Swimming with Leviathans


By Steve Price

Automobiles are taking up more and more space on our local streets—they're getting bigger and heavier. Light trucks, which include SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks, were 33% of the new vehicle market in 1990; they're now 78%. Average horsepower for light-duty vehicles grew by 85% between 1975 and 2021. This targets the most dangerous vehicle users, young men. 

The top-selling vehicle in America is the Ford F-Series pickup. Compare that with the modest-sized best selling car in Europe, the Peugeot 208. (See the comparison in the graphic above from carsized.com.) For older communities like El Cerrito and the Richmond Annex, where street space is not growing, this car bloat puts more and more squeeze on bicycle riders and makes crossing streets for pedestrians more dangerous. As cars get electrified, they will get heavier, which means that they will be deadlier at lower speeds.

The taller the front end of a vehicle, the more deadly it is. Low front ends, as typical in the sedans of the past, would hit pedestrians in the legs. The aggressive-looking high front ends of popular SUVs and pickups hit pedestrians in the torso. A study of almost 18,000 pedestrian crashes done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that "pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile." 

Higher front ends pose a greater threat of full-body trauma to pedestrians.
Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

The massive vehicle designs are intended to convey malevolence. Karan Moorjani (seen with the truck below), the designer of the GMC Sierra HD pickup truck, told “Muscle Cars and Trucks” magazine, "We spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feeling." He said that he designed it to look like "a massive fist moving through the air."

The GMC Sierra pickup truck doesn’t hit pedestrians in the legs.
It hits them in their internal organs. Photo: Muscle Cars and Trucks magazine.

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