What to do about America’s killer cars
The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous as the rich-world average. It doesn’t have to be that way
这个国家的道路几乎是富裕国家平均水平的两倍危险。其实没必要这么糟糕。
2024年9月05日 09:06 上午
THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.
下次你被堵在车里时，看看周围的人。别光看车，要看看乘客。如果你在美国，大约每75个人中就有一个可能会被撞死——大多数都是被别人开的车撞的。不管在哪儿，坐在大型SUV或皮卡里的那些人更容易活下来。但他们的车重也带来了问题，因为这让其他人的道路变得更危险。《经济学人》发现，在美国，每辆最重的SUV或卡车救回的一条命，都会导致超过12条小型车辆上的生命丧失。这让交通堵塞成了一堂轮子上的伦理课。
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.
每年在美国，汽车大约会害死4万人——这可不仅仅是因为地方大，人们爱开车。其实，这里的道路每英里都比其他富裕国家的危险得多。尽管引入了一些让驾驶更安全的技术，但过去十年与汽车有关的死亡人数还是在上升。
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin, because of the battery that moves all those lithium ions from cathode to anode.
问题在于重量。我们看了2013到2023年间美国14个州的750万起车祸的数据，发现每1万起事故中，最重的车会导致其他车里37人死亡，而中等重量的车只有5.7人，最轻的更少，仅2.6人。情况还在变糟。2023年，美国31%的新车超过5000磅（约2.27吨），而2018年这个比例是22%。自2010年以来，被汽车撞死的行人数几乎翻了一番。虽然欧洲普通汽车比现在轻25%，日本则轻40%，但电动化也让这些地方的车变重，这样一来，最重和最轻车辆之间的差距就更大了。例如，福特F-150 Lightning比它那款汽油版重了大约40%，这都是因为电池要把锂离子从阴极移动到阳极。
This poses a giant collective-action problem. Individually, it is rational for people to buy bigger cars. As Tony Soprano once said to his son A.J. when discussing SUVs, “So you want to be the sucker in a regular car who gets decapitated?” Yet the sum of those decisions is much more lethal roads, as well as more expensive car insurance.
这就成了个大问题。对个人来说，买更大的车是有道理的。就像托尼·索普兰诺（Tony Soprano）跟他儿子A.J.说的：“你想当那个开普通车、被撞得脑袋都飞掉的人吗？”但大家都这么想的话，结果就是路上变得更危险，汽车保险也越来越贵。
In theory, regulators could insist that vehicles were lighter. Good luck with that. Pickup drivers love sitting behind the wheel of a huge truck. Running for election on a platform of banning massive cars would be a metrosexual caricature. In America it is hard enough to persuade gun owners to embrace sensible gun laws, because of a mistaken belief that guns make people safer. For big cars that argument is even harder to make, because up to a point it is actually true.
理论上，监管机构可以要求车子轻一点，但这可不简单。皮卡司机就是喜欢开大卡车的感觉。要是有人以禁止大型车为竞选口号，那简直就像个笑话。在美国，说服枪主接受合理的枪支法律都挺难，因为他们觉得有枪会更安全。而对于大车来说，这种说法更难让人信服，因为在某种程度上，这确实有点道理。
What, then, could make roads safer? As people become aware of the risk their choices impose on everyone else, attitudes to owning gigantic cars may change. This need not come at any cost to their drivers’ safety. We estimate that if the heaviest 10% of vehicles in America’s fleet shrank by roughly 1,000lb, road fatalities in multi-car crashes would fall by 12%, or 2,300 a year, without sacrificing the safety of the heavier cars.
那么，什么能让路更安全呢？随着大家意识到自己的选择对别人带来的风险，人们可能会改变对大车的看法。这并不意味着要牺牲驾驶者的安全。我们估计，如果美国最重的10%的车减轻大约1000磅，那么在多车事故中，每年可以减少12%的死亡人数，也就是2300人，而且不会影响那些重型车的安全性。
Attitudes can be nudged with reforms. Bizarrely, the government body that rates cars for safety did not propose taking the safety of pedestrians or other vehicles into consideration until last year. Because of a trade dispute with Europe over exports of poultry, many lighter foreign-made trucks are not even sold in America, a wrinkle known as the “chicken tax”. Tax deductions for working vehicles encourage people to buy trucks. Fuel standards, introduced in the 1970s to boost efficient vehicles, gave pickups a carve-out, inadvertently boosting their sales. The gradient could even tilt in the other direction. In 2022 France introduced a surcharge on new vehicles of €10 ($11) per kg over 1,800kg (4,000lb). In 2023 Norway began taxing car buyers at a rate of NKr12.50 ($1.17) per kg over 500kg.
