\n<\/p>\n
26-inch hood<\/p>\n
2002 Toyota Corolla<\/p>\n
36 inches<\/p>\n
2014 Ford Escape<\/p>\n
47 inches<\/p>\n
2022 Chevrolet Silverado<\/p>\n
In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads were traditional cars like sedans. Their hoods were low to the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads were traditional cars like sedans. Their hoods were low to the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n By the 2010s, larger vehicles like compact S.U.V.s had eclipsed cars.<\/span><\/p>\n By the 2010s, larger vehicles like compact S.U.V.s had eclipsed cars.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks dominate the roads. Many are bigger than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks dominate the roads. Many are bigger than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n And far deadlier, a New York Times investigation found. <\/span><\/p>\n And far deadlier, a New York Times investigation found. <\/span><\/p>\n They are killing thousands of pedestrians who otherwise might have survived.<\/span><\/p>\n They are killing thousands of pedestrians who otherwise might have survived.<\/span><\/p>\n Illustrations by Todd M. Detwiler<\/span><\/p>\n For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75 percent.<\/p>\n Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety<\/span> The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven\u2019t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don\u2019t tell the whole story.<\/p>\n Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.<\/p>\n After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and S.U.V.s is an important factor.<\/p>\n Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.<\/p>\n There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,\u201d said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash tests for us. \u201cBefore the driver knows what\u2019s happened, the pedestrian\u2019s head is under the wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n More vehicles than ever have hoods that exceed the average American\u2019s center of gravity, which is generally around the belly button.<\/p>\n The hood of an average passenger vehicle today is about three feet high. Anyone shorter than 5-foot-6 \u2014 about half of American adults \u2014 would frequently be rammed to the pavement. So would most children.<\/p>\n An average U.S. manAn average U.S. womanA person, who is 4-foot4-foot-14-foot-24-foot-34-foot-44-foot-54-foot-64-foot-74-foot-84-foot-94-foot-104-foot-115-foot5-foot-15-foot-25-foot-35-foot-45-foot-55-foot-65-foot-75-foot-85-foot-95-foot-105-foot-116-foot6-foot-16-foot-26-foot-36-foot-46-foot-56-foot-66-foot-76-foot-86-foot-96-foot-106-foot-117-foot7-foot-17-foot-27-foot-37-foot-47-foot-57-foot-6, is likely to be knocked down by about XX percent<\/strong> of vehicles today.
Not only are the high hoods on larger vehicles more lethal, but their bulkier frames can also block drivers\u2019 views of pedestrians.<\/p>\n To analyze how these blind zones have changed, we used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sightlines in four of the most common pickups today \u2014 the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma \u2014 with their counterparts from the 1990s or early 2000s.<\/p>\n The Silverado\u2019s blind zones have nearly doubled.<\/p>\n The Sierra\u2019s and the Tacoma\u2019s grew by about 60 percent.<\/p>\n The smallest increase was the F-150\u2019s. Its blind zones grew by about 25 percent.<\/p>\n Our overall findings match what we found in court records and heard from dozens of experts who reconstruct crashes for police and lawyers.<\/p>\n One morning last year, Charlene McAlister, 76, set out for work at a child care center in Colorado Springs. \u201cSee you tonight,\u201d she called to her daughter as she left their home.<\/p>\n As Ms. McAlister was crossing the street, a Ram 1500 TRX \u2014 a pickup marketed for its off-road capabilities and fierce-looking design \u2014 was turning left.<\/p>\n Ms. McAlister was not quite five feet tall. The pickup\u2019s hood was at least four feet high. It hit her, throwing her to the pavement.<\/p>\n The driver later said he hadn\u2019t seen Ms. McAlister, according to court records. They show that the truck\u2019s large hood and side mirrors may have impeded his view.<\/p>\n When Ms. McAlister\u2019s daughter, Serena, arrived at the scene, she saw her mother\u2019s hedgehog-themed backpack and red purse in the road, spattered with blood. Emergency workers had draped a white sheet over her body.<\/p>\n Serena McAlister at the intersection where her 76-year-old mother was struck by a pickup truck.<\/span> Rachel Woolf for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n Charlene McAlister was hit as the truck turned left.<\/span> Rachel Woolf for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n The size of vehicles is far from the only reason that more pedestrians are dying, according to independent experts and industry officials.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile vehicle safety is critical, blaming larger vehicles for pedestrian deaths overlooks systemic issues\u201d including the design of roads, said Mike Levine, a spokesman for Ford.