Electric cars and hybrids hit pedestrians twice as often as petrol and diesel cars

Pedestrians may be twice as likely to be struck by electric or hybrid cars compared to those powered by petrol or diesel, according to a 2013-2017 study of UK casualty rates published online in Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

The risk is higher in urban areas, and governments need to take action to reduce the risk as they phase out fossil fuel cars to improve air quality and combat climate change, researchers insist. Road accidents are the leading cause of death for children and young people, and 1 in 4 road deaths are pedestrians, they note.

With the ongoing shift to electric and hybrid vehicles, there are concerns that these vehicles may pose a greater danger to pedestrians than fossil fuel vehicles because they are quieter, especially in urban areas where background noise levels are higher. p>

To further explore this issue, the researchers compared the differences in pedestrian injury rates per 100 million miles driven in the UK between electric/hybrid and fossil fuel vehicles using road safety data (STATS19). They estimated annual mileage using data from the National Travel Survey (NTS). The data only began including hybrid vehicles as a fuel type in 2013, and an archiving glitch prevented the corresponding data from being loaded from 2018 onward—hence the study period chosen from 2013 to 2017.

A total of 32 billion miles driven by electric/hybrid vehicles and 3 trillion miles driven by gasoline/diesel vehicles were included in the analysis.

From 2013 to 2017, there were 916,713 people injured in road traffic accidents in the UK. Of these, 120,197 were pedestrians, 96,285 of whom were hit by a car or taxi.

Three quarters of these pedestrians - 71,666 (74%) - were hit by a car or taxi powered by petrol or diesel. About 1,652 (2%) were hit by an electric or hybrid vehicle. But in almost 1 in 4 cases (22,829; 24%) the vehicle type code was missing.

Most collisions occurred in urban areas, with more collisions involving electric or hybrid vehicles than petrol/diesel vehicles: 94% versus 88%. That's compared with 6% and 12%, respectively, in rural areas.

Based on that data, the researchers calculated that from 2013 to 2017, the average annual pedestrian injury rates for every 100 million miles traveled were 5.16 for electric and hybrid vehicles and 2.40 for gasoline and diesel vehicles.

That suggests pedestrian collisions were, on average, twice as likely with electric and hybrid vehicles than with gasoline and diesel vehicles, and three times as likely in urban areas than in rural areas, the researchers say.

They acknowledge several limitations to their findings, including a lack of data after 2017 and a lack of vehicle coding in nearly a quarter of cases.

Additionally, younger, less experienced drivers are more likely to be involved in crashes and are also more likely to own an electric vehicle, which may explain some of the observed increased risk associated with these vehicles, they suggest.

"More pedestrians in the UK are injured by petrol and diesel cars than by electric vehicles, but compared with petrol and diesel cars, electric vehicles pose a greater risk to pedestrians, and the risk is greater in urban settings," the researchers write.

"One plausible explanation for our results is that background noise levels differ between urban and rural areas, making electric vehicles less audible to pedestrians in urban areas," they suggest.

"From a public health perspective, our results should not discourage active forms of transport that have health benefits, such as walking and cycling; rather, they can be used to understand and prevent potentially increased road traffic injury risks," they emphasize.

They conclude by noting that the increased risks to pedestrians posed by electric and hybrid vehicles "need to be mitigated as governments continue to phase out gasoline and diesel vehicles."