Daily Score Blog

This isn't really news, in that we've known for a while that SUVs aren't necessarily safer than cars, but a new study in Pediatrics shows that, compared with sedans, driving an SUV doesn't make your kids any safer. To some extent, bulk may give SUVs an advantage in collisions with smaller vehicles.  But because of their height and weight, SUVs are twice as likely to roll over than are cars -- and rollover accidents are particularly dangerous to kids, with three times the risk of serious injury as accidents with no rollover.  On net, the increased rollover risk cancels out the purported benefit of a heavier vehicle.

So SUVs don't make your kids safer. But there are things that will help -- including properly restraining children with car seats and seat belts. Restrained children face a 2 or 3 percent injury risk in passenger cars and SUVs respectively--not much difference there. By contrast, leaving children loose in a car or SUV quadruples their risk in a crash. And in an SUV rollover, the risk is twenty-five times higher.

Another recent study works through the physics of rollovers (pdf): SUVs with a King-of-the-road view can raise the center of gravity--especially when loaded with passengers and cargo--enough to tip on a hard turn. This same study also goes over what makes light trucks more dangerous to other cars, even when ignoring their worse handling and longer stopping distance.

Poverty rates are higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts. But it's easier to make ends meet in the deep south, where the staples of existence generally cost less. So which place really has worse poverty?

Among the more annoying problems with US poverty rates--and the problems are legion--is that comparisons between states can be spurious because the rates do not account for differences in the cost of living. So in an attempt to straighten things out, I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation today to find out where poverty hits the hardest. (Assuming that median household income is a decent proxy for the cost of living, I adjusted state poverty rates by incomes. This has been done before, in lots of more complicated ways, but I wanted to figure out something specific.)

As it turns out, the worst states are still the worst--Mississippi, Washington, DC, and Texas have the highest rates of poverty by either accounting. Same for the best--New Hampshire, Minnesota, and the northeast states are the best in the nation using either method. But in the Pacific Northwest, things get interesting--and Washington is the biggest loser.

Some more good, or at least interesting, news for 2004:  teen birth rates in Cascadia hit an all-time low. There were just under 27 live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, according to final data for the year.  That's probably not just the lowest rate in recent history, but the lowest since humans first inhabited this place.

(Just to be clear: we spend a lot of our time comparing trends in BC, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho -- the main political jurisdictions whose rivers flow through the temperate rainforests on the Pacific Northwest coast.  For short, we call the region "Cascadia."  End of public service announcement.)

Teen births throughout the region have fallen by about 57 percent since 1970.  But they've fallen unevenly, as the chart shows.  In the Northwest states, teen pregnancy rates are about half of what they were in 1970.  In British Columbia, however, teen pregnancies fell by an astonishing four-fifths over the same period.  Or, said differently -- teen birthrates in BC and the Northwest states used to be quite comparable.  Now, the teen birthrate is more than three times as high in the Northwest US as in BC.

As with many social and environmental trends, BC more and more looks like, well, it's in a different country than Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.  Gasoline consumption, sprawl, health, teen births -- on these measures and many others, BC substantially outperforms the Northwest states; and on many of them BC's lead just keeps getting bigger.  I'm not sure what this means; perhaps nothing. But it may also be a sign that the politics and cultures of these neighbors are gradually diverging.

Regardless, given the similarities in climate, language, and history between the two halves of Cascadia, the differences between BC and the US Northwest demonstrate--fairly convincingly it seems to me--that minor differences in policy and outlook can gradually add up to huge differences in outcomes.