Too many Americans are dying because of bloated trucks. This rule change may help.

In 2021, 5-year-old Allie Hart was killed when she was hit by a van while riding her bicycle at a crosswalk. After her mother, Jessica, lost her mother, she said no parent should have to go through what she did and began advocating for safer roads and vehicles.

Ally is one of two children and 20 people killed on foot or biking on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 2021, part of a broader crisis of fatal crashes on U.S. roads. It became. By the next year, pedestrian deaths would reach a 40-year high, equivalent to three Boeing 737s falling from the sky every month, according to the advocacy group Smart Growth America. This trend has made the United States an outlier among its peers, which also include Canada, Australia, and several European countries. But even though air travel is overall very safe, the increasing number of deaths among people trying to get around our cities comes under intense scrutiny over airline safety deficiencies. Very rarely.

When profiling the Hart family and trying to dig into why America is becoming more deadly for pedestrians, I discovered one cause I couldn’t ignore. It’s our desire for bigger, taller, heavier cars. The growth of larger and more dangerous SUVs and trucks, referred to as the “bloat car,” “bloat truck,” and “obese car,” is indirectly enabled by the government and is deadly to Americans. is bringing about results. The way the government understands what constitutes a safe car does not take pedestrians into account at all. But that’s about to change.

Americans increasingly prefer fortresses on wheels, meaning those outside the fortress 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 Safety, vehicles with hoods that are more than 40 inches tall are “approximately 45 percent more likely to cause a fatal pedestrian collision” 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. A boxy, blunt front end is more dangerous than a low-cornered hood. This finding suggests that taller vehicles are more likely to hit people in the head or chest, increasing the risk of death, compared to smaller, lower-height vehicles that can hit pedestrians’ legs. This is consistent with other studies shown. The heavier size also means that the force with which the vehicle hits a pedestrian is greater, making it more likely that the person will fall under the vehicle rather than onto the hood.

Over the past two decades, American consumers have turned to SUVs, as well as vehicles sometimes referred to as “light trucks,” which weigh up to 8,500 pounds and include many SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks. The number of people killed by vehicles is also increasing. —I grew up.

The super-large size of vehicles on U.S. roads, combined with a lack of meaningful regulation, is creating perverse incentives. This is a question that almost everyone who owns a car has thought about at least once. If you feel like everyone else is driving a big car, you don’t want to be the only one driving a small car when an accident occurs. It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

However, these individual decisions have significant consequences. This graph from The Economist best illustrates it. The analysis shows that larger vehicles are safer for the people inside them, but the heavier the vehicle, the more dangerous it is for people in other vehicles.

“For every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen are lost to other vehicles,” The Economist says. Now imagine how deadly they are to people who don’t have a car to protect them.

After Allie was killed, Jessica volunteered with Families for Safe Streets, a network of people whose loved ones have been killed by aggressive drivers, to push for reforms that would bring about safer roads and vehicles. Started activities. Last July, Jessica launched a Change.org petition calling on the government to improve vehicle safety ratings to take into account pedestrians and vulnerable road users like her daughter.

At the time, the government was considering public comments on plans to update the New Car Assessment Programme, also known as NCAP. The program is a series of tests used by governments to evaluate the five-star safety rating program assigned to new cars, and is intended to help consumers make safety decisions when purchasing a car. The purpose is The European version of NCAP tests the damage caused by vehicles when colliding with dummy or replica body parts that serve as pedestrian stand-ins, and awards higher ratings to vehicles that prove to cause less damage. While Euro NCAP adopted pedestrian safety testing measures over 20 years ago, the US version of NCAP did not. This means that consumers who buy large vehicles with five-star safety ratings may not even realize that their vehicles are extremely dangerous to others.

Last month, after numerous requests from families, other activists, and the public seeking safer streets, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finally updated NCAP to clarify when vehicles are dangerous. The company announced that it will also adopt a European model for testing. They attack pedestrians. The new program will also test advanced driver-assistance technologies, including technology designed to automatically apply the brakes if a pedestrian is at risk of colliding with a vehicle.

The changes will encourage automakers to make their vehicles safer for pedestrians and give consumers a more complete picture of their vehicles’ ability to protect themselves and others. Sho. Previous changes to NCAP have shown that they have the potential to bring about meaningful change. In 2004, NHTSA better tested vehicles for rollover risk in response to a concerning increase in SUV rollover fatalities. NCAP-mandated improvements in vehicle stabilization technology and improved testing have significantly reduced the number of rollover fatalities.

Ultimately, the reason why America’s roads are so dangerous is not that complicated. It all boils down to unsafe road design, dangerous vehicle design, and a culture that doesn’t prioritize pedestrian safety enough. The NCAP changes seek to address two of the three. It may not be enough to solve the crisis, but it is an important step.