Drive that sports utility vehicle and improve road safety

So-called safety and consumer advocates have long preached that sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and light trucks are roadway menaces. Pity the fate of the driver of a lighter-weight, conventional vehicle unfortunate enough to tangle with one.

But two professors of economics at Rutgers University in the U.S.A. recently published a detailed study of light-truck and SUV accidents from 1994 to 1997. Douglas Coate and James Vander-Hoff found that the larger, heavier vehicles are safer for occupants in single-car crashes and multi-car accidents.

The overall point they make is simple, but often overlooked. While a collision between two light cars might kill everyone in both vehicles, passengers riding in a truck involved in a car-truck crash are more likely to survive – thus, a net saving in lives.

During the years covered by the study, registrations of light trucks and SUVs increased by 5 percent – but single-vehicle fatalities per driver decreased 7.5 percent and multiple-vehicle fatalities per driver dipped by 2 percent.

Overall, the U.S. has experienced a 50 percent decline in traffic fatalities per vehicle over the past two decades, just when light-truck registrations were doubling.

The authors of the study statistically controlled for other factors which were improving highway safety over the period.

They concluded that the "increased safety to occupants of light trucks outweighs potential increases in fatalities to occupants of other vehicles."

Source: Brock Yates (Car and Driver magazine), SUVs Mean Safer Roads, Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2001.

For text (WSJ subscribers)

http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve/text/wsjie/data/SB98642701798677 5024.htm

For more on Vehicle Safety http://www.ncpa.org/pd/regulat/reg-2.html