Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity

<i>Exactly</i> on topic: a philosophy paper &quot;<i>Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?</i>&quot; by Douglas Husak. Author argues that because of the high <i>crash incompatibility</i> with other vehicles (and pedestrians), SUV driving is immoral - imposing an oversized amount of harm to others with no proportional safety for self.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;23562447</a>

&gt; Findings suggest larger vehicles are involved in pedestrian and pedalcyclist crashes with more severe injuries that result in higher hospital charges.<p>I&#x27;ve commuted 10s of thousands of miles by bike the last 30 years, mostly in an urban environment. This doesn&#x27;t surprise me. I can&#x27;t read the whole article, and the excerpt doesn&#x27;t offer any data or speculation about the causes of this. So, with some experience, I&#x27;ll speculate. I&#x27;m happy to have real data instead!<p>So, why? Well, my first thought is that the impact surfaces of those vehicles are much higher off the ground. Rather than being tossed up onto a hood, people might be more likely to be hit directly.<p>Also, the visibility in tall vehicles is worse. For the driver of a sedan, my whole bicycle and torso are eye-level for them -- I&#x27;m easier to see. To a Suburban driver, my head and maybe shoulders are at eye level. I&#x27;ve ridden next to [ostensibly] passenger vehicles where the drivers are above my head level; they&#x27;d have to look _down_ to even see me.<p>And even aside from the height, modern vehicles have narrower windows and larger pillars. This alone makes a big difference. As a contrast, compare an old car with a modern one. The old Benz has at least 150% the visibility. It&#x27;s like driving inside a fishbowl.<p>* A 1980s Mercedes wagon -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mercedes-Benz_W123#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Mercedes-Benz_W123_T-Modell_rear_20090430.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mercedes-Benz_W123#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File...</a> * A modern Chevy Suburban -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chevrolet.com&#x2F;suvs&#x2F;suburban" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chevrolet.com&#x2F;suvs&#x2F;suburban</a>

As an American, we need to rethink how the cities are designed. Way too much emphasis on car centric design. An emphasis on car centric transportation means fed government and people want cars to be safer. Larger A-pillars which decrease line of sight. Larger vehicles give people a higher sense of security and safety.<p>These 2 points make it very safe for the driver and occupants but disregard any safety for pedestrians. Which is consistent with the papers findings.<p>Anecdotally, I have seen empty nesters and older men&#x2F;women buy large SUVs and trucks not because of utility but because of the perceived safety a larger vehicle gives them. Even growing up in TX, rich parents would buy their 16 year old child a truck, SUV, or even a god forsaken hummer because it gives them peace of mind.<p>In my opinion, if cities were re-designed around public transportation and alternative forms of transportation. We would be better off in the long run: decreased auto v pedestrian fatalities, increased air quality, decreased in air pollution related illness&#x2F;disease, much more efficient use of space (parking lots&#x2F;garages vs space for human beings), and much more efficient cities in terms of taxing efficiency (decreased dependency on municipal bonds), and decreased and&#x2F;or stabilized cost of living for everyone

Honestly as an upper middle class or rich American it looks like one of the more dangerous things you could do is probably go out cycling in a road shared by these monster machines. If you crave physical activity so much there’s many other alternatives.<p>When I lived in College Station Texas I had to use a bike (because I was broke) but I stuck to the sidewalks, rules be damned. And even in the sidewalk had to keep an eye for unruly drivers on the road alongside because the last person you want to trust not to mount the curb is a drunk Texan kid with a raised pickup after a football game.<p>And when time came to cross a road, even if the light was green, even if I made eye contact with the dude in the truck, I wouldn’t venture out until the road was fully empty. I decided a long time back id never put myself in a place where another American in a car has to brake to not hit me when I’m outside a car.

Americans are driving bigger and bigger vehicles, which cause even deadlier accidents with smaller vehicles and pedestrians. It&#x27;s a big problem.<p>Here&#x27;s a good video on the problems with Americas increasingly large vehicles:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aIy5uv5-VrE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aIy5uv5-VrE</a>

Large personal vehicles should just be banned in cities. People abused the system to such an extent that now it is a matter of infringing on other people&#x27;s right to personal safety not to mention the unnecessary pollution and traffic congestion. I do not want to discuss the specifics but it would be great if for example cities only allowed KEI cars or a similar concept.

