UC Berkeley's Safe Transportation Research & Education Center (SafeTREC) has released a new interactive report summarizing its findings for "Safety Impacts of Vehicle Weight on Vulnerable Road Users", a program funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

As with the rest of the nation, vehicles on California roads are changing. With the transition from sedans to SUVs, our state's vehicle fleet is getting larger and heavier. And as a result, the share of traffic fatalities that are vulnerable road users is also changing as more pedestrians and bicyclists are struck on our roads.

SafeTREC set out to combine DMV vehicle registration data from the past decade with Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data on fatal crashes to explore whether larger vehicles are involved in more fatal vulnerable road user (VRU) crashes per registered vehicle than smaller vehicles. These concerns are built on existing data demonstrating that larger, heavier vehicles are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in the event of a crash.

In their final interactive report "Bigger Vehicles, Bigger Problems?" SafeTREC researchers explore how California’s vehicle fleet and vulnerable road user traffic fatalities are changing over time in urban regions. By examining California DMV registration data from 2014-2023, they found that cars are generally getting heavier, with 2023 being the first year where people are buying more SUVs and pickup trucks than sedans.

This report also found that heavier vehicles generally had higher rates of VRU fatalities in urban areas, with two exceptions: SUVs have lower VRU fatality rates than sedans, and coupes have higher VRU fatality rates than other small, similarly-weighted cars.

Check-out the Full Report Here