SUV infatuation puts everyone else on road at risk
Fatality rates for others rise in collisions
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 spare some sympathy for the rest of us, who 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 why, 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.
Prof. Michelle J. White at the University of California, San Diego, first noted the problem in a paper way back in 2004 and appropriately called it an “arms race.” 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, bicyclists, 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 tease out what is posing the biggest danger to the most vulnerable. Until 1980 in the U.S., SUVs were counted as cars; after that, they were classified as light trucks. The most confounding thing is that passenger cars, light trucks, SUVs, CUVs and pickups of all sizes are all dumped in one category, statistically, anyway. In Canada, which closely follows on the heels of most American regulatory action, 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. Statistics are broken down by age group, road-user type (driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist), province, and seatbelt usage.
This might have been sufficient when safety regulation got pulled into 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 in the auto industry.
“But they made a distinction for commercial vehicles, a nod to the significant costs it would entail to meet industry-wide regulation. Some of it was already a little iffy; a van with three rows of seats was passenger, the same van with one row was commercial.”
So the asterisks and exclusions were clouding interpretations from Day 1. Fast forward to today. Vehicles in that category that encompasses passenger cars and light trucks and SUVs are all deemed “not dump trucks,” which they’re not. But a 2,400-kg SUV is in the same class as an 880-kg 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 on the roads.
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-percent spike between 2009 and 2016 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 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. Statistics bear out that you are safer driving a larger, heavier vehicle. Manufacturers tout their safety ratings as a premium selling point, and they’re right. But what about all the other road users?
“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.
Manufacturers pump out what consumers buy. But at what cost? Where does public good meet up with consumer appetite?