two thirds of ute trips are happening in cities<\/a>,” she said.<\/p>\n“And they’re just particularly dangerous in cities, seven times more likely to kill you if they hit you, particularly dangerous to kids, and [cities are] where air pollution is a real problem, having 3000 early deaths every year due to our air pollution problems.”<\/p>\n
The shape and size of utes made them significantly more damaging in a crash, Wild said.<\/p>\n
“The traditional bonnet of a car, it’s sloped and fairly soft, it’s designed to reduce some of the impact, you go up on the bonnet. With [utes] they’re very high, instead of hitting you in the legs they hit you in the chest and are more likely to drag you under the car,” she said.<\/p>\n
Wild and her colleague Professor Alistair Woodward were spearheading calls for a tax to discourage people from buying utes if they did not need them.<\/p>\n
“Thinking about whether there [should be] higher charges for things like congestion charges, and also asking councils not to do things like make parking spaces bigger to accommodate these vehicles which just encourages it,” Wild continued.<\/p>\n
That could extend to a ban on advertising.<\/p>\n
“[Utes] are one of the most heavily marketed commodities in the world, and like we see with other harmful commodities, things like tobacco, yeah I think there’s a case [for] restrictions on advertising.”<\/p>\n
Such a thing was not unprecedented, she explained.<\/p>\n
“There are a range of things that have been implemented, mostly in Europe, around sales taxes, around parking taxes, and in general they don’t have the same problem because they have better pollution standards and pedestrian protection standards in their transport planning.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health researchers at the University of Auckland have suggested a tax on utes in response to high emissions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,22065,63,137,500,16861],"class_list":{"0":"post-629538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-auckland","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-transport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}