Pedestrian Safety and Vehicle Regulatory Capture

PDF Version

Author: Nora Lewis

Suggested citation:

Lewis, N. (2026). Pedestrian safety and vehicle regulatory capture. Technology Assessment Project Case Study Library, University of Michigan. https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/tap-case-study-library/pedestrian-safety-and-vehicle-regulatory-capture

Pedestrian Safety and Vehicle Regulatory Capture

Key Takeaways

• Industries where design and tech innovation outpace safety regulation can lead to industry regulatory capture.
• Regulatory capture (or the influence of corporate actors on public regulatory agencies) works to strengthen corporate interests and power, often harming marginalized communities the most.
• Viewing safety and human error as an unavoidable, cost-benefit analysis problem can result in weak safety regulations. Alternatively, viewing risks to people and the environment as ethically unacceptable (and thus not a question of "acceptable" harms to exchange for other benefits to society) can inform more proactive and targeted policies and tech development that minimize death, injuries, or other harms.

Pedestrian Safety in the United States and Europe

The Staggering Rise in American Pedestrian Deaths

The United States has experienced unprecedented growth in pedestrian deaths in the past ten years. By the end of 2022, levels reached their highest in 40 years, with 7,522 reported pedestrian fatalities (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Highway Loss Data Institute, 2024). Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when fewer cars were on the roads and many were confined to their homes, deaths still soared. In 2021 alone, 7,624 pedestrians were killed in the United States, a 13 percent increase from the 6,721 pedestrian deaths in 2020 (Governors Highway Safety Association, 2023). When observing this phenomenon over the course of a decade, there has been a 77 percent increase in overall pedestrian fatalities since 2010 (Governors Highway Safety Association, 2023).

These numbers are particularly alarming in a global context. General traffic fatalities are 50 percent higher in the U.S. compared to nations like Canada (which is comparably spacious and car-centric), Japan, Australia, and the majority of Western Europe (World Health Organization, 2018). Metrics from the Urban Institute state that Americans are roughly three times more likely to die in a car crash than their French counterparts (Freemark & Jenkins, 2022). In Western Europe in particular, the trend of pedestrian deaths has moved in the opposite direction than the United States. The region has seen a 23 percent decline in fatalities between 2010 and 2019, a figure which continues to fall (Gwam, 2021). The question of why such a disparity exists between nations with relatively comparable socioeconomic makeups is not immediately obvious.

Trends within the Large Vehicle Market

Building Bigger and "Safer"

The American fascination with large cars represents one piece of this puzzle. Over the past decade, large car sales (including SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans) have soared in popularity (Zipper, 2024). The share of new car sales in this category jumped from 47 percent in 2009 to 74 percent in 2020 (Gwam, 2021). The large vehicles of today look quite a bit different than they did even 20 to 30 years ago. Contemporary pickup trucks are roughly 32 percent heavier than they were in 1990, and with this rampant upwards scaling, vehicle hoods have become taller and blind spots have become larger (Barry, 2024).

With these hulking new models comes a slew of top-ranked safety features and accolades. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) consistently names these SUVs as some of the safest on the road, with many receiving five-star crash-test ratings from car publications this past year (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, n.d.). These models are equipped with forward collision warnings, automated emergency braking, and lane-keeping assistance to name just a few impressive bells and whistles. It's no surprise that consumers are drawn to these touted safety benefits, especially when these vehicles often tower several feet off the ground. This physical separation from the road creates a sense of security for vehicle occupants, something that is increasingly appealing given climbing traffic accident statistics and incidences of violent road rage (Burd-Sharps et al., 2024). Thus, consumers get the idea that bigger truly is safer, especially given the innovative safety technology that's become synonymous with these models. These conceptions become a sort of feedback loop, further enforcing the insatiable pressure for car manufacturers to scale up for a greater payout.

