Free Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page B

not wearing a seat belt. The West led seat belt use in 2014 with 95 percent of car occupants buckling up. The South was next, matching the national average of 87 percent, while the Northeast and Midwest trailed with 83 percent of car occupants using their seat belts. 26
    Men are 10 percent less likely to wear their seat belts than women, and rural residents are 10 percent less likely to buckle up than their urban counterparts.
    S hortly before midnight, a married couple and their three-year-old daughter were all killed in Lonoke, Arkansas, when their Mercury sedan skidded and screeched off the road and into a tree after being rear-ended by a much heavier SUV. Glenna Michelle Wright, thirty-eight, who had been driving; her husband, Aundrey “Bucky” Wright Sr.; and their daughter Aunaysia Wright, all died at the scene, about forty miles away from their home in Stuttgart, Arkansas. The driver of the Mercury Mountaineer SUV was uninjured.
    This mismatched weights and sizes of the two vehicles—one of several such mismatch crashes this day—illustrates a deadly trend that emerged in the early nineties in the U.S. After two decades of steadily dropping traffic fatalities on America’s streets and roads, the numbers started climbing again. The shift coincided with another change: the rapid rise in popularity of a new type of passenger car—the sport-utility vehicle, a bigger, heaviercar that was actually classified as a light truck (the same classification as a pickup truck).
    The confusing part of this: heavier cars are supposed to be safer, not more dangerous, yet traffic deaths were going up.
    Researchers soon figured out what was going on: vehicle owners were, according to University of California, San Diego, economist Michelle J. White, “running an ‘arms race’ on American roads by buying increasingly large vehicles.” 27
    The SUVs that had become so popular at the time were, in fact, safer for drivers and passengers inside them, White reported in a 2004 paper. She found SUV occupants were 29 percent less likely to be seriously injured in a collision with a smaller car, irrespective of who was at fault in a collision. However, the reverse showed the high cost of that increased safety: the small car occupants were 42 percent more likely to be seriously injured in the same crash. Again, it didn’t matter who was at fault. The occupants of the lighter vehicle were more likely to be toast.
    And when all the various types of cars and traffic collisions were taken into consideration, White found that for every crash death avoided inside an SUV or light truck, there were 4.3 additional collisions that took the lives of car occupants, pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. The supposedly safer SUVs were, in fact, “extremely deadly,” White concluded.
    She calculated that the safety benefit of replacing light trucks and SUVs with conventionally sized and weighted passenger cars would be “similar in magnitude to the benefit of seat belts.”
    The simple bottom line of this: heavier cars make most people more likely to die. If we all drove lighter cars, we’d all be much safer.
    But the popularity of SUVs and the newer, similar class of vehicles known as “crossovers” has continued to rise, although some newer models do not run quite as huge as the original versions. In2014, for the first time, SUVs and crossovers took a larger share of the American car market than sedans. Cars of all kinds have grown heavier as well in the last forty years: the original Honda Civic, a compact car, debuted in 1973 at 1,500 pounds but now weighs in at more than 2,800 pounds.
    Expanding on White’s work, a more detailed study out of Berkeley looking at the effect of vehicle weight on safety found that for every additional 1,000 pounds in a vehicle’s weight, it raises the probability of a death in any other vehicle in a collision by 47 percent. 28 The added cost to