It’s onerous to flee the truth that American vans and SUVs have been on a steroid-infused weight loss program for the previous few years. The development was all too obvious on the final auto present we went to—at Chicago in 2020, I felt physically threatened just standing next to a few of the merchandise on show by GMC and its rivals. Intuitively, the supersize hood heights on these pickups appear extra harmful to susceptible highway customers, however now there’s onerous information to assist that.

It hasn’t been an awesome few years to be a pedestrian within the United States. These most susceptible highway customers began being killed by drivers more frequently in 2020, and whereas some states had been capable of reverse that development, others went the other way, making 2022—the final 12 months for which there’s full information—essentially the most lethal 12 months on document for US pedestrians.

The drawback has a number of causes. For a long time, city planners have prioritized automobile visitors above all the pieces else, and our built environment favors speeding vehicles at the price of folks making an attempt to cross roads or cycle. But it is not all of the fault of these planners, because the automobiles we drive play a big function too.

Some of that’s the swap from sedans to crossovers, SUVs, and pickup vans. Data from the Nineties discovered {that a} pedestrian hit by a light-weight truck was two to 3 instances extra more likely to be killed, with one other examine discovering that gentle vans had been twice as more likely to injure a pedestrian than a automobile, particularly at low pace.

Now, a brand new examine printed within the journal Economics of Transportation has analyzed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s crash information from 2016 via 2021, crashes involving one automobile and one pedestrian. The writer, Justin Tyndall of the University of Hawaii, matched the NHTSA’s crash reporting sampling system information for these years to automobile specs the place the automobile’s VIN was included within the CRSS information.

Tyndall’s dataset began with 13,783 single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crashes, then filtered out these situations the place there was no VIN recorded, besides if the report included make and mannequin. He additionally eliminated entries that didn’t document different essential variables, akin to automobile pace, leaving a pattern dimension of three,375 crashes.

To be sure the smaller dataset was nonetheless consultant, Tyndall regarded on the full dataset in addition to the ultimate pattern. He discovered that “average crash characteristics are similar across the two samples, suggesting that the reduced sample is broadly representative of the original dataset,” though he notes that 6.7 % of crashes within the massive set resulted in a pedestrian loss of life, whereas 9.1 % of crashes within the smaller, closing pattern had been deadly for the pedestrian.

Pickups and SUVs Are More Dangerous to Pedestrians

There had been 1,779 distinctive automobiles (as decided by make, mannequin, and mannequin 12 months) within the dataset. Pickups and full-size SUVs had considerably taller hoods than the typical automobile, at 28 % and 27 %, respectively. Minivans weren’t significantly better, at 24 % taller than the hood on a median sedan. Even compact SUVs—also called crossovers—had been 19 % taller. Pickups and full-size SUVs had been additionally a lot heavier than the typical automobile: 55 % for SUVs and 51 % for pickup vans.

Tyndall additionally notes that whereas the dataset spans solely six years, over that point “the median front-end height increased by 5 percent,” whereas weight elevated barely much less (3 %), and the prospect that the automobile was a light-weight truck moderately than a automobile went up by 11 %.