Love affair with SUVs putting everyone else on the road at risk
Drivers responsible for rising carnage on our roads, Lorraine Sommerfeld writes
The No. 1 reason buyers give for getting into an SUV or light truck is that they feel safer. Higher up. Bigger. And all those things are true. But the rest of us are getting injured and killed at disproportionate rates.
Add in a study showing that driving the super-sized vehicles is “masculinizing ” how females are driving, and it starts to make sense that, after years of declining numbers, fatal traffic collisions are heading back up. The vehicles we drive have never been safer; manufacturers have seen to that. Now, it’s the drivers alone extending the carnage on our roads.
Professor Michelle J. White, a researcher at the University of California in San Diego, first noted the problem way back in 2004. She noticed the steady increase in larger and larger vehicles on North American roads, and the impact that had on “occupants of smaller vehicles and to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists.”
Anyone who knows even a bit of physics might shrug; big beats little in the event of a collision, every time. But reported statistics in North America have allowed something important to fly under the radar: the classification of vehicles has made it difficult to determine what’s posing the biggest danger.
In the U.S., passenger cars, light trucks, SUVs, CUVs and pickups of all sizes are all lumped in one statistical category.
In Canada, you can’t ascertain if a fatality was caused by a compact car or a behemoth SUV. Crashes are crashes, vehicles counted only as passenger or commercial.
This might have been sufficient data when safety regulation was put the spotlight by Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe At Any Speed. As auto consultant Dennis DesRosiers tells it, that was when the U.S. finally got serious about safety regulation in the auto industry.
But fast forward to today. A 2,400-kilogram SUV is in the same class as a 880-kilogram Smart car.
Consider that 73 per cent of vehicles sold in Canada last year were light trucks, SUVs and CUVs, and 80 per cent of those were passenger trucks. The numbers continue to climb as the love affair with big, bigger and biggest continues. And so do the fatality rates of all those around them.
Pedestrian and cyclist deaths are at crisis points in many cities. There are many factors at play, including distracted drivers, distracted pedestrians, more cars on the roads, and higher employment, which means more kilometres being driven. But the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (which does differentiate between vehicle types) recently reported an 81 per cent spike between 2009-16 in pedestrian deaths caused by an SUV.
While road and pedestrian deaths are falling in most places in the world, in Canada and the U.S., pedestrian deaths are going up. We are safer in our cars (mostly because so many of us are driving bigger ones), but the most vulnerable road users face a growing risk.
A study out of Vienna addresses the question we’re not allowed to say out loud: Does driving a bigger vehicle make you drive like an idiot? They didn’t phrase it that way, but they did note that women driving SUVs became what they termed “masculinized.” They displayed more, and riskier, driving behaviours that studies have equated with male drivers.
We’re at a critical point in the auto industry.
“For each fatality avoided for an SUV or light-truck occupant, more than four fatalities are inflicted on others,” White said in 2004.
And the number of large vehicles on our roads has skyrocketed since then.
I’ll give DesRosiers the last word.
“Autonomous cars will solve this, ultimately,” he says.