The government can no longer allow the auto industry to treat walkers and bikers like collateral damage.
About the author: Angie Schmitt is a freelance journalist based in Cleveland. She is working on a book on the pedestrian-safety crisis in the United States. After a decade of steady increases, the newest Ford F-250—part of Ford’s F-Series of pickups, the No.1 selling vehicle model in America—measures some 55 inches tall at the hood. That’s “as tall as the roof of some sedans,” a Consumer Reports writer remarked in a recent analysis examining the mega-truck trend. This height would easily render someone in a wheelchair, or a child, totally invisible at close range. If I, a tallish woman at 5 foot 6, were hit by a new F-250, I would be struck above the chest. The face, head, neck: These are not great places to suffer a forceful blow—like the kind that an up-to-7,500-pound F-250 can deliver. Americans have traded sedans for crossovers and SUVs for full-size pickups with total abandon over the past decade. To the extent that we think at all critically about the sheer bulk of the vehicles we drive, we’re usually motivated by environmental concerns. One common notion—though auto-safety experts will say it’s not that simple—is that it’s safer to get around in what’s basically a tank. But those benefits, exaggerated as they may be, are only for people inside the vehicle. People outside —pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchair users—are in more peril. European and Japanese regulators have for many years imposed pedestrian-safety standards on automakers, leading to innovations like the active hood (a little airbag-type of cushioning for a car’s hood). American regulators, however, have been slow to think beyond the driver’s seat. This helps explain why passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities.
