Pedestrian safety is a small portion of all the other safety measures that have increased vehicle weight. The point I'm trying to make is not that these measur

Pedestrian safety is a small portion of all the other safety measures that have increased vehicle weight. The point I'm trying to make is not that these measures aren't useful, but that had these resources been spent on more clever road design and traffic rules, the overall safety increases would have been higher. You don't need seatbelts on a subway train (heck, you can even stand up!) because the likelihood of an accident is almost nil. It's my opinion that that's the ideal governments should have been after with road safety for passenger cars. -------- EDIT: I guess I made some pretty big claims without any numbers to back them up. Here's something [0]. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) found that weight ratios for modern cars have been getting worse, in part because of safety regulations. The top commenter on the original IEEE article cites additional beams inside doors and more metal in the roof supports to meet rollover standards [1]. For some perspective, the average vehicle-to-passenger weight for the Model T was 7.7. A Boeing 787's ratio is 6.3. For the average modern passenger car, it's 25.7 (!!). Both figures assume the only occupant is a single 154-lb person. [0] http://www.autoblog.com/2015/01/02/breaking-down-vehicle-weight-to-payload-ratio/ http://www.autoblog.com/2015/01/02/breaking-down-vehicle-wei... [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/cars-weigh-too-much http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/cars-weigh-too-much