[article] What to do about America’s killer cars
[article] What to do about America’s killer cars
The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous as the rich-world average. It doesn’t have to be that way
THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest.
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Tax by weight. These things destroy roads so it'll be easy to avoid the "government overreach" yapping.
Yeah I'll pay more in taxes for my fat sedan, but it'll be worth it.
The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load.
Basically a big ass pickup that weighs twice as much as a car should be taxed at 2^4 = 16 times as much by this metric
edit: source
Just to clarify, this "fourth power" rule is reasonable because that is approximately how road damage scales with per axle weight (last I checked it's not an exact integer exponent but it is about 4)
Stop using vehicle footprint for trucks on CAFE standards.
Starting in 2012 truck fuel economy standards changed to being based on vehicle footprint, which essentially outlawed small trucks and encouraged manufacturers to keep making them bigger and bigger.
It's why the Ranger, Dakota, and S10 were all suddenly discontinued. The Ranger eventually came back, but is now bigger than the F150 was before.
It's hit cargo vans too. Between 2021 and 2023, all small cargo vans (Transit Connect, Promaster City, and NV200) were discontinued as they got passed by stricter fuel economy standards that penalized them for not having a larger footprint.
Yeah, somehow the MPG count as well, they have a formula where a bigger car has higher MPG in the end, smaller cars are lower MPG by that formula.
What people do here is they use the loophole that they are super cheap in insurance and road taxes because they are A: "work" trucks. And B: they only count the usable space and not the bed or some stupid shit. Which means a ridiculous dodge ram is cheaper than a smart four four that i use to drive around for work. If they would just stop that it would help A LOT. But talking to these insane people just hurts my head. Some guy told me that bicycles should pay as much road taxes as cars, because they also use the road.
Sounds good but as a person who drives a wheelchair-modified minivan, which was already twice as expensive, is heavier, and is the smallest vehicle that can accommodate a power chair, I hope you'll remember a carve-out for disability-access vehicles.
There would be lots of carve outs I imagine. The goal wouldn't be to remove useful vehicles from the road.
If I'm wish listing laws then those vans would just be given to people who need them, or at least the mods would be covered.
Specifically, this is what the yearly road tax should be. It should scale faster than linear, and be agonistic to gasoline or electric powertrains (since road tax is already part of the price of gasoline).
Weight, exhaust and distance driven should all be factors.
“Where people love to drive”. I hate driving but damn try getting around without a car and spend your whole day just getting groceries.
It was NOT always like this and now the regime made it so that vast majority of Americans have no choice unless you are "lucky" enough to live in a select few cities that were designed pre WW2 and region with some rail infrastructure.
3 generations of malinvestment and chronic infrastructure issues to show for it.
First world country.
When I lived in the rural northeast, driving was fun. The bendy roads with low traffic were a blast to drive.
Now that I live in a southwest city, not so much. It's merely the least inconvenient way to get anywhere.Bro, groceries can be ordered right to your door even in nowheresville USA.
For twice the price of already exorbitant prices.
I've said this before, but create a new license requirement for these, "light duty trucks," that are causing all these problems. Right now a standard Class D allows any chud to drive one of these things. If you want to drive something that weighs more than 5,000 pounds, you should have to get a special license that teaches you about how huge their blind spots are and why they aren't crash-compatible with normal cars.
That is kinda like a prisoner's dilemma. If we all go smaller we all win, but if one person goes big they win and others lose.
We cannot rely on people to do the right thing because there is an incentive to do the wrong thing. Change has to be through legislative incentive.
Don't need legislation. Simply needed mechanical sorting. Place barriers only reasonably-sized vehicles can fit through without being damaged. Added bonuses: traffic calming, driver competency testing.
<Obnoxious Pedantic comment>
All your ideas would need to be legislated.
</Obnoxious Pedantic comment>
Would be funny if an entire country made all it's border crossings with 2m wide bamboo bridges above a moat. Car too wide or heavy? In the moat it goes. Sploosh!
This is precisely why I'd want my own kid driving a tank of a car, until laws are passed such that nearly all vehicles become smaller. I'd make him save up money to get a little car, and match whatever he's saved to get him a far larger car.
1 in 75? That math seems pretty off.
40,000 fatalities would be a sample size of 3 million. The USA is 335 million, 110x larger.
1 in 8,250 is more like it.
Try thinking about the math a little differently. Instead using a by mile approach I get a similar result.
- Average American drives 15,000 miles/year
- Over 60 years, that's 900,000 miles total
- Using a death rate of 1.33 per 100 million miles:
- So for 900,000 miles: (1.33 / 100,000,000) * 900,000 = 0.01197
- Convert to percentage: 0.01197 * 100 = 1.197%
- 1/75 is about 1.3% which is not far from my guess.
Lifetime vs annual.
You have a 100% chance of your life ending in death. That doesn't mean it'll happen this year.
Yeah the number seems way off to me too.
In 2022, there were 42,795 total motor vehicle fatalities.
