Smaller Vehicles, Safer Pedestrians
During the pandemic, many of us became reintroduced to an outdoors we had been neglecting. We hauled our bikes out of the garage and dusted off our running shoes and were reminded that — no matter how tumultuous things are — the outside always offers a bit of solace.
Aside from the danger of massive vehicles.
The vast majority of American cities and suburbs are designed around the movement of cars, not around the movement of people, and so pedestrians have always been at higher risk. Walk around any major city, and you’ll often find broken or missing sidewalks leading to difficult-to-find crosswalks, then you’ll have to hope distracted and speeding drivers yield when you cross the street. In too many cases, they don’t: last year, 6,721 pedestrians were killed by vehicles. To put this in context, in 2020, one person was killed every 78 minutes while walking.
Pedestrians are now less likely to survive being hit by a car, primarily due to the sheer size and weight of modern vehicles. Last month, Consumer Reports published a new analysis that found, “…the hood height of passenger trucks has increased by an average of at least 11 percent since 2000 and that new pickups grew 24 percent heavier on average from 2000 to 2018.” They also found that, on some heavy-duty trucks, “the front edge of the hood is now 55 inches or more off the ground — as tall as the roof of some sedans.” The result of this is that adults can be hidden by the truck itself when they’re standing directly in front of it. Children can’t be seen unless they’re ten feet away from the front of the vehicle.
Source: Consumer Reports
Vehicle safety ratings focus on occupant protection, which neglects the safety of others on the road and incentivizes the introduction of increasingly larger vehicles. In this arms race for safety, nobody wins. America’s top-selling truck weighs over 4,000 pounds empty, and is nearly 18 feet long and 8 feet wide. SUVs and trucks are more than twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as sedans. Even if the truck is driving at a slower speed, a pedestrian has a slim chance of surviving a collision.
That’s why at Nuro, we built our bots to be significantly narrower and lighter than typical vehicles, and they were designed with a pedestrian-protecting front end to reduce potential harm. This rethinking of vehicle design to produce smaller, lighter vehicles is fundamental to addressing pedestrian fatalities. In fact, according to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), for every mile of driving replaced by a zero-occupant design vehicle, the risk of fatality or injury can be reduced by approximately 60%.
Since Nuro’s bots are smaller than nearly all cars on the road, there is more space on the street for cyclists. And because our bots don’t transport people, they prioritize the safety of pedestrians, animals, and cyclists over the goods carried inside the bot.
The end result of incorporating more zero-occupant vehicles into our cities means greater safety and a higher quality of life. It means fewer people need to use their cars to run errands and more people feel safer walking and biking through their communities. This reimagined vehicle design is key to creating an equitable future in which cities once again serve their human residents instead of catering to the cars that dominate the roads.
