SUV's -- More dangerous for everybody.

The New Republic Online: Easterbrook: "Actually, the National Academy of Sciences found in 2002, in a George W. Bush-requested study, that SUVs are safer for their occupants in some types of crashes, but are so much more likely than regular cars to cause rollover fatalities for their occupants that there exists no net safety benefit to those inside an SUV. Now Georgetown University professor Ted Gayer, writing in the March issue of the technical publication Journal of Risk and Uncertainty--which is edited by W. Kip Viscusi of Harvard, who is one of the nation's leading academic conservatives--finds that having lots of SUVs and pickup trucks on the road increases total fatalities, by causing more deaths not just in regular cars but more deaths inside the SUVs and pickup trucks, too.

People riding in pickups and SUVs are somewhat less likely to die in any given crash than people riding in regular cars, Gayer finds. But this statistic, on which defenses of the SUV as 'safe' are based, does not take into account whether SUVs and pickup trucks are more likely than cars to get into crashes in the first place. Gayer studied the question of whether SUVs and pickup trucks crash more often than regular cars, and he adjusted for the fact that bad drivers may be drawn to buying SUVs and pickup trucks. Even adjusting for this, Gayer found, SUVs and pickup trucks crash far more often than regular cars. Analyzing state-by-state data, Gayer determined that SUVs and pickup trucks are 2.6-4 times more likely to crash than regular cars. Using 'light trucks' to mean SUVs and pickup trucks employed for regular commuting rather than construction work, Gayer concludes that, 'A world of light trucks leads to substantially more fatalities than a world of cars.'"