That would be 1 in 75 if the population was 3,225,000.
The USA is well over 300 million.
You’re right about it being 100x more
You're conflating two separate things.
It's not 1:75, of all living people, for that year.
It's 1:75 of people who die in the US, are killed by cars.
In any given year, if 40K die from cars, 3M people will have died some other way, that year.If calculated over lifetime, this number becomes closer to 1 in 75: This year one has the 'chance' or risk of 42000/335000000=12.5/100000 to be killed by a car. But one has this risk every year of the ~80 years one lives, thus the life time risk for the average person is about 1 %. Maybe the data is 'cleaned' for road death and people living close to agglomerations, where one encounters traffic jams, and thus the number is slightly higher, 1/75.
Article math seems fuzzy for sure. I wondered if they were measuring for a lifetime of time. Even if that were true, it still feels off.
12.8 per 100,000. That's way less than 1 in 75.
I read a different article a few months ago about how cars are now so heavy that guardrails do absolutely nothing to stop them anymore. And while I'm all about small cars for a number of reasons, electric cars are super heavy even if small which of course is growing in demand. I'll just be glad to move back to the city soon where I can take public transit.
They were not designed for vehicles over 5000 lbs allegedly. Which is weird since lots of the older cars pushed that threshold. Maybe they meant 80’s cars.
Same thing they do with everything else. Glorify it and double down.
SUVs for toddlers. Wear a car pin whenever an accident happens nearby.
they forgot to add deathsand chronic illness from air pollution caused by cars, not only nasty particles from gas combustion but brakes and tires dust, aggravated with weight
Economics will catch up to many of these people at least for vanity ICE trucks. When did the blue collar workers started buying 60-90k luxury vehicles?
But people will die while that self resolves. EV will likely grow and there is no solution to that besides public transit. But US is way behind on transit so the next generation of workers, most will need a car to be able to work.
EV as transportation solution were always a red herring even if the product tech has use cases as family car or delivery truck.
Public transit is the proper transportation solution and US seriously under investing in that.
The good thing is that new generations can't afford new cars. And if they can afford them, then can't afford to crash their only home. So I predict that people will be more careful with their homes as they drive them from time to time according to parking laws.
Don't these economists know that the economy regulates itself? lmao.
As an EV fan, I’d want a closer look at how dangerous vehicle weight really is. Historically more weight correlates with trucks, with poor visibility, higher hoods, misaligned bumpers and lights, poor handling. However EVs tend to be heavy, but with better handling and visibility , aligned bumpers and lights, normal hoods, and advanced safety features. It’s quite possible that using weight here is a proxy for larger vehicles
Once EVs become popular many of their designs will mimic what we see today with trucks and SUVs. We need regulation specifically for bumper shapes and hood heights. This can help enforce better visibility and improve crash outcomes as lower, curved out hoods push people away or over the car. The current flat and tall hoods on trucks push people under the car.
Except that,
E = 1/2 m v^2. You can't get rid of thatm. All else being equal, lethality scales linearly with vehicle weight. The safety features that exist are still for the occupants; there are crumple zones for decelerating another vehicle hitting head on, not foam padding for protecting pedestrians. Some features of trucks are extra bad for impacts, but a heavy EV is going to be worse than the same frame with less mass.Sure, I never said weight wasn’t a factor but I’m not convinced it’s much of a factor.
Aside from excesses like the monstrosity of an Hummer EV, I’ve read that EVs are typically 20% heavier than a corresponding ICE car. So, any collision is with a vehicle 20% heavier.
However that EV also
- has a standard height bumper so any car collision will be in the most reinforced spot, as opposed to anything raised/lifted which inflicts that vehicles most reinforced spot on a weaker part of the victim vehicle
- has a standard hood (except pickups) so any pedestrian collision has a better chance of pedestrian survival, as opposed to the solid wall the is the front of many trucks
- I likely to have outstanding reflexes and stopping distance to avoid or lessen an accident, being more likely to have advanced automated collision avoidance plus tires that can handle instant torque/braking
- as more likely to be a car with normal sight lines, is more likely to see and avoid than a truck
- as lower center of gravity, help with emergency maneuvers so more likely to avoid an accident
Ban passenger cars, mandate light duty trucks as smallest legal vehicle.
Win.
This shit belongs in [email protected], not here.
Don't you people see? Scapegoating big trucks as if they're the only kind of cars that are a problem is a misdirection tactic. Quit falling for it! Car-supremacists like at The Economist just want to get us circle-jerking about big trucks so that we waste all our grass-roots energy attacking some tiny corner of the car industry while forgetting about the rest of the system.
The real solution here -- the only real solution here -- is that the zoning must be repaired so that people can get out of the cars (regardless of size) in the first place!
"Not here"? Trucks are still cars and part of the problem.
It's important for people to tackle the issues from many angles, including both zoning and dangerous vehicle design. I'd argue the real waste of our grass-roots energy is going after each other.