Articles like these make me glad to live in the Netherlands. Here we had &quot;stop de kindermoord&quot; which translates to &quot;stop murdering children&quot; which was aimed at the higher incidence rate of accidents due to motor vehicles. in the abstract they talk about vehicle type, race and other factors while I dont see the real killer anywhere in the abstract or introduction; Speed. Way back during the protest we subsequently figured out how to incorporate cars into cities without accidents.<p>1) In pedestrian and cycle heavy streets, you reduce the speed to a maximum of 30kmh (~20mph) and sometimes to 10 near schools and residential area&#x27;s<p>2) traffic seperation. to improve traffic flow, the dutch governement made sure to always seperate traffic from destinations and only intersect pedestrians and cyclists in the last mile in a 30kmph area.<p>3) Careful road design. Its really uncomfortable to drive above the speed limit because they narrow roads, add trees, obstacles and turns that are perfectly safe at 30kmph that make driving only safe at the apropriate speeds. adding trees next to roads also increases safety for pedestrians as an offroad car is bound to hit a tree instead of a person.<p>4) great investment in public transport and highways. Despite everything someone might tell you, the Netherlands is a great country to drive in with the most ridiculous infrastructure to keep traffic flowing.<p>5) accident investigations. There&#x27;s safety focused public design. We blame the road for an accident rather than a driver. Because even if someone was wasted drunk, an accident could have killed an innocent person. Therefore the road design can be changed so that even an imcompetent or drunk driver wont harm someone. Also, everyone in a car has the legal responsibility to drive safe when encountering pedestrians because as a heavy vehicle, the onus is on you to not cause damage. even if some cyclist ran a red light. You should have been able to stop.<p>look up strongtowns for better accessibility for non-dutch speakers.

The sad thing is that at least some part of the growth of vehicles on the road is because few people can afford to own (and park) multiple cars or other vehicles larger than a bike.<p>I have to move 3 kids and 2 adults regularly over longer distances, so I am pretty much constrained to a van (say a VW T7). But unfortunately, I cannot afford to accompany this expensive car with a smaller, preferrably electric, vehicle. So whenever I have to switch off the bike and move something or someone by car, I switch to the van directly. Car sharing is pretty much uneconomical at that point and a motorcycle or even a cargo bike is problematic due to space constraints.

I wonder if insurance rates have been adjusted to reflect this. I would assume that being &quot;at fault&quot; for a crash with a fatality would result in a hefty insurance payout....

I got nailed head-on in an 80&#x27;s Chevy truck vs Mountain Bike accident. I was deprived of life function for around 25 minutes. Were it not for the mom-daughter nurse team that saw the entire accident happen as they were coming home from their shift, I&#x27;d not be here today.<p>Impacts with large and heavy vehicles suck. I can not recommend. Stick with bumper cars.

Last summer someone pulled out in front of me and totaled my Honda Fit. I would have loved to replace it with a new one but they don&#x27;t sell them in North America any more. In the 90s I had a small Nissan truck (apparently it is called a Hardbody? The manual just said &quot;nissan truck&quot;) You can&#x27;t buy any truck anywhere near as small as that any more. I also had a Dodge Dakota at one point and you can&#x27;t even really find a truck that small any more.<p>I was secretly hoping that the high gas prices would encourage auto makers to reintroduce some smaller cars but it seems like supply chain issues have resulted in them only making higher end cars since they can make more money off of them.

I hope that more Americans will settle on CUVs as family cars.<p>CUVs are built on car style chassis (as opposed to SUV which are built like trucks) and generally are smaller and more fuel efficient (modern turbo 4 cyl designs are pretty impressive). Yet they retain the vast majority of benefits (roomier, higher, AWD, seating up to 7)<p>Yes CUVs are bigger than sedans, however for a family they check all the boxes and are in my opinion a vastly better alternative to vans, pickups and large SUVs, all of which often come in v6 and v8 engines.

Something I&#x27;ve wondered about is how do some of the newer vehicle designs fare when it comes to pedestrian safety? Presumably getting hit by a Tesla Cybertruck or Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle would be pretty bad, but are they just as bad as a giant pickup truck? My intuition says yeah, probably. But there might be some nuance, like maybe the Canoo has better-than-average visibility so hitting pedestrians is less likely.<p>I&#x27;m kind of surprised cars don&#x27;t have external airbags at this point.

People buy bigger cars to protect them and their family from the big cars.

We really need to add a special license requirement for vehicles over a certain size. You shouldn&#x27;t be able to drive something so dangerous without additional training and restrictions. In addition we should enforce safety standards similar to commercial vehicles. Reduced speed limits, additional licensing fees, and stricter inspections. Also, traffic laws should be more heavily enforced for this class of vehicle with licensing revoked if they cannot keep a clean record.<p>Driving a truck or an SUV that weighs more than 4 tons is a huge responsibility and we treat it the same as driving a half ton econobox. If a cop sees a 4 ton SUV breaking the speed limit on a residential zone the penalties should be much harsher than a small car, motorcycle or cyclist doing the same.

