Concerning facts about SUVs need clarifying
I READ with interest the article (Cars are getting too big for their parking spaces) about the impact of large vehicles/cars such as SUVs on our lives. While there are worries about the size of parking spaces, there are much more concerning facts about SUVs that need to be made clear. The deaths caused by large SUVs (such as a Land Rover Discovery or Toyota Land Cruiser) in the United States has been studied at length. For example, a research article published in the Journal of Safety Research (full citation follows*), studying 23,090 accidents over three years, found that:
n Children are eight times more likely to die when struck by a SUV compared to children struck by a passenger car.
n Across these 23,090 accidents SUVs struck 14.7% of the pedestrians and pedal cyclists studied, but were involved in 25.4% of the fatalities.
n Passenger cars are under-represented in fatal pedestrian and pedal cyclist fatalities.
A further concern is the lack of visibility for SUV drivers – put simply, the height of the SUV means that a small child standing in front of or behind an SUV does not reach the height to be seen above the bonnet or the back window. The result is that there is evidence that the sheer size and poor visibility of SUVs make it harder for their drivers to see children. Children comprise 21% of all pedestrian and cyclist crash victims, but they comprise 26.1% of cases involving SUVs as noted in the study cited above.
As the sales of SUVs in the USA increased their market share by a factor of six between 2010 and 2019, the number of fatalities of children increased. The US Highway Safety Association showed that deaths caused by SUVs grew 76% between 2011 and 2020, while deaths caused by passenger cars grew 36%.
Our narrow roads mean that cars, cyclists, tractors, buses, vans, and pedestrians (and their dogs) are often squeezed into situations that are, frankly, dangerous – we must not be blind to the risks we, and especially our children, face on our shared roads and car parks.
KEVIN BALES
*Mickey Edwards, Daniel Leonard, ‘Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedalcyclist injury severity’, Journal of Safety Research, volume 82, 2022, Pages 275-282, ISSN 0022-4375, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.06.005.