Electric cars, buses, bikes, and scooters are quiet because they lack an engine running on gasoline, which is good for the environment – but not necessarily for pedestrians on the streets.
A new study of casualty rates from 2013-2017 in the UK, just published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, shows that the risk is greater in urban areas.
Pedestrians may be twice as likely to be hit by an electric or a hybrid car as those powered by petrol (gasoline) or diesel, wrote Phil Edwards, Siobhan Moore, and Craig Higgins of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the article, entitled “Pedestrian safety on the road to net zero: cross-sectional study of collisions with electric and hybrid-electric cars in Great Britain.”The authors urged governments to take steps to reduce this safety hazard as they proceed to phase out fossil-fueled vehicles to improve air quality and curb climate change.
Greater hazard to pedestrians
Amid the ongoing shift to electric and hybrid cars, concerns have been raised that these vehicles may pose more of a safety hazard to pedestrians than conventional cars because they are quieter, particularly in urban areas where background ambient noise levels are higher.
Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young people, and one in four road deaths are of pedestrians, they wrote. Silent electric bikes and scooters ridden on sidewalks are also a danger to pedestrians of all ages.
The difference in causality rates
The researchers compared the differences in pedestrian casualty rates for every 100 million miles of road travel in the country between electric/hybrid and fossil-fueled cars, using road-safety data. In total, 32 billion miles of electric/hybrid vehicle travel and three trillion miles of petrol/diesel vehicle travel were included in the analysis.Between 2013 and 2017, there were 916,713 casualties from reported road traffic collisions in Great Britain. Of these, 120,197 were pedestrians, 96,285 of whom had been hit by a car or taxi.Most collisions occurred in urban areas, a greater proportion of which involved electric or hybrid vehicles than petrol/diesel vehicles: 94% vs 88%. This compares with 6% and 12%, respectively, in rural areas. Based on these data, the researchers calculated that during the five years studied, the average annual casualty rates of pedestrians per 100 million miles of road travel were 5.16 for electric and hybrid vehicles and 2.40 for petrol and diesel vehicles.Younger, less-experienced drivers are more likely to be involved in a road-traffic collision and are also more likely to own an electric car, possibly accounting for some of the observed higher risk connected with these vehicles, they suggested.
“More pedestrians are injured in Great Britain by petrol and diesel cars than by electric cars, but compared with petrol and diesel cars, electric cars pose a greater risk to pedestrians, and the risk is greater in urban environments,” the researchers wrote.
“One plausible explanation for our results is that background ambient noise levels differ between urban and rural areas, causing electric vehicles to be less audible to pedestrians in urban areas,” they wrote.“From a public health perspective, our results should not discourage active forms of transport beneficial to health like walking and cycling; rather they can be used to ensure that any potential increased traffic injury risks are understood and safeguarded against,” they added.They concluded that the heightened safety risk posed to pedestrians by electric and hybrid cars “needs to be reduced as governments proceed to phase out petrol and diesel cars.”