Building Bigger and More "Fuel Efficient"

Another feature of many of these large vehicles is gains in fuel efficiency over the past several years. Large vehicles, long characterized for their gas-guzzling engines, have been pushed to adapt to a culture more cognizant of the negative environmental implications of inefficient fuel capacities. The 2023 Ford F-150 pickup truck, for example, which can weigh over 6,000 pounds, has been lauded by Car and Driver for its gains in fuel efficiency and rollout of new hybrid and all-electric models (Dorian, 2023). The popular publication has also highlighted the hybrid models and efficient engine options of the Ram 1500 and Chevy Silverado pickup trucks in recent years. These three designs respectively topped the Car and Driver list of most sold models in 2022, with a combined total of over 1.6 million units sold (Capparella, 2023). While it may not be emission concerns alone that draw most consumers to these bulky models, fuel efficiency is certainly a buzzword that car industry advertisers seek to emphasize in an era of greater climate consciousness. But are these vehicles actually making strides in fuel efficiency by a measurable margin?

A 2022 report on automotive trends and fuel economy from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says not exactly. The agency notes that although carbon emissions are at a record low across the car industry, the market's shift towards SUVs from smaller sedans and wagons has offset these improvements in fuel economy (Environmental Protection Agency, 2023). These smaller cars consistently have higher fuel economy and lower carbon emissions than their SUV and truck counterparts, meaning that even with more efficient engines, these larger vehicles will still always be the less environmentally-conscious choice (Kolbert, 2023). Instead of making vehicles more economical in fuel efficiency and size, many manufacturers have opted to adjust engine efficiency with the distinct goal of enabling bigger and flashier designs, a decision which offsets much of the benefit of increased fuel efficiency. Car companies can vaguely virtue signal support for en vogue "save the planet" efforts, while also continuing to cater to the demand for large vehicles. In essence, they can have their cake and eat it too.

Vehicle Regulations

Where American Regulations Fall Short

So what regulations govern the kinds of vehicles brought onto the American market? In the United States, it is the NHTSA who can issue Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to implement laws from Congress. The New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), established in 1979, is one particular mechanism set in place to assess the safety of new models. The agency subjects vehicles to tests on frontal and side impacts, forward collision systems, lane departure warning systems, and an array of other elements in order to measure how safe they are on the road (NHTSA, n.d.). Results are often reflected in consumer reports and popular car publications, allowing drivers to use these evaluations to make informed decisions on occupant safety when purchasing a vehicle.

Yet in recent years, there has been mounting criticism on the scope of these assessments (Zipper, 2024). Many have pointed out that these tests are woefully devoid of measures to test pedestrian safety impacts of new vehicle models (National Association of City Transportation Officials, 2023; U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2020). This is especially problematic given the ways in which large vehicles of today are particularly poised to inflict serious damage towards struck pedestrians. You are roughly two to three times more likely to die in a traffic accident when hit by an SUV or other large vehicle, not to mention that these models often come with incredibly large blind spots (Lawrence et al., 2019). The Ford F-150, for example, has a front blind spot of 9 feet and 7 inches. The Cadillac Escalade, a popular SUV model, has a whopping front blind spot of 10 feet and 2 inches (Lawrence et al., 2019). One demonstration from the Indianapolis news organization WTHR 13 reported that drivers in an Escalade were unable to see 12 children lined up directly in front of the vehicle (Hawkins, 2020). A vehicle safety organization, KidAndCars, found 575 child deaths resulting from slow-moving vehicles that didn't see them over the past 10 years, compared to 304 deaths in the prior decade (Hawkins, 2020). These stark figures represent an increase in child pedestrian deaths of 89 percent in that period, numbers which further reflect a distinctly worsening pedestrian death crisis in the United States. Without these figures on pedestrian impacts, there is very little incentive for manufacturers to tinker with the designs they have already set in place, especially when these large models are received so readily by American consumers. In turn, the very features that make large vehicles so deadly are maintained in the market.

The European New Car Assessment Program

In the European Union, new car assessment occurs under the European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP). The voluntary program was established in 1996, and despite its tests not being mandated in Europe for new car models, it is backed by the EU and numerous vehicle and consumer organizations across the continent (Hobbs & McDonough, 1998). The Euro NCAP remains the gold standard for vehicle regulation over the European Community Whole Vehicle Type Approval (ECWVTA) system, which officially certifies new models for legal sale in the EU. With its emphasis on best practices and more frequent enhancements to assessment procedures over the ECWVTA, the Euro NCAP remains a more rigorous and dynamic measure of vehicle safety.

