BMJ  2006;333:199 (22 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7560.199-c

Letter

Death on the roads

Perceived threat is important in road safety

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—As Walker et al show, the more insulated and "safe" drivers are from the consequences of their behaviour the more likely they are to drive more dangerously.¹

However, sports utility vehicles (SUVs) differ in one important way from the engineering features—seat belts, airbags, and antilock breaking systems, for example—that have often provided data on risk and behaviour. Engineering features are unobtrusive to the casual observer, whereas SUVs are immediately noticeable because of their great size compared with other private cars. The size of SUVs plausibly makes them unusually threatening to other car drivers, if only because visual size at the eye is a determinant of perceived distance: a larger vehicle is inherently more likely to appear unduly close.² Hence other car drivers may be more cautious in the presence of SUVs, which in turn may exacerbate SUV drivers' tendency to risky behaviour.

In contrast, anecdotally, drivers of small . . . [Full text of this article]

University of Ulster, Newtonabbey, County Antrim BT37 0QB ah.reinhardt-rutland@ulster.ac.uk

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