Motor Vehicle Fuel Efficiency and Traffic Fatalities

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of changes in average fuel efficiency on traffic-related fatalities while controlling for other confounding effects. These other effects include population, per capita income, per capita alcohol consumption, existence of safety-belt laws (and safety-belt usage), and age cohorts in the population. State-level time-series data over 24 years is used with a fixed effect negative binomial regression model that accounts for both the distributional properties of accident count data and heterogeneity. Other studies of this issue have not used either panel data in this way nor have they used appropriate statistical methods for count data. Results vary with the selection of the time series used. Overall results suggest that while there may have been an association between fleet fuel efficiency improvements and traffic fatalities in the 1970s, this has largely disappeared. There are suggestions that variance in the composition of the vehicle fleet may have adverse safety impacts.

Pounds That Kill: The External Costs of Vehicle Weight

“…A large traffic safety literature examines the relationship between average vehicle weight and traffic fatality rates. Most of this literature estimates aggregate time series correlations (Robertson, 1991;Khazzoom, 1994;Noland, 2004;Ahmad and Greene, 2005).…”

Automobile Externalities and Policies

“…37 It was not long after the first emissions standards were put in place, however, before regulators 35 See for example Crandall and Graham (1989), Khazzoom (1997), Kahane (1997), andNoland (2004). 36 Due to its unique air quality problems, California can set its own standards, and these have generally been stricter than the federal standards; all other states must adopt either the federal or the California standards.…”

“…Most of the empirical literature on this issue has focused on the relation between vehicle size/weight and total highway fatalities or injuries (e.g., Crandall and Graham 1989, Khazzoom 1997, Kahane 1997, Coate and VanderHoff 2001, Noland 2004. But for our purposes, we are interested in how (marginal) external costs differ across vehicle types; external costs are quite different from total injuries as they exclude own-driver injury risks, but include property damage, travel delay, and other costs listed in Table 2.…”

The Effect of Fuel Economy Standards on Vehicle Weight Dispersion and Accident Fatalities

“…This would suggest that CAFE increased fatalities by 2,000 to 3,000 annually. Several follow-on papers used the same variation but different model specifications to come to different conclusions (Noland, 2004;Ahmad and Greene, 2005). More recently, the focus has moved to vehicle weight dispersion and in this literature CAFE is modeled as changing relative prices in order to shift drivers towards more efficient vehicle classes (White, 2004;Jacobsen, 2013b).…”