and find parking off season. But it wasn’t summer yet when, in a parking lot, I witnessed an accident in slow motion. A large pick-up truck, attempting to park, dented the side of a shiny new luxury SUV. The driver hopped out of the truck and looked bewildered. Are parking spaces too small? Are vehicles too large? Are we all not trained truck drivers? The answer to all that is yes.
Years ago, the tabloid website outlet TMZ broke the story of California’s First Lady, Maria Shriver, caught on camera holding a cellphone to her ear while driving in Brentwood. Just one year earlier, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had made the use of hand-held mobile devices illegal while driving. The story was then picked up by mainstream media. (“Shriver and her cell phone,” by Meghan Daum, Oct. 15, 2009, Los Angeles Times). People were abuzz.
“There’s going to be swift action,” said the governor. But the big crime to me at the time was the largeness of her car, a black Cadillac Escalade.
In the years that followed, the American appetite only grew for ever larger SUVs, pick-up trucks and swollen vans. Demand for the sedan dwindled. Today, nearly half of the U.S. population owns a truck, and trucks have become supersized.
“The consequences of this vehicle growth trend are far from benign. Cities and infrastructures designed for smaller vehicles are now grappling with oversized vehicles,” according to The Finn Blog 2025. Parking, road congestion and, most critically, the increase in size, are also more dangerous to people walking and biking, wheelchair users and children. Blind spots are created when the driver sits higher and the front of the truck is higher. And while cars with lower hoods might have struck pedestrians in the legs, the supersize truck strikes torsos and heads. “To put it simply, pick-up trucks and SUVs are two to three times more likely than smaller vehicles to kill people in the event of a crash,” wrote Steve Davis, April 12, 2021, for the nonprofit organization Smart Growth America.
These giants have finally become too much vehicle for us to handle. I know, I drive one. Not as massive as Maria Shriver’s black Cadillac Escalade, but a midsized SUV, which I consider huge. Mirrors help in the back, but not in the front. As I come over a rise to our drive, for a breathless moment, I see nothing at all before me until the car levels out. My heart has always been in something smaller.
At age 6, my grandson is obsessed with Monster Trucks. He collects them, plays with them, draws them, wears them proudly on T-shirts, and is super excited whenever he spots one. He will get over it, but will we?
