[roughly]

> Key Ideas: Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.

I'm actually curious how much of this danger is primarily to pedestrians and cyclists. On the margins, I'd expect in a crash a 6000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment to be safer than a 3000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment, but folks have crashed modern sports cars at triple-digit speeds and (literally) walked away.

For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger, and the collision rates are higher because visibility and vehicle control are much worse than smaller cars.

I'm also curious how much of the perceived safety benefit of larger cars is offset by the reduced ability to control the vehicle - in other words, I'm curious what the per-capita crash rates are in SUVs compared to normal cars.

[Spooky23]

I think a lot of this is details lost in the stats. Every car is heavier due to safety standards. A 2024 Civic is bigger than a 1994 Accord.

The pickups are less safe for all stakeholders and are a dominant category. They have poor safety features, handle poorly and have comically bad visibility.

That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death. 2000lb or 8000lb car, if you get hit at 45mph, you’re dead. Velocity is exponentially more important than mass.

[coredog64]

Even cars are getting comically bad visibility. While there might be a big piece of glass bonded to the rear quarter, it’s got a huge black painted border on the outside and frit on the inside. Then there’s fat plastic trim that obscures driver sight lines from what is left.

NHTSA would be better off at having a visibility requirement for 5th and 95th percentile men/women. I’d allow cameras to play a part, but if used, everything in the system has to be warrantied for 10 years/100k miles (similar to emissions equipment).

[seoulmetro]

Yeah it's gone under the radar pretty much, but going from an early 80s car in the 2010s to a new car, it was like I was driving blind for half the time but reversing cameras are great (too bad they also cause problems where we can't really see everything).

Driving in older cars is way easier apart from power steering. The rest are luxuries like air con, entertainment. Even cabin space in older cars was vastly larger than new cars and the exteriors of new cars are vastly larger now than before.. thanks (but no thanks) to safety measures.

[milch]

> That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death

I don't think they need enforcement as much as traffic calming features. It simply shouldn't be possible to speed as much as people do... I live between a middle school, a special ed school and a bus stop, on a 30mph road which is 43ft wide. Basically this is what it looks like: https://streetmix.net/-/2685748 and this is probably what it should look like to reduce average speeds: https://streetmix.net/-/2685753. There are children walking and biking along this road all day. I frequently see people speeding, easily going 40, 50 even 60mph. Note that this isn't a very high traffic road either, I just looked up the average traffic counts and it gets 8-12k of vehicles in both directions PER DAY, so traffic calming would barely have an impact. If anything it might drive more people to take the highway or one of the other high-speed roads nearby instead, which would be a good thing too.

The other problem is people coming out of cross streets, and immediately pulling forward as much as possible without looking. You have a kid crossing the street who maybe doesn't know any better, or is distracted because they are on their phone or chatting with their friends, and you got a perfect recipe for an "accident" right there ... I've also watched close calls like that so many times in this area. You simply can't put a cop on every corner to do enforcement of that - maybe some automated camera systems would do it, but so does daylighting the intersections like they do in Hoboken.

And the other problem is that any time you do something that even vaguely could cause an increase in driving time, people will rage. I've seen public comment sessions where the planners literally showed the data that adding a bike lane wouldn't increase travel times during peak and actually decrease traffic and people were like "well, I don't believe it, my commute is going to slow down for sure". Same with even simpler things like speed cameras ("cash grab"), heck even increased police activity (also "cash grab"). You can show data that it will save people's lives, even children's lives, and people (even on HN) will say "but the economy... and efficiency...".

[hermitcrab]

>For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger,

Especially if they have raised it, which seems very common in places like Florida.

[AdrianB1]

Honestly, I don't think the weight of the car matters too much in an accident with a bicycle or pedestrian. I was hit a few times by cars at low speed (10-20 km/h) while riding my motorcycle and the weight of the car did not matter, when I was rear ended if the car was 20% (300 kg) lighter it would still be 4 times the mass of (me + bike), so the impact would be similar. A car versus a pedestrian is almost identical if the car is 1000 kg or 2000 kg.

[berikv]

Not saying you are wrong, but this is anecdotal. I’d rather try to interpret crash statistics than use my own experience.

[roughly]

Yeah, I think the primary difference is the geometry - the SUVs and trucks present an almost flat surface and cause much more head and neck trauma - and in the visibility and controllability of the vehicle.