In recent years, with the spike in pedestrian deaths in the United States, another strength of the Euro NCAP has become clear: it tests all new models for pedestrian impacts. These stipulations, deemed Vulnerable Road User (VRU) Protections, were first added to test procedures for pedestrians in 2016 and cyclists in 2018 (Euro NCAP, n.d.). The assessment includes tests on head, leg, and pelvis impacts for both groups in a variety of settings. These scenarios include cars reversing into pedestrians, children running from behind parked vehicles, and adults crossing the road in various directions on foot or bicycle, to name a few.

Revamped Regulations from the NHTSA and Biden Administration

There have been several attempts over the last three presidential administrations to revise NCAP testing procedures. In 2015, the NHTSA proposed its first pedestrian protection safety ratings to be integrated into procedures. Yet as the White House transitioned from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, the NHTSA suspended pedestrian protections in order to "reduce regulatory burden" (Hemmersbaugh & Lavey, 2023). It took six years before the federal government made further steps towards enshrining these guidelines into NCAP procedures. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), commonly referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021 and mandated that the NHTSA incorporate advanced crash avoidance technology and pedestrian user safety info into the NCAP (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2021). The NHTSA released proposals in March of 2022 and May of 2023 in response to this legislation.

Section 24213(b) of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires the NCAP to add information on crash avoidance technologies and vulnerable road user safety to their procedures (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 2021). This includes determining which technologies should be included in guidance to manufacturers, as well as new performance test criteria, distinct rating systems for each technology, and updating overall vehicle ratings to incorporate new ratings into consumer information. They are also directed to publish these results in order to inform consumers about the best crash avoidance technologies for pedestrians and cyclists (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 2021).

The proposed changes are meant to test "crashworthiness pedestrian protection" in order to encourage vehicle technologies to address the rise in pedestrian injuries and fatalities across the past decade. They are largely based on VRU Protections in the Euro NCAP, though they will weigh results on head and leg impacts differently than in the European context, and will award credit for pedestrian protection safety to vehicles with a score of 60 percent or above (NHTSA, 2022). Additionally, the agency is implementing this program via self-reporting from vehicle manufacturers, who will provide data to the NHTSA to then award credits as appropriate. The agency has stated that they will perform random verification tests on some new models to make sure manufacturer reports are accurate (NHTSA, 2023).

Beyond delineating new VRU test procedures, the NHTSA has also proposed a new safety standard mandating that newly manufactured light vehicles include an automatic emergency braking system (AEB) to prevent collisions with pedestrians.

The NHTSA opened the proposal up for public comment from May until July of 2023, receiving over 1,000 comments by the end of the period (NHTSA, 2023). Many remarked on the need for the long-awaited measures, but also on the insufficient nature of these changes. Some drew attention to the lack of distinction between pedestrian injury risk and fatality risk in the tests (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, 2023; NHTSA, 2023). Others pointed out more specific features missing from procedures, such as a thorax impact test despite this area being highlighted as a place of key concern in pedestrian collisions earlier in the proposal. Some felt that testing procedures were also missing measures of pedestrian visibility in respect to blind spots, a problem which is especially pertinent to large vehicles. At the time, NHTSA did not include new pedestrian safety measures into their 5-star ratings system (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, 2023; NHTSA, 2023). Under this schema, new models could still receive a 5-star rating for safety while being deadly to pedestrians.

Beyond these more technical considerations, safety experts have expressed concern over the self-reporting nature of the program (Streets Are For Everyone, n.d.). Under these stipulations, manufacturers are essentially in control of what data is used to inform NHTSA policies. It raises questions of how reliable such data might be, especially when physical tests are not required under these guidelines.

Is Human Error to Blame in Traffic Accidents?

The Failure of Vision Zero in the United States

Despite lagging federal pedestrian safety initiatives in the United States, many city governments have adopted policies at the local level to attack the crisis. The Vision Zero traffic safety initiative, born in Swedish parliament in 1997, envisions roadway regulations that reduce pedestrian and cyclist deaths to zero (Vision Zero Network, n.d.). Vision Zero relies on the idea that any risk of serious injury or fatality on the road is ethically unacceptable. In essence, the life and health of humans cannot be exchanged for other benefits in society, and thus questions of how many pedestrian deaths are "acceptable" are reframed outside a cost-benefit analysis mindset (Vision Zero Network, n.d.). The United States has largely functioned under the thinking that human error, something that is seemingly unavoidable and individual in responsibility, is at the core of traffic safety incidents (Singh, 2015; Walker Smith, 2013). Within the Vision Zero frame of mind, human error is not unavoidable and random, but something that can be curtailed with infrastructure and policy changes (Vision Zero Network, n.d.). It also operates under the viewpoint that the responsibility for safety is shared by both pedestrians and drivers on the road, and that governments hold central responsibility for instrumentalizing the wellbeing of their citizens by targeting human error.

