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In 2021, 5-year-old Allie Hart was killed after she was struck by a van while riding a bike through a crosswalk. After the loss, her mother, Jessica, started advocating for safer streets and vehicles, arguing that no parents should experience what she did.
Allie was one of two children, and 20 people, killed walking and biking on Washington, DC, streets in 2021, and part of a broader crisis of fatalities on US roads. By the next year, pedestrian fatalities had reached a 40-year high — equivalent to three Boeing 737s dropping from the sky each month, according to the advocacy group Smart Growth America. The trend made the US an outlier among peer nations, including Canada, Australia, and several European countries. But the rising deaths of people trying to navigate our streets rarely earns the scrutiny that accompanies airline safety failures, even though airline travel is, overall, extremely safe.
In profiling the Hart family, and trying to dig into why the US was becoming more deadly for pedestrians, I found one cause impossible to ignore: our appetite for bigger, taller, heavier vehicles. The growth of these bigger, deadlier SUVs and trucks — sometimes referred to as “car bloat,” “truck bloat,” or “autobesity” — has indirectly been enabled by the government, with deadly consequences for Americans. The way the government understands what makes a safe car hasn’t ever really taken pedestrians into account. But that’s about to change.
The American penchant for fortresses on wheels increasingly means that people outside of them don’t stand a chance. The most vulnerable road users, including children, often aren’t even visible to drivers of large trucks and SUVs.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, vehicles with hoods higher than 40 inches “are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes” than cars with lower, sloping hoods. It’s not just hood height that makes these vehicles more deadly, but also their design — boxy, blunt front ends are more dangerous than low-angled hoods. That finding is in line with other research which shows that taller vehicles are more likely to strike people in the head or chest, increasing fatality risk compared to smaller, lower vehicles that might strike a pedestrian in the legs. The heavier size also means that the vehicles strike pedestrians with more force, and people who are struck are more likely to end up underneath the vehicle rather than rolling onto the hood.
More US consumers have turned to SUVs in the last two decades, and as they have, the number of people being killed by what are sometimes called “light trucks” — vehicles that weigh up to 8,500 pounds and include many SUVs, vans, and pickups — has grown.
The supersizing of vehicles on US roads, combined with a lack of meaningful regulation, has created perverse incentives. It’s one that almost anyone who owns a vehicle has had to think about. If it feels as though everyone else is driving a big vehicle, you don’t want to be the only person driving a small car when a crash happens. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Those individual decisions have serious consequences, though. They’re best illustrated by this chart from the Economist. Its analysis shows that heavy vehicles are safer for people inside them — but the heavier they get, the deadlier they get for people in other cars.
“For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles,” the Economist notes. Now just imagine how deadly they are for people who don’t have a vehicle to protect them.
After Allie was killed, Jessica began volunteering with Families for Safe Streets, a network of people whose loved ones had been killed by deadly drivers, to push for reform that would result in safer roads and vehicles. Last July, Jessica published a Change.org petition urging the government to improve its vehicle safety ratings to take pedestrians and other vulnerable road users like her daughter into consideration.
At the time, the government was weighing public comments on a plan to update their New Car Assessment Program, sometimes called NCAP. The program is a series of tests the government uses to assess their five-star safety rating program that is assigned to new vehicles and meant to help consumers make decisions about safety when purchasing a car. Europe’s version of NCAP tests vehicles for the damage they cause when colliding with dummies and replica body parts meant to stand in for pedestrians, and gives higher ratings to vehicles that are proven to do less damage. Though Euro NCAP adopted pedestrian safety testing measures more than 20 years ago, the US version of NCAP didn’t. That has meant consumers buying large vehicles with a five-star safety rating might not even realize that their car is incredibly dangerous for other people.
Last month — after lots of urging from Families for Safe Streets, other advocates, and the public — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it is finally updating NCAP to also adopt the European model of testing vehicles for how deadly they are when they strike pedestrians. The new program will also test for advanced driver assistance technologies, including one designed to automatically brake when a pedestrian is at risk of being struck by a vehicle.
The changes will encourage car manufacturers to make their vehicles safer for pedestrians, and will give consumers a more complete picture of a car’s ability to protect themselves and others. Previous changes to NCAP show that they can make a meaningful difference: In 2004, NHTSA rolled out better testing for vehicle rollover risk following a worrying rise in fatalities involving SUV rollovers. The better testing, along with improved technology for stabilizing vehicles that NCAP mandated, helped reduce the number of rollover-related deaths significantly.
The reasons US roads are so deadly ultimately aren’t that complicated: They come down to a matter of unsafe road design, deadly vehicle design, and a culture that doesn’t prioritize pedestrian safety enough. The NCAP changes attempt to address two of the three. It might not be enough to solve the crisis, but it’s an important step.
