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You feel it every morning at the school gate. The roads feel tighter, the air heavier, and the vehicles towering over our children look more like tanks than family cars.
It’s not just a feeling. It’s a crisis.
This is "carspreading"—a dangerous phenomenon where vehicles are growing longer, wider, and - lethally - higher. The average bonnet height increases by 0.5cm every single year. We are letting our streets be swallowed by vehicles that are getting bigger, while our children’s independence is shrinking.
What’s the problem?
We’re sold these massive vehicles on the promise of "safety." And while the driver inside might feel secure, the child outside is the potential victim. The stats are brutal: a child is three times more likely to be killed if struck by a large SUV than by a standard passenger car.
This isn't an accident; it's a design failure.
1. The Blind Spot Crisis
Drivers in high-bonneted vehicles face a terrifying problem: they often cannot see what’s directly in front of them. A driver in a massive SUV will be unable to see a four year-old child standing in their path. In the area around a school, those few seconds of lost visibility mean the difference between a child walking home and a tragedy.
2. The Physics of Impact
The design of these vehicles is fundamentally violent. Traditional cars have lower, sloping bonnets that sweep a pedestrian onto the hood or away from the impact. SUVs and massive trucks have tall, blunt fronts. They hit a child directly in the head or chest and push them under the car. That is why the fatality rate for children is so much higher. And the more common these cars become, the greater the threat they are to our kids on their daily journeys.
We are losing our cities
This isn't just about safety; it's about the space our children have to exist. Public space is being cannibalised for oversized metal boxes. The scale of this land-grab is staggering. In London, the 800,000 SUVs now on the road occupy the same footprint as the entire Borough of Kensington and Chelsea - space that could be used for homes, parks, or community life. We are sacrificing our public realm to accommodate private vehicles, when according to the 2021 census 42% of Londoners don’t have a car.
And although it might feel like everyone on the school run is driving there in an enormous car, that is not the case. In London 75% of primary school children are walking, cycling or taking public transport, but they are doing it surrounded by cars. A minority of children are driven to school, but the nature of cars - in particular SUVs - is that they are bigger, more cumbersome and take up much more space than people, so they dominate.
We need a change - now
Twenty years ago, SUVs comprised just 3% of cars on our roads; today, that figure is 30%. This isn't just a change in consumer preference - it's a deliberate shift in the market. Manufacturers are deprioritising safer, appropriately sized vehicles in favour of massive, high-bonnet SUVs. This trend is a public safety emergency. We need politicians and decision-makers to act now to signal a change in policy and reverse this trend. As the number of these oversized vehicles increases, so too do deaths and injuries. We need to reverse 'carspreading'.
What next?
From bonnet height limits to enabling cargo bikes - check out what we think the solutions are here (coming soon).
Get involved.
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