THE ROAD TO TRANSPORTATION JUSTICE: REFRAMING AUTO SAFETY IN THE SUV AGE COMMENT

For the past fifty years, a singular focus on consumer protection has persistently prevented auto-safety regulators from addressing serious external hazards created by dangerous automobile designs. Traffic violence is the second leading cause of death by injury in the United States. Beyond physical injury, traffic violence limits mobility and sends a powerful message about who does and does not belong on our streets. This toll is not unleashed at random; SUVs and pickups represent a disproportionate danger to other road users, particularly pedestrians and drivers of ordinary passenger cars. What's more, the resulting traffic violence disproportionately burdens women, people of color, and low-income communities. The result is a mounting crisis that threatens the safety and equity of our transportation system. Despite growing criticism, federal auto-safety regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have yet to meaningfully respond to this crisis. The roots of this failure are deep. Drawing on original research, this Comment establishes that the exact design risks of SUVs and pickups that have contributed to our current crisis have been known to federal regulators since the mid-1970s. From its inception until the mid-1990s, NHTSA repeatedly attempted to issue regulations that could have addressed the enormous risks that SUVs and pickup trucks pose to other road users-but without success. NHTSA's historic and ongoing failure is a product of a fundamentally consumer-protectionist vision of road safety. Over the past fifty years, federal policymakers have centered the automobile purchaser as the appropriate beneficiary of auto-safety policy, regulating automobile safety primarily for the people inside them with little regard for equity or negative externalities for other road users. Informed by this history, this Comment argues for a dramatic reframing of auto-safety policy, from one focused on consumer protectionism to an equity-oriented, distributional approach grounded in principles of transportation justice. This approach will finally align auto-safety scholarship and policy with trends in the distinct, but closely intertwined, field of transportation planning to advance a unified vision for road safety.