<\/p>\n Automakers say that new technology designed to detect and avoid pedestrians \u2014 including systems that automatically apply the brakes \u2014 would dramatically improve safety. For example, Bill Grotz, a spokesman for General Motors, pointed to a recent study that found that G.M. vehicles with so-called front pedestrian braking reduced the frequency of injuries by 35 percent.<\/p>\n The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pinning its hopes on automated collision-avoidance systems. Such technologies \u201care actively reducing the occurrence of these crashes and fundamentally shifting the risk landscape,\u201d said Sean Rushton, an agency spokesman. \u201cWe view these technologies as the cornerstone of future mitigation strategies.\u201d<\/p>\n But many experts say that technology is not a perfect substitute for drivers being able to view their surroundings directly. And tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which studies ways to make driving less dangerous, have shown that many large vehicles\u2019 automatic braking systems do not consistently prevent collisions.<\/p>\n The owner\u2019s manuals for some of the most popular vehicles caution that safety technology can fail in a variety of common situations: in bad weather; at high speeds; if there are shadows on the road or its surface is uneven; or if a pedestrian is running, pushing a stroller, not standing upright or the size of a small child.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s S.U.V.s and pickups promise more: more seats, more space, more safety, more power, more domination, more prestige.<\/p>\n And, for automakers, more money.<\/p>\n They are the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry\u2019s profits, said Mark Wakefield, an industry expert at the consulting firm AlixPartners. For nearly a decade, Ford and G.M. have said in their annual reports that their earnings depend on larger S.U.V.s and pickups.<\/p>\n The cost of making bigger vehicles is usually not much higher than it is for cars, because they are often built in automakers\u2019 most efficient factories and the extra raw materials are relatively cheap.<\/p>\n Yet customers are willing to pay much more for them. The average sticker price for a full-size pickup is $70,000, double that of a sedan, according to Cox Automotive. (Some people pay more to soup up their trucks with \u201clift kits\u201d that raise their suspensions.)<\/p>\n It is no coincidence that automakers have dramatically scaled back their production of sedans and other passenger cars in the United States. Ford, for example, went from selling more than a million in 2017 to fewer than 100,000 five years later.<\/p>\n What used to be utilitarian vehicles for construction workers are now marketed to the American masses, with messages tailored to specific audiences.<\/p>\n One common pitch centers on machismo. Automakers trumpet how some of their trucks have an \u201caggressive appearance\u201d or a \u201cpiercing glare.\u201d<\/p>\n Chevrolet Silverados from 1998 and 2021.<\/span> <\/p>\n Other approaches emphasize the perceived safety of being the biggest vehicle around. \u201cYou\u2019re the king of the road,\u201d said Frank Hanley, a director at the automotive research firm JD Power.<\/p>\n At Ford, Nicole Gayney\u2019s job was to identify specific social and psychological groups to target.<\/p>\n One was men who hoped to be seen as the neighborhood\u2019s hero, keeping everyone safe, said Dr. Gayney, who left Ford in 2022. Another group was women who viewed a roomy S.U.V. as a way to be the community\u2019s caregiver, taking the soccer team out for ice cream.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re kind of in this American mind-set that bigger is better,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In 2009, after a spate of fatal incidents in which drivers were crushed in rollovers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required roofs to be strong enough to support three times the weight of a vehicle. Many automakers responded by installing thicker A-pillars.<\/p>\n James Forbes, who was a longtime engineering manager at Ford, said that after the company began installing the fatter A-pillars, he and his colleagues noticed that they were reducing drivers\u2019 visibility.<\/p>\n The drivers were safer, but pedestrians were in greater peril. \u201cWe were very much biasing safety toward the owner of the vehicle,\u201d Mr. Forbes said.<\/p>\n Those potential dangers began attracting attention, with articles in the Detroit Free Press and Consumer Reports.<\/p>\n By 2022, the lack of visibility in large vehicles had become a concern for researchers at the Transportation Department\u2019s Volpe Center, whose mission is to identify and address problems in the transportation system.<\/p>\n That November, the researchers met with leaders at the department and N.H.T.S.A. They delivered a stark message: Large vehicles, with their big blind zones, were increasingly deadly. They were killing hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists every year and injuring thousands more, the researchers estimated, according to attendees and meeting materials we reviewed.<\/p>\n The researchers hoped that their warning would spur regulators to consider how to address the problem.