Large trucks (including SUVs) are marketed towards non-commercial customers in some countries (esp. the US). These vehicles have become more numerous over the recent years and a growth in size of average vehicles has been well documented. These vehicles are designed in a way that increases the likelihood of killing and maiming vulnerable road users: pedestrians, bicyclists, and even those who drive in small cars. These large trucks have proportionally larger kinetic energy to dissipate in a collision (vastly dominating that of pedestrians and cyclists), the vehicles can drive over people with little notice to the drivers, and the large, high vehicle creates large blindspots that are detrimental to pedestrians even of adult height. There are both scientific articles and pop media sources highlighting this issue over the last decade or so, yet the problem seems to grow.
These vehicle are designed in a way that is detrimental to public health. Some things that we could probably contribute to this conversation:
Design guidelines for vehicles to minimize risk to vulnerable road users. We should be able to quantify the risk to some degree based on blindspot locations and size, vehicle geometry, vehicle protrusions, ability to squish people, torque/power, etc.
Vulnerable user danger ratings of existing vehicles based on some metric that quantifies the various.
Make use of crash data to tie injury to specific design aspects of the vehicles involved.
Evaluate different designed elements of the vehicle for danger.
Design vehicles optimal for minimizing risk to vulnerable road users (given some reasonable constraints, i.e. vehicle can't just be a slow moving soft bubble).
Evaluation of crash avoidance systems and their relative efficacy to simply reducing vehicle size and danger.
Costs to said drivers of large vehicles if they are banned. What are the negatives of restricting these vehicle types?
Prior Art
An extensive review of the existing work on this topic might reveal some new areas to focus research on, as it seems there is work related to the ideas written above.
Description
Large trucks (including SUVs) are marketed towards non-commercial customers in some countries (esp. the US). These vehicles have become more numerous over the recent years and a growth in size of average vehicles has been well documented. These vehicles are designed in a way that increases the likelihood of killing and maiming vulnerable road users: pedestrians, bicyclists, and even those who drive in small cars. These large trucks have proportionally larger kinetic energy to dissipate in a collision (vastly dominating that of pedestrians and cyclists), the vehicles can drive over people with little notice to the drivers, and the large, high vehicle creates large blindspots that are detrimental to pedestrians even of adult height. There are both scientific articles and pop media sources highlighting this issue over the last decade or so, yet the problem seems to grow.
These vehicle are designed in a way that is detrimental to public health. Some things that we could probably contribute to this conversation:
Prior Art
An extensive review of the existing work on this topic might reveal some new areas to focus research on, as it seems there is work related to the ideas written above.
Proposed Methods
Required Resources