Safety Group Walks Back Advice to Let Risky Teens Drive Megacars - Improving their personal safety while endangering everyone else more | Streetsblog USA

Headlines are quick hits from media outlets from Missouri and around the world. Follow the headline link for the full story. The source of this headline says:

A top safety organization is recommending that parents put their teen drivers in larger cars that are safer for occupants but more lethal for pedestrians and cyclists — and sparking a backlash about why it seems to be enlisting the youngest drivers in the SUV arms race rather than demanding that cars be made smaller and safer for everyone.

In honor of Teen Driver Safety Week, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently revisited its August study about the role of vehicle design in protecting the youngest motorists on our roads, which found that U.S. teens “are the riskiest drivers,” but “drive the least-safe vehicles” — i.e. smaller cars.

Those cars, though, are actually among the safest on the road … for people who walk and roll. Studies have long shown that megacars are two to three times more likely than a sedan to kill a walker in the event of a crash, and today’s hulking SUVs are a staggering eight times more likely to kill a child who isn’t behind the wheel.

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Safety Group Walks Back Advice to Let Risky Teens Drive Megacars - Improving their personal safety while endangering everyone else more | Streetsblog USA

MoBikeFed comment: One of the principles of the Vision Zero approach is that, to eliminate deaths and serious injuries caused by motor vehicles, it is vital to take a *safe systems approach* to change.

This is the same type of the approach industries like the airlines have taken - and it is the approach that has helped make airline safety as good as it is today. The idea is that you change the system so that an individual making a mistake or a bad decision does not have the type of serious consequences it does now.

And you change the system so that it is less likely that people make serious mistakes in the first place.

A good example of this is reducing speed limits within populated areas and places where motor vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists meet. The consequences of a driving mistake at 20 mph are far, far lower than the same mistake made at 60 mph. And if the driver (or pedestrian or cyclist) DOES make a mistake, it is far easier to recover from it in an area where the speed limit is low.

The same principle applies to the size of the motor vehicle. If all vehicles are huge, heavy behemoths with limited sight lines - all in the service of carrying one person - that means that mistakes are easier to make and far more costly when they do happen.

Reducing or eliminating the "my-vehicle-is-larger-and-taller-and-heavier-than-yours" arms race makes our roadways safer for everyone - because the system has been changed in a way the naturally reduces driving mistakes and the consequences of mistakes when they do happen.

See https://visionzerochallenge.org/vision-zero?locale=en