<\/p>\n But a senior N.H.T.S.A. official disputed the data and argued that new pedestrian-sensing technologies were already improving safety.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was just zero acknowledgement of the problem,\u201d said Angie Byrne, a former Volpe Center employee who was involved with the research and attended the meeting.<\/p>\n The meeting ended with no plan for action.<\/p>\n The U.S. government has paid scant attention to how the size of vehicles affects the safety of pedestrians.<\/p>\n Federal regulators don\u2019t collect much data about the heights of vehicles\u2019 hoods. But we found one service that does: Expert AutoStats.<\/p>\n Our analysis shows a radical change in the makeup of American vehicles over the past two decades.<\/p>\n Not only have many drivers abandoned traditional cars in favor of S.U.V.s and pickups. But millions have flocked to vehicles with hoods that are more than 50 inches tall \u2014 like the Ford F-250 and Chevrolet Silverado 2500 \u2014 whose ranks have increased more than five-fold since 2002.<\/p>\n Source: A New York Times analysis of registration data from S&P Global and vehicle dimension data from Expert AutoStats.<\/span> <\/p>\n To understand how a vehicle\u2019s size affects a crash\u2019s lethality, we built a statistical model. Our goal was to estimate how many fewer pedestrians, if any, would have died in a world in which vehicles had remained roughly the same size since 2002.<\/p>\n We started with a federal database that contains a nationally representative sample of crashes reported to the police from 2016 to 2024. We narrowed that down to those involving a single vehicle and a single pedestrian. And we added the data on hood heights, which wasn\u2019t included in the federal database.<\/p>\n Our model then analyzed the degree to which different factors \u2014 such as hood height, weather conditions, time of day and whether alcohol was involved \u2014 affected whether pedestrians died.<\/p>\n Crashes are complex events, and the data we fed into our model doesn\u2019t capture everything about each incident. And, of course, there is no way to definitively say what would have happened in an alternate reality where vehicles had not continued to grow larger.<\/p>\n But based on the best available data, the model reached a sobering estimate: The shift toward vehicles with higher hoods caused about 3,000 deaths from 2016 to 2024.<\/p>\n The estimate is conservative in many ways.<\/p>\n For example, it doesn\u2019t include collisions that occur in places like parking lots, driveways or private roads, which are not part of the federal database. Hundreds of pedestrians a year are estimated to die in such crashes, a number that has been increasing.<\/p>\n Only in the past several years have researchers started exploring whether and how larger vehicles threaten pedestrians.<\/p>\n The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, for example, found last year that vehicles with larger blind zones were substantially more likely to hit pedestrians when turning left.<\/p>\n One evening in October 2016, Margaret Lacey, a 57-year-old nurse, was taking her dog for a walk in Jefferson County, Colo.<\/p>\n She was in a crosswalk as Ernest Martinez, a 50-year-old construction manager, was turning left in his Ford Excursion. He later said he hadn\u2019t seen Ms. Lacey until his S.U.V. was nearly upon her. His view had been blocked by the A-pillar, a crash reconstructionist found.<\/p>\n He slammed the brakes, but he still hit her.<\/p>\n The hood of his 2002 Excursion \u2014 large for its time but common by today\u2019s standards \u2014 was nearly four feet tall. It came up to Ms. Lacey\u2019s chest. The impact sent her flying. Her head smashed into the pavement.<\/p>\n Margaret Lacey was hit by an S.U.V. in a crosswalk in 2016.<\/span> Lucy Garrett for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n When Ms. Lacey\u2019s sister, Betty, learned of her death, she flew to the United States from Ireland.<\/span> Lucy Garrett for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n Mr. Martinez leapt out of his vehicle and knelt by her side. \u201cI prayed with her,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI just held her hand and watched her go.\u201d Her dog also died.<\/p>\n When Ms. Lacey\u2019s sister, Betty, learned of her death, she flew to the United States from Ireland. She wanted an open casket, following her family tradition. But her sister\u2019s head was grievously misshapen. \u201cThe only part that looked like Margaret was her hands,\u201d Betty said.<\/p>\n The coffin was closed. Her funeral was held at a Catholic chapel in Denver, and Mr. Martinez was among the mourners. \u201cMay God bless you all, and I pray that you all will find peace,\u201d he wrote in the condolence book.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n Rachel Woolf for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n Methodology<\/p>\n We used four main datasets to conduct our analysis: crash data from N.H.T.S.A.\u2019s Crash Report Sampling System (C.R.S.S.) from 2016 to 2024, the most recent year available; N.H.T.S.A.