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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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.