I'm about to buy a cool S.U.V., but my friends act as if I'm some kind of criminal. Am I?

It depends where you drive. If it's on the unforgiving lunar surface, no harm done. If you do a lot of off-road driving here on earth, the harm might be justified by need. But if you do most of your driving on paved American roads, then your friends are right.

S.U.V.'s are inherently dangerous, not for their own passengers but for everyone else. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the height and weight of S.U.V.'s make them responsible for roughly 2,000 additional deaths a year, and 20 times more likely than a conventional vehicle to kill other motorists in side collisions. If you have no compelling need for the S.U.V.'s off-road features -- i.e., if your sport utility vehicle has no utility -- there's no way to justify endangering others so you can play cowboy. Why should your fellow motorists support your life style with their life span?

Indeed, in a city like New York, where the population is dense and the public transportation excellent, it's abhorrent to drive any kind of car at all. Last year, 193 pedestrians and bicyclists were killed by cars, and approximately 15,800 were injured. And that's not the half of it. "When you talk about damage caused by cars," says John Kaehny, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, "you also have to talk about emissions, noise pollution, damage to buildings, delays to motorists, ambulances and deliveries, damage from fuel extraction and shipping and the cost of national security to secure oil lines." And that toll ($19 billion a year by one credible estimate) is shouldered by all citizens, though far fewer than half actually have a car. Even beautiful preserves like Central Park and Prospect Park allow motorists to speed through, disrupting family picnics in the name of a quicker route to the store. Surely a benign urban vision requires a distinction between a park and a parking lot.

So if you're planning to drive that S.U.V. in New York, pack a suitcase into your roomy cargo area, because you're driving straight to hell.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann