In 2021, 5-year-old Allie Hart died after being hit by a van while riding her bicycle through a crosswalk. After the loss, her mother, Jessica, began advocating for safer roads and vehicles, arguing that no parent should have to experience what she did.
Allie was one of two children and 20 people to walk and bike the streets of Washington, DC, in 2021, and as part of a wider crisis of deaths on US roads. By the following year, pedestrian fatalities had reached a 40-year high —That’s the equivalent of three Boeing 737s from the sky every monthAccording to the advocacy group Smart Growth America. This trend has made the United States an outlier among peer countries, including Canada, Australia, and several European countries. But the mounting deaths of people trying to navigate our roads rarely bear the scrutiny that accompanies airline safety failures, even though airline travel is overall extremely safe.
In profiling the Hart family and trying to figure out why the United States is becoming more deadly to pedestrians, I found one factor impossible to ignore: our appetite for bigger, taller, heavier vehicles. The growth of these big, deadly SUVs and trucks — sometimes referred to as “car bloat,” “truck bloat” or “autoobesity” — has been indirectly enabled by the government, with dire consequences for Americans. The government’s understanding of what a safe car does doesn’t really take pedestrians into account. But that’s about to change.
The growing American penchant for castles on wheels means people outside them don’t stand a chance. The most vulnerable road users, including children, are often invisible even to drivers of large trucks and SUVs.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway SafetyVehicles with hoods greater than 40 inches are “about 45 percent more likely to die in pedestrian crashes” than vehicles with low, sloping hoods. It’s not just the height of the hood that makes these vehicles more dangerous, but also their design – boxy, blunt front ends are more dangerous than low-angled hoods. This finding is consistent with other studies showing that longer vehicles People are more likely to hit their head or chest, increases the risk of death compared to smaller, lower vehicles that can hit pedestrians’ legs. The heavier size means that vehicles hit pedestrians harder, and those who are hit are more likely to end up under the vehicle rather than rolling over the hood.
Over the past two decades, more and more American consumers have turned to SUVs, and with them, many have died in what is sometimes called the “light truck“— vehicles that weigh up to 8,500 pounds and include many SUVs, vans and pickups — increased.
The supersizing of vehicles on US roads combined with a lack of meaningful regulation has created perverse incentives. This is one that almost any car owner has to think about. If it seems like everyone else is driving a big car, you don’t want to be the only person driving a small car when an accident happens. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
These personal decisions have serious consequences though. They’re portrayed by the best This chart from The Economist. Its analysis shows that heavy vehicles are safer for the people inside them — but the heavier they are, the more deadly they are for people in other cars.
“For every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost in other vehicles,” notes the Economist. Now just imagine how deadly they are for people who don’t have a vehicle to protect them.
After Allie was killed, Jessica began volunteering with Families for Safer Streets, a network of people whose loved ones had been killed by fatal drivers, to push for reforms that would result in safer roads and vehicles. Jessica last July A Change.org petition has been published Urging the government to improve the safety rating of his car to take into account pedestrians and other vulnerable road users like his daughter.
At the time, the government was weighing public comments on plans to update its New Car Assessment Program, sometimes called NCAP. The program is a series of tests that the government uses to evaluate their five-star safety rating program that is assigned to new vehicles and to help consumers make decisions about safety when buying a car. Europe’s version of NCAP tests vehicles The damage they do During the collision with dummy And replica body parts mean standing up to pedestrians, and rated high on vehicles proven to do less damage. However, Euro NCAP has adopted the Pedestrian Safety test system More than 20 years agoThe US version of NCAP did not. This means that consumers buying large vehicles with five-star safety ratings may not even realize that their cars are incredibly dangerous to other people.
Last month — later A lot of urges From families, other advocates and the public for safer roads — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it finally NCAP is being updated To adopt the European model of testing how deadly vehicles are when they hit pedestrians. The new program will also test for advanced driver assistance technology, including one designed to brake automatically when a pedestrian is at risk of being hit by a vehicle.
These changes will encourage automakers to make their vehicles safer for pedestrians and give consumers a more complete picture of a vehicle’s ability to protect themselves and others. Previous changes to NCAP show that they can make a meaningful difference: In 2004, NHTSA The vehicle is better tested for rollover risk following An alarming increase in deaths involving SUV rollovers. Better testing, along with improved technology to stabilize NCAP-mandated vehicles, has helped reduce rollover-related numbers Significantly death.
The reasons why US roads are so deadly aren’t ultimately that complicated: They come down to unsafe road design, deadly vehicle design, and a culture that doesn’t prioritize pedestrian safety enough. NCAP changes attempt to address two of the three This may not be enough to solve the crisis, but it is an important step.
