Imagine you are walking home from school. At the crosswalk, you glance both ways before crossing, noting that there’s a truck at the stop sign. You have the right of way, so you start to cross. Before you know it, the truck’s engine ramps up, starting to turn into the parking lot at speed. The truck slams into you at 30 miles per hour, pulling you under the vehicle. You’re paralyzed, you can only watch as the tire moves toward your head in slow motion as your life flashes before your eyes. People behind you can only watch in horror as your head gets crushed by the truck, your light snuffed out forever.

Pickup trucks and full size SUVs shouldn’t be allowed in a school environment due to their increased deadliness to people walking/biking to school. Compared to a regular car, pickups and full-size SUVs are far more likely, when hitting a pedestrian, to pull people under the car, running them over, and hit parts of the body more important to human function like the chest. According to a study published in the
Journal of Consumer Policy, conventional cars are far less likely to hit somebody in the chest and instead mostly focus their impact on the legs.

Focusing impact on the legs is better as it increases the chance of survivability in an impact. Breaking your legs might suck, but you’ll most likely live. If you get hit in the chest and your ribs break and puncture an important organ, suddenly it’s a lot more serious. Conventional cars also, instead of pulling a person under the vehicle, cause them to land on top of the car itself, increasing the chance of survivability and the chance of the driver noticing that they have hit a pedestrian.

Another reason that these vehicles should be banned in a school area is because visibility is greatly reduced when you are in an SUV or pickup. Preliminary studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have shown that as A-pillars get larger with vehicle size increases, the blind spot caused by them also increases, causing drivers not to see people in the crosswalk. Their higher ride height also makes it harder to see pedestrians as well due to the degree of disconnect you feel with the road. The longer front hood on most of these vehicles also contributes as it is harder to see past it and to the street in front of you. All of these add up to pickup trucks and SUVs having a 42% and 23% higher chance of hitting a pedestrian respectively during a left turn. While taking a right turn, they have the same probability as a smaller vehicle, but as stated in the previous section, the consequences of being hit by a larger vehicle are much greater.

A factor that specifically impacts the drivers of these large vehicles is the “Car Cushion Hypothesis.” In essence, what the theory refers to is that the larger a car size gets, the more safe the driver feels when doing risky maneuvers as they feel more safe in these vehicles. This should not be a factor in a school area, we should make drivers more careful by making risk taking uncomfortable.

Large cars are also unsafe for students to drive as well, studies have shown that these vehicles are more unsafe than conventional vehicles as they have a higher rollover risk and a higher center of gravity, making control more difficult.

Banning these vehicles from our school is a great way to try and save the lives of students, drivers and pedestrians alike.