Bigger vehicles are heavier; at the same speed as a passenger car, they have more kinetic energy. It is even worse when the victim is lighter, as per the momentum conservation principle. The study confirms the physics. What&#x27;s unexpected is the last line of the abstract.

I drive a Camaro. I can’t fit an infant seat behind my driver’s side seat, and I sit abnormally closer to the steering wheel than most. Never mind a larger child seat.<p>Ok, you’re saying - but that’s a Camaro. Well, said Camaro is in repair at the moment and they gave me a loaner. It’s a Chevy Sonic. I also can’t fit the infant seat behind the driver’s side.<p>To be fair, it’s a subcompact. However, even in my wife’s CX-5 we can barely get our hand between the driver’s seat and the latch for the infant seat to get it out. That’s after moving the seat up further than my wife prefers. I’ll be shopping for a new vehicle soon and I can definitely see how people with families instantly jump to SUVs, vans, and to some extent trucks.

I wonder how much damage is solved by halfing all speed limits. I&#x27;m constantly amazed about how much risk people will take on in order to arrive home (but usually, a red light) a minute earlier.

Some poor understanding of physics in many comments. High school physics deals in point masses in vacuums, but people and vehicles are not point masses.<p>Injury is closely correlated to accelerations applied to various body parts. A sloping hood gives more space to average out the acceleration.<p>Conversely my stepfather blacked out and fell backwards on a tile floor. A low speed impact with a high acceleration applied to the back of his skull and brain that killed him.

This is why weight is a concept used in the Netherlands to determine liability. The more weight you put in motion on public roads, the more liable you&#x27;re going to be. In a collision, drivers of vehicles that are significantly heavier are going to be assumed at (partial) fault. Kinetics are not complicated.

I would like to see a similar study with data about the type of medicine drivers were on when they struck pedestrians&#x2F;cyclists. I&#x27;ve always got the impression that there is more people driving under the influence of those drugs than alcohol.

Most predictable research outcome ever. I wish I could get funding for research like this ;-)

I’m curious why they use the word pedalcyclist not just cyclist

Some poor physics in many comment

Effective cycling is only possible with effective infrastructure. If you keep sharing the same road, accidents will happen. Big cars are not a problem. The solution is build dedicated infra for cyclers. There is no other way.

This article is a great example of how correlation might be suggestive of causation, but is not itself causation.<p>Are pickup trucks inherently more dangerous than other vehicles? Or are pickup truck <i>drivers</i> more dangerous than other drivers? Or are pickup trucks more likely to be driving on more-dangerous roads than on less-dangerous roads?<p>Unfortunately I wasn&#x27;t able to read the article due to the paywall, but I didn&#x27;t see any mention of controlling for confounders in the abstract.

&gt; Passenger cars were the striking vehicle in most fatal pedestrian and pedalcyclist crashes, though they were underrepresented relative to the proportion of all crashes in which they were involved. Though pickup trucks were the striking vehicle in just 5.6% of pedestrian and pedalcyclist crashes, they were involved in 12.6% of fatalities. SUVs were similarly overrepresented in fatalities relative to the proportion of their involvement in all crashes. SUVs struck 14.7% of the pedestrians and pedalcyclists investigated here, but were involved in 25.4% of the fatalities.<p>&gt; In fact, passenger car sales in the United States dropped at an annual rate of 2.4% from 2008 to 2018 alone, while pickup truck sales increased at an annual rate of 6.4% (Davis &amp; Boundy, 2020). In 2008 light trucks were about 40% of light vehicles produced, in 2018 they were nearly half (Ibid).<p>Based on this, I would put SUV&#x27;s&#x2F;Trucks conservatively at say 45% of US vehicles.<p>Based on this,<p>their combined pedestrian&#x2F;pedalcyclist crashes are 5.6 + 14.7 = 20.3%<p>their combined fatality is 12.6 + 25.4 = 38%<p>With these numbers, given that the crashes are lower in proportion to their overall numbers, I would say that Light Trucks&#x2F;SUV&#x27;s are less likely to be involved in a crash with pedestrians&#x2F;cyclists but when a crash does happen it is worse. However, they do not seem to be a disproportionate cause of pedestrian&#x2F;pedalcyclists fatalities compared to passenger cars.