The implementation of this program was largely successful in Sweden, employing reduced speed limits and the strategic placement of pedestrian walkways away from maximum-speed roadways. Traffic deaths in Sweden sat at 204 in 2020, compared to 772 in 1990 (European Transport Safety Council, 2023; International Transport Forum, 2021). The Vision Zero template has been loosely applied in numerous European countries, as well as the United States. From New York to San Francisco, mayors have enthusiastically adopted plans. Despite this, infrastructure and policy change has not followed, warranting quite different traffic safety outcomes than in Europe.

To begin with, this attitude of abandoning cost-benefit structuring is unfamiliar to Americans. The context in which much of the NHTSA's regulatory framework was built in the 1960s and early 1970s overlapped with the height of GM, Ford, and Chrysler's oligopoly over the American auto industry (Boyer, 2008). Today, the most popular models sold in the United States come from these American companies (Capparella, 2025). As a result, much of the agency's work has focused on maintaining market controls rather than good-faith vehicular safety performances. The 2016 Trump administration's decision to strike down pedestrian safety measures in the NCAP to avoid "regulatory burden" clearly highlights this preference for policies that keep large vehicle sales lucrative for manufacturers.

Conceptualizations of Risk and "Human Error"

What is particularly troubling about an emphasis on human error and education campaigns rather than policy change is that these narratives trickle down into the media, and by extension to consumers and academics. The NHTSA long-reported that 94% of serious crashes are due to human error on their own website (Yen & Krisher, 2022). This percentage has been further proliferated by journalists, research institutions, engineers, and agencies alike, who continue to posit the crisis as a problem of distracted drivers and not something more structural. The ineffectiveness of these campaigns is perhaps best illustrated by the present failure of Vision Zero in the United States, where the central focus has been on signaling outrage over pedestrian deaths in neat PR messaging, but very little concrete infrastructure change. While speed cameras, separated bike lanes, and pedestrianized city centers have been readily adapted tools for European lawmakers, similar efforts have not taken root across the U.S. (European Commission, n.d.). It leads the public to come away with the idea that risks on the road are inevitable, and that the onus lies solely on drivers and pedestrians, not the engineers and policymakers who mold roadway conditions, when it comes to roadway deaths.

In the context of vehicle manufacturing, the same is true. It is not vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds, fastened with grills and hood shapes that inflict maximum harm on pedestrians, or blind spots spanning 12 children long that are targeted by policy. Instead, roadway engineers paint the problem as one of individual origin under the human error narrative, where the blame is conveniently removed from agencies and officials. And manufacturers incur little public pressure to change their fatal designs under this same line of thinking.

In terms of regulation, the NCAP's past omission of pedestrian safety measures has also impacted the ways that consumers and publications view safety. Up until November of 2024, large vehicles could earn a 5-star safety rating from the agency, which would often lead it to top consumer report rankings and fall on the radar of consumers. Yet strides were finally made as part of the Biden administration's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including a crashworthiness pedestrian protection program that will evaluate new vehicles' ability to mitigate pedestrian injuries, as well as advanced driver assistance technologies such as pedestrian automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist, blind spot warning and blind spot intervention (NHTSA, 2024). These changes can help improve consumer awareness of pedestrian safety features when purchasing, and perhaps better motivate manufacturers to address these considerations when designing their products (Wilson & Mizerak, 2024). They also represent a closer alignment with the Euro NCAP's pedestrian safety measures.

Inequities in Traffic Deaths

Just as human error is not "random," traffic deaths, and who they impact, do not exist in a vacuum. Women, people of color, and low-income individuals are disproportionately impacted by traffic accidents (Raifman & Choma, 2022). Neighborhoods with high rates of pedestrian accidents often have low vehicle ownership rates. This phenomenon is seen most often in poor and minority neighborhoods, where residents are less likely to own a car and tend to rely more heavily on walking or biking to move within a city (Raifman & Choma, 2022). Black and Native pedestrians are killed at a rate almost double their population share each year (Governors Highway Safety Association, 2023).

