This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on October 28, 2024. It is the third and final article in a series looking at the ongoing trend in North America for ever bigger and taller pickups and SUVs, and some of the problems these pose both for human health and safety, and for the health of the planet. In this article we look at what governments in Canada could, at least in theory, do to tackle the bloat. Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.

For 10 years Ben MacLeod watched from afar what was happening in his home town of Halifax, and was pleased to see HRM Council undertaking “progressive initiatives” on traffic safety, and the “gradual construction of the bike lane network.”

“It was exciting to see them moving in the right direction,” he said in an interview.

MacLeod, an urban planner and sustainable transportation advocate, had moved to Hong Kong in 2012, and in 2022 moved back to Halifax, where he grew up.

“I was excited to come back to see what’s changed,” he said.

What MacLeod didn’t bargain on, what made him “a little bit shocked” when he got home, however, was the “design trends” in the vehicles on the roads, and how prevalent big vehicles had become.

“Eighty-six percent of new vehicles in Canada are now SUVs [sports utility vehicles] and pickup trucks, which is shocking,” said MacLeod, who doesn’t own a car and mostly gets around on foot or on bicycle.

MacLeod found the preponderance of big SUVs and pickups in an urban area confounding.

On one hand, he said, Halifax had been “moving in the right direction to redress the dominance of cars and the design of streets, to make things a little more equitable between different types of road users.” On the other, the vehicles that were on the roads were larger and more imposing than ever before.

“There are already enough negative externalities of car culture,” MacLeod said. “And all of these negative effects are worsened when the vehicles are larger. Safety outcomes are worse, noise gets worse, air pollution gets worse. And they undermine efforts to make cities more walkable and bikeable.”

MacLeod recognizes that there are practical aspects of pickups as work vehicles, but notes that in other countries, work gets done without such large vehicles.

“They have these little work trucks in Japan and Korea, and the bed sizes in those are even larger than the beds in giant American pickups,” MacLeod said.

MacLeod supports policies that might help curb vehicle size, such as the one proposed by Coun. Shawn Cleary to have HRM examine revisions to residential parking permits. This would involve differential fees based on length or weight of the vehicle, with higher fees for longer vehicles.

Higher parking fees for vehicles the size of ‘tanks’

In 2023, a borough in Montreal took the unprecedented (in Canada) move of linking annual parking fees to the weight and size of the vehicles, with special dispensations for electric cars and people with disabilities or low incomes. In studying the issue, the borough council noted that between 2001 and 2021, the number of light-use trucks in Canada rose by 189.7%.

The mayor of the borough, François Limoges, told Bloomberg, “It’s an idea that makes sense if you want to make a lively, a human-scale city. You cannot do nothing about the fact that cars are the size of Second World War tanks.”

Some vehicles are indeed that big.

Tackling the vehicle bloat …or not

Municipal parking policies may be the easiest place to start tackling the vehicle bloat, according to Albert Koehl, coordinator of the Canadian Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards (C.R.A.S.H.).

“I think that’s probably one of the easiest ways for municipalities to prevent this incursion of these big vehicles, which have spread from rural areas into cities,” Koehl said in an interview. “People pay attention when their pocketbooks are affected.”

“We have a lot to lose in cities from trying to accommodate these monster vehicles,” he added.

Koehl said the large pickups that take up all the extra space also have lower fuel efficiency than smaller pickups, and the size and weight of these larger trucks “isn’t a function, it’s a fashion.”

Koehl describes the high, blunt, imposing front ends of the pickups as “purely decorative,” meant to “boost the ego” of the driver. He worries that industry is now starting to push electric pickups that look the same.

“And what’s in the front end of those electric pickups?” Koehl asked, before answering himself. “Nothing, there’s not even a motor in there.”

Koehl said these high and dangerous front ends are “selling features,” and that vans with a different front profile and closed cargo space are actually more functional.

The marketing of oversize vehicles, Koehl believes, is something the federal government should do something about, but he’s not holding his breath. Members of C.R.A.S.H. have met with the federal government, he said, but so far made no headway.

“They’ve been really good at crafting excuses and saying ‘We’re one market [with the U.S.], and we can’t do this alone.”

Koehl said now that the National Highway Safety Administration in the U.S. has adopted new vehicle safety testing and standards to protect pedestrians from these large vehicles, C.R.A.S.H. intends to go back to the federal government in Ottawa to point out that excuse no longer holds. (Part 1 of this series describes the U.S. proposal to protect pedestrians from vehicles with tall, blunt front ends.)

