Safety vs Efficiency

I’ve been thinking about a number of instances where we’ve traded energy for safety.

SUV’s, and heavier cars in general. A lot of environmentally minded people don’t like SUVs. The arguments from the anti-SUV crowd:
1. They guzzle gas.
2. They are unfairly classified as cars when they are really light trucks. This gives a tax break to owners.
3. Although some people use them for their designed purpose, most SUV owners buy them for image. Most SUV’s are never taken off-road. Many in southern climates are never put into four-wheel drive.
4. They make the roads less safe for everyone. In a collision between a small car and an SUV, the small car loses.

My comments: I’m not too much of an SUV hater. In fact, I own one, and it’s nice in snowy conditions and for the one or two times a year we take it off the road. I agree with item (2); we should revise the classifications. I do appreciate the complaint of item (3), and if we do feel an energy crunch, we might regret the significant cost we collectively paid to make ourselves feel macho. But I wouldn’t push the point too far, because we as individuals have the right in this country to make our own personal choices, and if we choose image over cost then that’s our business.

It’s the safety item that bothers me. That’s the point at which our personal decisions cross over and affect the people around us. Two issues here: actual crashes themselves, and then the psychological threat of crashing that keeps people from buying smaller cars. I haven’t quantified either (is the risk of crashing really worth worrying about), but I do know people who drive large cars for safety.

I think the standard economics approach here would be to add some sort of safety surcharge on SUV purchases. The surcharge could either be a tax, or a sum that goes into an insurance pool. Partly to discourage their use; partly to compensate the rest of us, somehow. That kind of makes sense, but I’m not sure how much it would work. I mean, if thought there was a significant risk in driving a Honda Civic down the highway, I wouldn’t let an extra grand or two stop me from getting an SUV. I also wonder if such an approach could backfire; I can see some people paying the safety surcharge and acting like it’s a license to drive aggressively. (Well, probably not; just a thought.)

Here’s another example of the tradeoffs between safety and efficiency: child car seats. In the old days I can remember cramming four adults and five kids into a mid-size sedan, with the kids sitting on laps. These days, when my parents come to visit, if we want to go anywhere as a family it takes two cars to drive four adults and two kids. Man that annoys me. Someday we’ll get a minivan, but until then we’re stuck.

Makes you wonder though; how much gas has been burned since the requirement of using child car seats? I’m not saying that was a bad rule, not at all. Just that there was a cost to it. Already, personal observation leads me to believe that car seat usage is correlated with socio-economic status. If the price of gas increases sharply, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that you will see the rule be ignored more and more often (or we’ll come up with other solutions).

Again, I’m not saying that it’s a bad choice to trade energy for safety. But if the cost of energy increases, we will have to revisit some of those decisions, and that will be hard.