The infrastructure of lower-income and minority neighborhoods also enforces these adverse roadway outcomes. It is no accident that the roads that have proven most crucial to the development of wealthy, white suburbs have conversely come at the cost of safety in very specific neighborhoods. Expansive freeways have been strategically laced through Black and brown communities throughout American history, dumping burdens of noisy traffic, unpleasant and disruptive asphalt vistas, and dangerous driving on the doorsteps of these residents (Karas, 2015; King, 2021). With few crosswalks and a lack of protected bus stops, it is no wonder that individuals in these neighborhoods are met with more frequent instances of injury or death as a pedestrian. Most are left with simply no choice but to navigate through roadways that are highly inhospitable to those without a car.

These inequities represent a public health crisis, but are hardly highlighted as such by politicians or the media. Importantly, agencies like the NHTSA, who set the tone for government responses to traffic accidents, have failed to tease out these inequities when framing the severity of the pedestrian death problem. These communities are already the targets of redlining and an array of other disenfranchisement efforts, making it unsurprising to see little outrage over the disproportionate racial, gender, and socioeconomic impacts of traffic accidents represented in the media or political debates.

Regulatory Capture in the Auto Industry

American Culture and the Car

The United States is unequivocally a nation built on cars. Wide roads, spread out buildings, and sprawling concrete parking lots dot much of the modern American landscape, designed with the middle and upper class suburbanites who can afford a car in mind. Cars are an important portal for getting to work, school, the grocery store, and almost any other locale of everyday life outside our most densely populated cities. The car represents convenience and stability in the American imagination, and with infrastructure that largely necessitates its widespread use, it has also become synonymous with American culture.

Manufacturing giants like Ford and General Motors epitomize the all-American success story, born out of innovation and a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. In an era where American industry dominance is threatened by foreign car brands like Toyota and Honda, it seems as if policymakers are still set on protecting the sanctity of the car manufacturer. Such a blind reverence for the automobile, a reverence that's quickly falling out of style in regions like northern and western Europe, has impacted how we regulate vehicles and write policy in major ways.

Policy Incentives for Large Vehicles

The salience of the car in American culture is not just enforced by consumer report rankings or marketing strategies, but also by policies from the federal government itself. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for example, contained $110 billion for improving highway infrastructure across the United States. Funding for public transportation under the same bill was $39 billion, less than half of that set aside to bolster already expansive roadways (Birenbaum, 2021). While the U.S. is hardly close to weaning itself off of cars, making the maintenance of roads a necessary source of federal dollars, this disparity reveals clear priorities. It is less of an overwhelming task to funnel money into roadways rather than making strides towards an overhaul of American public transportation infrastructure.

Tax incentives are another explicit example of car-centric policy making. Section 179 of the U.S. internal revenue code allows for an immediate expense deduction for business owners purchasing depreciable business equipment, which includes "heavy" SUVs, pickup trucks and vans (Internal Revenue Service, 2020). The Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act of 2015 helped solidify positive depreciation rules for the business use of these kinds of vehicles, where firms can write off considerable portions of vehicle costs as long as they use the vehicle for business purposes more than 50 percent of the time (U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, n.d.; Wright Ford Young & Co., 2016). Under this tax code, SUVs can deduct up to $28,900 of first-year costs. Heavy non-SUVs, like long-bed pickup trucks with a cargo bed of at least six feet in length, as well as vans, are not subject to this $28,900 limit, allowing businesses to potentially write off the entire first-year cost of the vehicle if they decide to scale up in Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR). In addition to these tax breaks, businesses can also claim a bonus 80 percent first-year depreciation deduction, which is limited to new vehicles only (Block Advisors, 2024). As a result of these combined tax breaks, businesses can end up paying almost nothing for their vehicles as long as they pass a lofty weight threshold.

Depreciation deductions do exist for lighter vehicles under 6,000 pounds, but the tax deduction limit comes to just $12,200 in the first year, with the possibility for an $8,000 bonus depreciation deduction (Block Advisors, 2024). Thus, the larger (and newer) the vehicle, the more businesses can write off, largely incentivizing firms to purchase heavier models. These stipulations are no mistake, and largely fall in line with the bipartisan nature of favoritism for the car industry in policy realms.