A role for three levels of government

The C.R.A.S.H. report offers detailed recommendations for three levels of government in Canada — federal, provincial and municipal.

Among other things, C.R.A.S.H. recommends that the federal government:

• within six months, do a full review of “greater danger of pickups and large SUVs,” publish it, and act on it to ensure these vehicles “are no more dangerous than conventional cars”
• within 18 months update the Canada Motor Vehicle Standards to include an assessment of the risks to pedestrians and cyclists in crashes with motor vehicles in the test criteria
• require advertisers to include warnings about the greater dangers of pickups and large SUVs to other road users

C.R.A.S.H. wants municipal governments to increase parking fees for pickups and large SUVs to reflect the actual space they require, to update Vision Zero and related municipal safety plans so they highlight the dangers of pickups and large SUVs, and to restrict their use in heavy pedestrian and cycling traffic.

C.R.A.S.H. also has recommendations for provincial governments. Among them:

• create a new class of driver’s licence for pickups and large SUVs
• reintroduce vehicle registration taxes and other fees based on size, weight, and horsepower
• update highway traffic laws, imposing a ban on right turns at red lights, and imposing increased fines for traffic offences committed by drivers of such vehicles

NS government ‘not aware’ of report

I contacted Nova Scotia Public Works with a list of questions related to pickups and large SUVs, asking whether it was aware of the C.R.A.S.H. report recommendations and willing to implement them.

A public works spokesperson replied that the department was “not aware” of the report. He sent this statement, which doesn’t even acknowledge the issue of vehicle bloat:

We are always looking for ways to make our roads safer for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable road users. Right now, we are preparing to implement the Traffic Safety Act, which will improve safety on the province’s roads. The Act will establish a modern, flexible framework which will make it easier for government to make changes in the future.

Motor Vehicles sold in Canada must meet strict safety standards that are administered by Transport Canada at a Federal level. Similarly, National Safety Code standards are used to guide drivers license regulations at a provincial level. Provincial governments, Federal governments, and Automotive manufacturers are constantly working together to continually improve the design of vehicle and driver standards.

Automakers using tobacco industry playbook?

Oversized pickups and SUVs are just as popular and ubiquitous — and sometimes even fetishized — in Nova Scotia as they are elsewhere in North America.

Nova Scotia’s Ecology Action Centre (EAC) is currently “in conversation” with Équiterre, a Canadian research and advocacy organization striving for an ecological transition, about teaming up on a national campaign.

In the meantime, Anika Riopel, EAC senior sustainable transportation coordinator, tells the Examiner she is “very obsessed” with the issue of ever-larger vehicles. “They are ultimately unnecessary for the tasks most people use them for — so a huge waste of energy,” she said.

Riopel is also concerned about the growing size of electric vehicles (EVs) in Canada. “Our North American auto industry makes more money off SUVs and trucks than small economy cars,” she wrote in an email. “As we shift to EVs, most North American companies are only making electric SUVS and trucks, or luxury models.”

“The federal government is very invested in protecting our automotive industry because they are good jobs,” Riopel said. “So not only are we not making small EVs, we’re also imposing tariffs on importing them from overseas.”

Riopel refers to a 2022 statement from the Ecology Action Centre:

Car companies would rather sell you a gas guzzler instead of an electric car because they make more money that way. The auto lobby is fighting against enforcing ZEV [zero emission vehicle] sales targets because it would disrupt their profit-maximizing sales plans.

Riopel and EAC are in favour of electric vehicles, she said, but added:

The movement of people and goods requires multi-modal means of transportation. EVs are a part of the puzzle of de-fossilizing the sector. But we need smaller EVs for this shift to be effective and equitable so that everyone can actually afford them.

Riopel also suggested there is a lesson to be learned from the way industry has influenced governments to sidestep emission and safety regulations by producing ever bigger vehicles that regulators view as “light trucks,” and not acknowledging that these giant pickups and SUVs are bad for us, our cities, our roads, the environment and the climate.

“There is an interesting parallel between the lobbying of the auto industry and that of the tobacco industry (of bygone years),” Riopel said. “We know big cars are bad for us but we aren’t doing anything to regulate the industry.”

End of three-part series. Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.

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