Tom Wenzel and Marc Ross

Last spring's Senate hearings on Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards made much about the increased risk Americans would face if forced to give up their SUVs for vehicles that weigh less. To find out whether that risk is real, and whether SUVs really are safer than cars, as some have alleged, we analyzed highway fatality data. Our findings came as a surprise. Suv 2We focused on “driver death rates,” a concept of risk developed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. However, our analysis differs from the Institute’s in two important ways. First, we examine risk not only to drivers of vehicles of a particular type, but also to drivers of vehicles that crash with that vehicle type. Second, we limit our study to recent models having sold enough vehicles to permit statistical analysis.

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Robert L. Bertini

Everyone knows that major sources of freeway congestion are the “incidents,” including accidents, that block free traffic flow. Other troubling incidents include stalled engines, cars that have just run out of gas, debris fallen from trucks, flat tires, strayed animals, and other random events. According to one estimate, half of all congestion is relate to incidents. With vehicles stopped on the roadway, one incident can cause others, something leading to chain reactions involving many cars. So motorists and traffic officials alike consider incident-mitigation a critical objective.

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Charles Lave

Congress may soon pass a law that allows states to set their own speed limit. What might happen if state choose to raise these? We don’t need to guess. We can examine what happened when states were allowed to raise certain speed limits in 1987. The result: Higher speed limits caused and overall gain in safety.

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