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You would think that people dying on the road would attract a furore of voices for change. But somehow we just accept those deaths as the accepted collateral for ease, timeliness and convenience, just a side effect of car use.
Earlier this year I wrote about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that does NOT use female crash test dummies in their test vehicles despite the fact they’ve known for forty years that the bodies of males and females react differently in crashes.
In fact it was Consumer Reports that revealed that although most Americans killed in car crashes are male, data shows women are at a greater risk of death or serious injury in a car crash. A female driver or front row passenger with a seatbelt is 17 percent more likely to die, and 73 percent more likely to have a serious injury.
Automotive research still stubbornly clings to the “50th percentile male” which is understood to be a 171 pound 5 foot 9 inch dummy first developed in the 1970’s. And that crash test dummy has not substantially changed, despite the fact that the average American man weighs 26 pounds more.
Quite simply women are not factored in for crash survival tests, despite the fact they are 50 percent of the drivers.
In 2018 36,000 people in the USA died in car crashes, roughly the population of Penticton British Columbia. Twenty percent of those killed were vulnerable road users, pedestrians or cyclists, and those numbers are increasing annually. Statistically deaths of vulnerable road users have increased by 43 percent since 2008.
Statistics also show that SUVs are twice as likely to kill pedestrians because of the high front end profile, but this information has not been well publicized. Indeed an American federal initiative to include pedestrian crash survival into the vehicle ranking system was halted by opposing automakers.
It’s no surprise that Aaron Gordon in Vice.com writes on a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which discovered that the increasing pedestrian and cyclist deaths were “due to the total inaction of government safety regulators, who have known about the dangers to pedestrians increasingly large vehicles on American roads present, but have done nothing about it.”
The findings in the report are troubling. There are international agreements to develop protocol to protect vulnerable road users from vehicular crashes, but it simply has not been followed up on, despite the fact that this could save hundreds of lives.
I have written before how trucks and SUVs now comprise 73 percent of the new vehicle purchases in the United States. That means that of every four vehicles on the road, three are more likely to kill pedestrians or cyclists.
From 2009 to 2016 pedestrian deaths have risen 46 percent and are directly linked to the increase of these large vehicles on the road.
It is the weight and size of the vehicle and bumper height that are crucial for pedestrian and cyclist survival of a crash. But surprise! The NHTSA’s bumper regulations are written to “limit vehicle body damage. It has nothing to do with protecting people hit by said bumper. Nor do any regulations exist for vehicle hoods to absorb energy efficiently (cushion the victim) during a crash”.
What this all means is that the NHTSA is doing absolutely no studies or assessments on the survivability of people outside the vehicle during a crash. The only assessment that is done is the survivability of the people inside the vehicle.
And that is a huge ethical inequity that should not be tolerated.
The same organization that does not use female crash test dummies to help the survivability rate in a crash also does not do any research or grading to protect vulnerable road users in crashes.
As author Aaron Gordon bluntly states “The upshot to all this is NHTSA knows more pedestrians are dying but, despite being the regulatory agency with “highway traffic safety” in its name, refuses to do anything about it.”
When people buy a SUV or a truck because it’s seen as a moving den providing safety and security for their immediate family, they have no idea that what they are buying is a killing machine that can mow other vulnerable road users down.
It’s a problem that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should be addressing but is not. It appears that despite the fact “traffic safety” is in the name, the organization simply does not have the political independence from car makers to do the right ethical thing.
This is why I believe that SUVs should be banned from cities.
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There is a clue in the name of the agency — the national HIGHWAY traffic safety administration. How about the national HUMAN ……
The auto industry, which this regulatory body is a part of, has had blood on its hands for a century.