Over the past summer, I used a pickup truck nearly every day to transport materials for my house-painting job in Vermont. The extra cargo space of the truck bed was essential for carrying tools and supplies. My experience made clear to me that pickups are a critical resource for many working Americans.

But more broadly, these vehicles pose significant environmental and safety issues and our regulatory environment should be used to limit, not promote, their continuing adoption by the general public.

Pickup trucks have spiked in both popularity and size in recent years. From 2000 to 2018 pickup trucks have increased in weight by 24%, and they now account for one of every five vehicles sold. Both of these upward trends have combined to create a vicious cycle in which vehicles are only getting bigger, creating ever worsening safety and environmental issues.

One of Newton’s fundamental laws of physics is that Force = Mass x Acceleration (F=MA). It is, therefore, people’s basic survival instinct that makes them feel unsafe when driving a small car with 6,000-pound battering rams hurtling down the road next to them.

This vehicular arms race was described by one YouTube commenter who said “My wife was in an accident last year with a F-series pickup. She was driving her Chevy Spark. The pickup sustained minimal body damage and all its occupants were completely unharmed. My wife’s vehicle was crumpled beyond repair and the crash smashed her knee so badly she needed surgery, a bone graft, and had her knee completely rebuilt. She was unable to walk without crutches for 3 months.” Once his wife recovered, she did not feel safe driving a small car so she replaced her small, 30-mpg car with a larger one that got 18 mpg.

In addition to endangering fellow drivers, pickups also harm the environment. Demonstrated again by Newton’s fundamental law of physics F=MA, pickups require more force and thus more energy to be moved than smaller cars. The extension of this equation is that more energy equals more emissions which is worse for the environment.

But it does not stop there. Not only are pickup trucks worse for the environment and a danger to other cars and drivers, they also threaten those not even driving. Pedestrians are two to three times more likely to suffer a fatality when struck by an SUV or pickup truck than when struck by a passenger car.

The profound irony behind the harm caused by trucks is that the U.S. government is encouraging the sales of pickup trucks through regulations. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, also known as CAFE, are government-set miles per gallon minimums for vehicles. The fuel efficiency that pickups must reach is lower than what cars are required to have. According to Dan Becker, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign, “(t)he auto industry has really been the main fighter (against) improvements to the CAFE standards.” While the narrative that the car companies have pushed is that the fuel regulations should reflect the working needs of a niche market of laborers, the car companies have simultaneously marketed these trucks to the full spectrum of American society.

The result of this broad marketing is that while the majority of pickups used to be two-door models, today 81% of pickups bought “are more accommodating four-door crew cab configurations that are often designed to transport families.” Further, “consumers are flocking to top models loaded with upscale features like sunroofs and heated steering wheels typically found in premium consumer cars.” I currently live in New York City, and despite the notorious lack of space, I see countless pickup trucks barreling down the avenues, nearly all of them transporting only a driver and carrying nothing in their beds.

It would be relatively straightforward to allow for working vehicles while requiring that cars for the majority of citizens were right-sized, safe and efficient. A necessary first-step would be to change the CAFE standards to incentivize smaller cars, a complete reversal of the current incentives. Regulations surrounding the justified purchase of a pickup truck should be implemented. This could be relatively easily achieved by requiring pickups to have commercial license plates. Under this scheme, pickups could still be readily available for rent when needed.

In addition to the safety and environmental benefits of promoting a shift to smaller cars, there would likely be economic advantages as well because the average pickup is now priced at almost $50,000. Ultimately, it should be hard, and expensive, for consumers to purchase gargantuan 3-ton tanks for personal enjoyment, and easy and affordable to purchase efficient, sensible and appropriately sized cars.

Norwich native Soren Stettenheim is a student at Columbia University.