Ban SUVs - Save Lives and Help Stop the Climate Crisis
SUVs are dangerous especially to people walking, cycling, and rolling and a leading cause of the climate crisis.
A report from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that found that:
A SUV or pickup crashing into a person walking is 2 to 3 times more likely to kill them than a passenger car.
SUVs crashes were a leading cause of the skyrocketing deaths of people walking, which increased 46% between 2009 and 2018, according to an investigation by The Detroit Free Press and USA Today.
According to Growing preference for SUVs challenges emissions reductions in passenger car market based on an analysis published World Energy Outlook:
SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions since 2010 after the power sector, but ahead of heavy industry as well as trucks and aviation.
Bigger and heavier cars, like SUVs, are harder to electrify. Their rising demand may slow down the development of clean and efficient car fleets.
A Report on Toronto, Vancouver traffic reveals outsized health risks posed by trucks and SUVs states:
While pollutants from tailpipe exhaust have declined as cars have become cleaner, those emissions have been overtaken by other sources of traffic pollution, including fine particles and metal dust from increased wear on brakes and tires, a trend researchers say matches the growing prevalence of heavier consumer vehicles such as SUVs.
A study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that:
SUVs Are 28 Percent More Likely To Kill Other Drivers In A Crash
The auto industry is failing to protect people's health and safety and the environment. As a result, folks around the world are demanding that governments take serious action including the banning of SUVs especially in communities where there are lots of people around. Time for Canada to take serious action on the climate and road fatality crisis by banning SUVs.
Photograph: Yann Schreiber/AFP/Getty Images via 'A deadly problem': should we ban SUVs from our cities?
We call on the federal government to ban the sale of SUVs and large pickup trucks until and unless safety and environmentally problems are addressed. Specially, government regulations must mandate:
- safer lower front end designs and other measures eliminating the risk people of walking, cycling, rolling, or occupying other vehicles being killed or seriously injured
- significantly lighter vehicles decreasing manufacturing and operating GHG emissions enough to address the climate emergency; decreasing harmful tire and brake dust emissions; and enabling rapid fleet electrification
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Banning them seem to be the most reasonable and effective way to make the streets safer and reduce energy use.
Depending on the year and the source, the US is somewhere between 55 – 75 in road safety worldwide, usually somewhere near Egypt and Mauritius. More than twice as many kids die on US roads than from all pediatric cancers combined.
I could name stat after stat, but the headline is that the US is uniquely horrible at road safety in general and absolutely rock bottom worst at pedestrian and cyclist safety in particular. Our DOTs and regulators explicitly prioritize the throughput and storage of cars over human life in everything they do.
One step would be to start banning vehicles like the Tesla Cybertruck which are almost guaranteed to end or catastrophically injure any person they hit. The combination of weight, speed, shape and stiffness of these vehicles is a recipe for injury and death.
The only thing standing between this car and thousands of deaths is regulatory action. These deaths are not going to go away on their own.
Regards,
Isabella Chu