Two local pedestrians were hit by cars in one weekend in Los Alamos. One was an 11-year-old child who walked away, thankfully, with minor injuries. The other was a 68-year-old man who died. Both were in crosswalks; both cases were attributed to a driver failing to yield.

The vehicles were different: was that a factor? Will we ever know? The child was hit by a small sedan. The adult was hit by a large pickup truck that appears, from photos, to have been modified to be even taller. (Stock model hood height is already 51” for this truck.) Research shows that taller, heavier vehicles with high, flat front ends are far more likely to kill pedestrians. It’s not just speed and weight: the higher on the body the strike, the more possibility of severe head injuries.

But if we’re waiting for the investigation to find out if that was a factor, we’ll probably wait forever. Crash reports usually ignore vehicle design. They assign responsibility to individual drivers and focus on immediate behavior and road conditions. Not the vehicle itself. American trucks are designed to look muscular and scary. They are scary: they kill people. But nobody talks about that; especially not those who assign responsibility for death and severe injury.

So responsibility stops with the individual road user. No one is held responsible for the systems that shape these outcomes—not the engineers who design the roads, and not the manufacturers designing increasingly lethal vehicles.