态度其实可以通过一些改革来改变。有点奇怪的是，那些评估汽车安全性的政府部门直到去年才开始关注行人和其他车辆的安全问题。因为跟欧洲在禽肉出口方面有贸易纠纷，所以很多轻型进口卡车根本不允许在美国销售，这个现象被称为“鸡税”。还有，对工作用车提供税收减免，让大家更倾向于买卡车。本来20世纪70年代设立燃油标准是为了推广高效车型，但结果却无意间提高了皮卡的销量。这种情况甚至可能会变得更加严厉。例如，在2022年，法国对超过1,800公斤的新车加收每公斤10欧元（约11美元）的附加费；而到2023年，挪威也开始针对超重500公斤以上的新车，每公斤征收12.50挪威克朗（大约1.17美元）的税款。
Yet even if all those things were to change, consumer preferences are so strong that adjustments to fuel-efficiency standards would probably not be enough. That suggests another line of attack: as well as making cars lighter, you can make accidents rarer and less deadly.
不过，就算这些情况都改变了，消费者的偏好还是很强烈，所以光靠调整燃油效率标准可能还不够。这就意味着我们可以换个思路：除了让车更轻，我们还可以想办法减少事故，让它们发生得更少、伤害也更小。
In America the first step should be to redesign the road system. In the early 1990s the French were about as likely as Americans to die in a car crash (which worked out as being about twice as likely to die per mile). Now they are three times less likely. Driving in Mississippi is four times as dangerous as in Massachusetts. In both cases the design of roads explains much of the difference.
在美国，第一步应该是重新设计道路系统。在90年代初，法国人和美国人在车祸中死亡的几率差不多（每英里死亡的概率大约是美国人的两倍）。现在，他们的风险却低了三分之一。比如，在密西西比州开车要比在马萨诸塞州危险四倍。这些差异主要还是跟道路设计有很大关系。
It may seem arcane, but the lack of roundabouts in suburban and rural America is a big cause of deaths. Replacing intersections would save thousands of lives a year. The spread of stroads, four-lane highways that sit next to shopping malls, mixing pedestrians and cars turning out into traffic with heavy vehicles travelling at 50mph, is dangerous too. American highway engineers tend to associate wide lanes with safety. In fact, space encourages people to drive faster.
这听起来可能有点复杂，但在美国的郊区和乡村，缺少环形交叉路口是导致死亡的重要原因。把这些交叉口换成环形交叉路口，每年可以挽救数千条生命。而且，那种叫“stroads”的四车道高速公路也很危险，它们通常靠近购物中心，把行人、驶出停车场的汽车和以每小时50英里速度行驶的大型车辆混在一起。美国的公路工程师常常认为宽阔的车道更安全，但其实，这样反而会让人开得更快。
That points to a second step relevant everywhere: getting people to slow down. Because the energy—and hence destructive power—of a moving vehicle rises with the square of its velocity, finding ways to limit speed has an outsize effect. A good start would be to enforce the laws on speed limits that actually exist. Instead, plenty of American states ban speed cameras. More ambitious (meaning less popular) would be differential speed limits for heavier cars. Imagine the indignity of being overtaken by a Prius as you sit behind the wheel of your Chevy Silverado pickup, because you must travel 5mph more slowly to avoid being fined or losing your driving licence.
这说明在任何地方都需要采取第二步：让大家慢下来。因为车速越快，车辆的能量和破坏力就会成平方增加，所以限制速度效果特别明显。一个好的开始就是严格执行现有的限速规定。不过，很多美国州却禁止用测速摄像头。更大胆（但也不太受欢迎）的做法是给重型车设定不同的限速。想象一下，你开着雪佛兰Silverado皮卡，却被一辆普锐斯超车，那种尴尬感真是无奈，因为你得以每小时慢5英里行驶，以免被罚款或失去驾照！
American car-nage
美国汽车惨案
Ultimately, carmakers can innovate away a problem they have done so much to create. Better crash-avoidance technology and more pedestrian- protection systems with airbags would help. True self-driving cars, when they eventually become common, will greatly reduce the number of accidents and hence the death toll, even with heavy vehicles. Unfortunately, that could be years away. In the meantime, the task of saving lives will fall mainly to road engineers and traffic cops.
最后，汽车制造商可以通过创新来解决他们自己造成的问题。更好的碰撞避免技术和行人保护系统（比如安全气囊）会有帮助。当真正的自动驾驶汽车普及时，它们能大幅减少事故，降低死亡人数，即使是重型车也一样。不过，这可能还得等好几年。在这段时间里，拯救生命的任务主要还是靠道路工程师和交警来完成。