Lobbying among car manufacturers is another avenue in which car-centric policies flourish in American politics. General Motors spent $14.3 million on lobbying efforts in 2022 alone, followed by $8.3 million in lobbying funds from Ford Motor Company (Beggin, 2023). Despite the tacit associations of the anti-car movement with more liberal, climate-minded political agendas, Democrats in both the House and Senate receive slightly more in lobbying contributions than their Republican counterparts (Open Secrets, n.d.). Democrats in both chambers of Congress received roughly $1.6 million in total from auto lobbyists in 2022, compared to just over $1.2 million towards Republican members. Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia topped the list of Congressional recipients last year, receiving $85,580 in total, a sum that is well above the next highest recipient, Democratic Senator of California Alex Padilla, who received $39,435 (Open Secrets, n.d.). So sympathy for the auto industry does not fall neatly into party lines, exemplifying that the issue does not merely fluctuate with the shifting partisanship of administrations, but is instead a mainstay in the political agendas of both parties.

In the regulatory sphere, this same phenomenon is at play. American lawmakers are preoccupied with minimizing the burden placed on manufacturers, utilizing the cost-benefit analysis line of thinking that Vision Zero seeks to reject. It becomes a question of how to best employ regulations that minimally rock the boat for car manufacturers, and less so how to attack the pedestrian death problem head on with sweeping reforms. The rights of manufacturers are placed on even footing with those of the pedestrian, a dynamic which undeniably likens profit to human life. Thus, little internal political pressure falls on the manufacturer to incorporate pedestrian safety technology into their designs, as politicians and government agencies alike promote the idea that it is the individual driver that must change rather than the system. Large car manufacturers in particular profit off of their inherently unsafe designs, placing pedestrians in a perpetual state of risk.

Manufacturer Self-Reporting in New NCAP Proposal

Even with reform to the NCAP's pedestrian safety test measures, the nature of manufacturer self-reporting gives way to an array of ethical questions. Are manufacturers that seek to gain from the status quo a reliable source of safety data?

The car industry is not the only industry employing this model of self-sufficient design testing. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), for example, allows airplane manufacturers to conduct their own safety tests in order to inform the agency's policies. After a slew of high-profile plane crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets in the past several years, this model has come under increased scrutiny (Naylor, 2019). It was found that design flaws were brushed over and training procedures insufficiently prepared pilots for flying these models, oversights which cost hundreds of passengers their lives in crashes like the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March of 2019 (Raphelson et al., 2019).

Car manufacturers hold a similar burden of human life in their decision-making processes, where an apathy towards measurements of pedestrian impacts have undoubtedly cost thousands of Americans their lives. Yet in profit-centered regulatory frameworks, this apathy goes largely unpunished. The car industry has laid its roots in the agendas of a diverse array of stakeholders and political officials, making the unraveling of these strong ties a daunting task. The industry has also helped make self-regulation the status quo. The NCAP's new pedestrian safety regulations will need to overcome these barriers, and the U.S. will need to start taking the overhaul of its car-centric infrastructure seriously before change can be made.

Relevance to Advanced Nuclear Energy

We chose this case because of the auto industry's regulatory capture problem, which has been stoked by a largely weak and self-regulating safety paradigm in the United States. We wanted to contrast ideologies around risk across different regions of the world, in this case namely between Western Europe and the United States, and see what the impacts are on safety regulations and infrastructure. The case reveals how safety ideals in the U.S. view risk as unavoidable, and thus use cost-benefit analyses to frame how cars and roads are designed. Corporate interests are baked into these regulations and designs, resulting in more unsafe roads for pedestrians, bikers, and small car drivers, as well as greater land and gas usage when we should be moving in the opposite direction. Advanced nuclear may reinforce these same safety over profit approaches to regulation if the government is unable to match the expertise of the nuclear industry. Advanced nuclear may also seek to concentrate risks in marginalized communities if technologists and corporations shape the design, distribution, and operations of advanced reactors in full. Viewing risk as avoidable via intentional infrastructure and design decisions, instead of something that is totally "unavoidable," could potentially guide safety mechanisms in the nuclear industry down a more community-centered path.

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Photo: Crosswalk of Market at Third, San Francisco. Dllu / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons