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.
Archive
Ban passenger cars, mandate light duty trucks as smallest legal vehicle.
Win.
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.
Don’t these economists know that the economy regulates itself? lmao.
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