\u2019s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (F.A.R.S.); vehicle measurements from Expert AutoStats; and registration information from S&P Global from 2002 to 2024. The datasets characterized vehicle models differently, so we standardized the descriptions. Part of that involved using an A.I. model. We reviewed thousands of matches and found no errors among them.<\/p>\n To estimate the effect of hood height on a vehicle\u2019s lethality, we narrowed the C.R.S.S. data to single-pedestrian, single-vehicle crashes. We excluded motorcycles and commercial trucks, as well as collisions in which the vehicle was moving backward. That left us with about 6,000 incidents.<\/p>\n Then we ran what\u2019s known as a logistic regression. We took the following crash conditions into account: speed limit, bad weather, lighting, alcohol involvement, crash year, and vehicle year and whether the crash occurred in an urban area. We also accounted for the sex and age of the pedestrian and the driver. We included only crashes in which all these variables were available and accounted for C.R.S.S.\u2019s sampling method.<\/p>\n We found hood height to be a statistically significant (p-value = 0.003) predictor of pedestrian death in a crash. The estimated magnitude of this effect is a 2.8 percent increase in the odds of a pedestrian fatality for every one-inch increase in hood height.<\/p>\n We also considered alternative models that included reported crash speed, hood angle and hood length. In all variants, hood height remained a statistically significant predictor of deadliness. Hood height had a lower effect in our model than in most variants, indicating that our estimates may be conservative.<\/p>\n We used our model to estimate the number of pedestrian deaths that would have occurred under two counterfactual scenarios.<\/p>\n In the first scenario, we decreased the hood height of each vehicle in our dataset by three inches, equal to the increase of the average hood height since 2002. We computed how much this change would reduce the predicted probability of a pedestrian death for each crash. We multiplied the yearly average reduction, which was about 7 percent for all years, by the total number of pedestrian fatalities in the F.A.R.S. dataset, which provides a national census of fatal crashes. As with the C.R.S.S. dataset, we also filtered to single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crashes with non-commercial vehicles in the F.A.R.S. dataset. This resulted in a range of 306 to 377 lives saved, or 3,077 in total from 2016 to 2024.<\/p>\n In the second scenario, we took a random sample of hood heights from 2002 and applied them to more recent crashes in our database. Across 10,000 simulations, this reduced the probability of pedestrian death by about 5 percent to 7 percent, depending on the year. That amounted to 222 to 361 lives saved each year, or a total of 2,624.<\/p>\n To measure the differences in visibility among pickup trucks, we used an Artec Leo structured light scanner to create three-dimensional models of the trucks.<\/p>\n We scanned four of the most popular pickup models: Silverado, F-150, Sierra and Tacoma. We scanned one of each model from the 1990s or early 2000s and one from the modern-day fleet. Before scanning, we adjusted the driver\u2019s seat to the middlemost position.<\/p>\n Next, we used a technique called aperture projection to calculate how much space was visible through each window. We used these figures to determine the size and shape of the blind zones in front and to the sides of the driver, up to 50 feet.<\/p>\n We ran these calculations twice for each vehicle: from the perspective of a 5-foot-11 driver and from that of a 5-foot-6 driver. The differences were the same or smaller for the taller driver, so we used those results to be conservative.<\/p>\n We estimated the percentage of Americans under 5-foot-6 based on an analysis by Matthew Parkinson of Pennsylvania State University. The 3D Silverado that appears in the article was created with the help of Kevin Shain from Laser Design.<\/p>\n We consulted with a number of industry experts to develop and check our methodology, including Justin Tyndall from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and Steve Summerskill at Loughborough University in England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 26-inch hood 2002 Toyota Corolla 36 inches 2014 Ford Escape 47 inches 2022 Chevrolet Silverado In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads were traditional cars like sedans. Their hoods were low to the ground. In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[151,1870,313,24826,14650],"class_list":{"0":"post-50555","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-deadly","9":"tag-giant","10":"tag-rise","11":"tag-s-u-v-s","12":"tag-trucks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\tIn 2002, that number would have been XX percent<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\u2018King of the Road\u2019<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
An Unintended Consequence<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
The Closed Casket<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Percent of vehicles on the road by hood height<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n