Rolling coal should be illegal, considered aggressive driving, and the police should be able to impound your vehicle for a few weeks if caught doing it.

On a similar topic, any exhaust loud enough to require hearing protection should be illegal and the vehicle should be removed from the road until its exhaust cannot damage the ears of people outside the vehicle. It is absolutely ridiculous one asshole can wake up an entire neighbourhood at 2:00 am because “fast car go vroom vroom very loud, I am so cool.”

If you see someone rolling coal, it is morally OK to find them and remove the stem valves from their tires.

Tamy Valiente doesn’t ride anymore. She doesn’t talk to her bike. She’s given up on her dream of completing an Ironman in Kona. It’s not that she doesn’t want to ride. She can’t.

“And you know,” she says, “I really loved riding my bike.”

This sentence hit hard…

Every state needs to have a rigorous and regular car inspection policy. Coal rolling (and all other exhaust modifications) need to be illegal at the federal level, or mandated to be illegal at the state level. They don’t even purport to have an effect on efficiency or performance like some other exhaust modifications. They are objectively worse in every single metric beside looks, which is subjective besides. They are an attack on the environment, other motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and people who live in the surrounding areas.

I’ve been behind a shit-stacker in a car and they blinded me when they chugged from a traffic light. I can’t imagine how impossible and awful being around one on a bicycle would be.

Two Waller police officers arrived at the scene and, after taking some pictures, moved the broken bikes to the side of the road. When the cops told everyone that they could go home, Ferrell was aghast, “I was like, ‘Go home? These people need to go to jail.’” He told the cops he’d been coal rolled by the teenage driver, and it appeared the boy was attempting to coal roll the group of bike riders when he slammed into them.

Ferrell knew what professional police work looked like. His brother was a cop in Houston for 25 years and his dad worked at the prison unit in Sugarland. “Neither one of these cops were professionals at all,” he says.

Not to change the subject, but yeeeah that’s about standard for cops. Asking them to do their jobs is too much.

For those confused like I was.

A civil suit filed later alleges that the driver had attempted to “roll coal” on Ferrell, which the driver denies. An increasingly popular phenomenon at the time of the incident, coal rolling happens when a driver of a diesel truck floods the engine with more fuel than it can efficiently process, emitting a thick black plume of exhaust across the road. The emissions systems of diesel trucks are strictly regulated under federal law. But some truck owners modify their exhaust systems with illegal aftermarket parts, or fail to fix broken exhaust systems. In the 2010s, rolling coal became a kind of defiant act, an aggressive backlash against the increasing regulation of fossil fuels. People using forms of transportation that don’t burn oil—namely, those riding bikes, walking, or driving an electric vehicle—became targets. Social media apps such as TikTok helped drive the #rollingcoal trend. Videos with captions like “POV: You roll coal on every bicycle you see,” showing the engorged tailpipe of a diesel truck expelling a bubbling smoke, accrued thousands, even millions of views.

Of all the stupid things that stupid people can do, coal rolling is probably the most baffling to me.

My feelings can only be found at the intersection of surprise, curiosity, hatred and disgust of a Venn diagram

Archived link if you’d like to read the article.

Cyclists in areas where people regularly roll coal should be permitted to carry arms.

When people in the woo communities talk about low vibrational, does it mean they have less empathy than a rock?