Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes

society of overweight vehicles is $136 billion a year—costs that the owners of SUVs do not bear, the study’s authors concluded. In order to make up for the added death and injury their vehicles cost the rest of the country, their fair share of the gasoline tax would have to be raised from the current 18.4 cents to $2.17 per gallon, the authors calculated.
    Imposing this charge as the cost of using an inherently more deadly vehicle would, advocates argue, amount to removing a subsidy and allowing market forces to take over—which would likely dry up demand for heavy vehicles. But for a country that professes to believe in the power of markets more than public subsidies, there is absolutely no will or interest in having drivers pay the true cost of their choices. The U.S. government has not raised the gasoline tax since 1993.
    On a more positive note, vehicle obesity is trending down for other reasons. After weights rose 26 percent overall for all vehicles between 1980 and 2006, government mandates to increase fuel economy are slowly nudging car weights in the other direction. The average U.S. passenger vehicle weighs in at just under two tons. Automakers are, if very cautiously, looking at substituting lighter aluminum and carbon-fiber composites for some heavier steel parts, which theoretically could cut vehicle weight in half with no loss of safety protection. Other trends, such as the arrivalof fully autonomous cars, could shift Americans toward even smaller vehicles because virtually every crash that took place on Friday the thirteenth could, theoretically, have been avoided by replacing human drivers with robotic ones. The arms race toward big, heavy cars as the “safer” choice would end.
    B rian Bayers, newly elected as Elk Creek magistrate for Spencer County, Kentucky, ran through his morning routine on February 13 like any other workday. He got his eighteen-month-old son, Jackson, dressed, fed, and ready for preschool. With his wife already off to work this frigid day, Bayers decided to dash outside and back his pickup truck into the driveway, where it could sit idling while the heater warmed the interior. When he returned to his house, he saw the front door he thought he had left closed now stood wide-open. Worried for his son, he ran inside, looking and calling for Jackson, but he could not find the boy. In a panic, Bayers ran back outside, fearful that, if his son had somehow gotten past the latched door—something he had never been able to do before—Jackson would be at risk of falling into a pond on the family’s rural property. Then Bayers spotted the crumpled form of his only child beneath the pickup.
    The toddler had somehow gotten outside right behind Bayers, trying to follow his dad out the door. He had trundled into the truck’s blind spot as Bayers backed up. Jackson had been knocked over and run over by the front tires as the pickup backed into place. He died instantly.
    Bayers called 911 for help, knowing there could be no help, then called his wife, Amanda, who rushed home from work so they could hold and rock their only child, whose pictures decorated seemingly every available surface in their home.
    When backing up, motor vehicles don’t have a “blind spot,” asmany drivers believe. They have a blind zone . The Kansas-based advocacy group Kids and Cars has made this message a key part of its crusade to prevent backover collisions. One illuminating poster the group distributes shows a photograph of a black SUV next to a house, with sixty-two preschoolers sitting cross-legged behind it, covering most of the driveway. None of the children are visible to the driver behind the wheel. 29
    The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that the inherently poor visibility behind most cars and trucks, coupled with driver complacency about the risks of backing up, leads to 210 deaths and 15,000 injuries a year. Nearly a third of the dead are under