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

Pedestrians may be twice as likely to be hit by electric or hybrid vehicles compared with those running on petrol or diesel, according to a 2013-2017 study of casualty rates in the UK published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

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

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.

To explore this further, the researchers compared the differences in pedestrian injury rates for every 100 million miles of road travel in the UK between electric/hybrid cars and fossil fuel cars, using road safety data (STATS19). They estimated annual miles travelled using data from the National Travel Survey (NTS). This data only began to include hybrid cars as a fuel type in 2013, and an archiving glitch prevented relevant data from 2018 being downloaded – hence the chosen study period of 2013–2017.

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

Between 2013 and 2017, there were 916,713 road traffic casualties recorded in the UK. Of these, 120,197 were pedestrians, 96,285 of whom were hit by a car or taxi.

Three-quarters of those pedestrians – 71,666 (74%) – were hit by a petrol or diesel car or taxi. Some 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%. This compared with 6% and 12% respectively in rural areas.

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

This suggests that pedestrian collisions were, on average, twice as likely with electric and hybrid vehicles than with petrol and diesel cars, and three times more likely in urban areas than in rural areas, the researchers say.

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

In addition, younger, less experienced drivers are more likely to be involved in road accidents 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 environments," the researchers write.

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

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

They conclude by noting that the increased risk to pedestrians associated with electric and hybrid vehicles "needs to be mitigated as governments continue to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles."