Anyone who lives in the suburbs where doing lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and other such stuff is required due to HOAs and other such nonsense typically requires either owning a truck, or having a friend with a truck, because every now and then you have to pack it full of lawn crap and haul it off. I have to do yearly fire protection on my property, that includes cutting out bushes, trimming trees, and creating defensible space. Loading that into a van would be a pain in the ass, loading it into an SUV means I’m never getting the sap out of the carpet. Throwing it in the back of a pickup bed means I don’t even have to think about it.
I don’t own a pickup, but I have multiple friends with pickups, and you get into a beneficial “I’ll buy you a tank of diesel if I can borrow your truck for an afternoon” relationship. They get 100 bucks in fuel, I get my lawn crap taken care of.
In many places outside the US, people just rent a trailer or a truck if they need one once a year. Obviously people who need these vehicles for their daily work should be able to use them, but driving a massive pickup truck because you have one task for it annually doesn’t seem like a good solution.
People go camping twice/year and buy a trailer and F350 to haul it, leaving the trailer vacant 50 weeks of the year and using the F350 as a commuter vehicle. But they nEeD a tRuCK fOr HauLiNG.
I feel like a lot of people don’t really understand what “need” and “essential” mean, to be honest, and I think it leads to really skewed priorities at times. I mean, I can respect that it’s different for different people (e.g., takeout food doesn’t really seem like a need for me, but maybe it’s pretty important for somebody on crutches who would have a pretty hard time cooking for themselves right now), but often it seems like anything that’s a convenience becomes a need, if that makes sense? And while I don’t want to make people’s lives harder for no reason, I think there’s a lot of places where we can do something in a slightly less convenient way individually that has a big impact on a larger scale. Being able to prioritized what’s “actually important”, see the bigger picture, and put up with a little individual inconvenience to make things better for everybody as a whole seems like a really important skill to have in a society!
I’d definitely consider a flatbed transit personally, but there is definitely a “cool” factor that is lost on something that looks like that. Not that “cool” factor is a good argument for something to exist, but it is what it is.
And I could probably do that, but I’m in a pretty rural area and services like that tend to have a very long wait list around here because there’s too many people that need the same work done, and not enough handymen/services willing to do it. Not to mention the cost tends to be several hundred dollars.
Anyone who lives in the suburbs where doing lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and other such stuff is required due to HOAs and other such nonsense typically requires either owning a truck, or having a friend with a truck, because every now and then you have to pack it full of lawn crap and haul it off. I have to do yearly fire protection on my property, that includes cutting out bushes, trimming trees, and creating defensible space. Loading that into a van would be a pain in the ass, loading it into an SUV means I’m never getting the sap out of the carpet. Throwing it in the back of a pickup bed means I don’t even have to think about it.
I don’t own a pickup, but I have multiple friends with pickups, and you get into a beneficial “I’ll buy you a tank of diesel if I can borrow your truck for an afternoon” relationship. They get 100 bucks in fuel, I get my lawn crap taken care of.
In many places outside the US, people just rent a trailer or a truck if they need one once a year. Obviously people who need these vehicles for their daily work should be able to use them, but driving a massive pickup truck because you have one task for it annually doesn’t seem like a good solution.
People go camping twice/year and buy a trailer and F350 to haul it, leaving the trailer vacant 50 weeks of the year and using the F350 as a commuter vehicle. But they nEeD a tRuCK fOr HauLiNG.
It’s insanity.
I feel like a lot of people don’t really understand what “need” and “essential” mean, to be honest, and I think it leads to really skewed priorities at times. I mean, I can respect that it’s different for different people (e.g., takeout food doesn’t really seem like a need for me, but maybe it’s pretty important for somebody on crutches who would have a pretty hard time cooking for themselves right now), but often it seems like anything that’s a convenience becomes a need, if that makes sense? And while I don’t want to make people’s lives harder for no reason, I think there’s a lot of places where we can do something in a slightly less convenient way individually that has a big impact on a larger scale. Being able to prioritized what’s “actually important”, see the bigger picture, and put up with a little individual inconvenience to make things better for everybody as a whole seems like a really important skill to have in a society!
I understand the general use case what I don’t get is where a pickup is more suitable than something like a flatbed Transit - https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTAyNFgxMDI0/z/VmIAAOSw6DNcrKoD/$_86.JPG
Which has a bigger bed, a far more economical engine and is overall far more suitable as a work vehicle for carrying those kinds of loads.
Also do you not just have garden waste collection services?
Just hire the above for the few times a year you would need it. Honestly I do find it baffling.
I’d definitely consider a flatbed transit personally, but there is definitely a “cool” factor that is lost on something that looks like that. Not that “cool” factor is a good argument for something to exist, but it is what it is.
And I could probably do that, but I’m in a pretty rural area and services like that tend to have a very long wait list around here because there’s too many people that need the same work done, and not enough handymen/services willing to do it. Not to mention the cost tends to be several hundred dollars.