Category: Blog

In 1961, my wife was in a white VW Beetle.  She stalled coming out of a shopping center at night and was struck on the driver side by a car coming over a hill.  The driver swerved to the right and struck the VW just behind the driver side door.  Luckily, my wife was not physically injured but she was  badly shaken.  I had picked white as the color because it would be cooler (no air conditioning). I was not thinking safety back then.

Seehttps://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812318

Years ago the Federal Highway Administration published a poster for the public with the statistic that 60% of pedestrian fatalities occur between the hours of 6:00pm and 6:00am.  The “Be Safe, Be Bright” poster shows distances at which pedestrians can be seen wearing clothing of different colors – and retro reflective materials.  See https://www.careforcrashvictims.com/besafe.php

Many worthy articles on how engineers can move us closer to ending vehicle violence thanks to the publisher Tony Robinson and his staff.

One illuminating factor in this reporting is that it goes beyond statistics of the deaths, but also addresses the suffering of tragic injuries.  “Thomas Comella and Victoria Thomas have suffered so much already it would be best for them not to know that three legislators are now telling federal regulators that the seat backs in American vehicles are too weak and can easily collapse in rear-impact crashes.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Diana Degette of Colorado say the failure of seat backs can cause the driver or front-seat passenger to be flung into the back seat, suffering serious injuries or killing a child seated back there.

The Senators say the federal safety standard – adopted in 1972 – must be upgraded.

Comella and Thomas have known that for almost two decades.

It was how their worlds ended.

Comella, 50, was driving a minivan outside of Cleveland in 1999 when traffic slowed. His vehicle was hit from behind. He remembers the impact being slight, similar to getting bumped by one of those Dodgem bumper cars at an amusement park.

But his seat back broke. The seat belt no longer held him because seat belts are designed to keep occupants from being thrown forward. When he hit the back seat he suffered a spinal injury that left him blind and paralyzed except for the very limited use of his arms.”  

Thomas was 19 in 1997 when her car slid backwards into a pole, striking with a force estimated at about 11 miles per hour. The seat back broke. She suffered a spinal injury that paralyzed her legs.

I talked to Comella and Thomas and wrote about seat-back failures 15 years ago when I was covering automotive safety for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. I’ll post the full story below; but the short version is that way back then seat-back failure was a well-known issue and safety researchers said there were solutions.” See http://www.forbes.com/sites/jensen/2016/11/29/seat-back-collapse-15-years-later-feds-still-fail-to-address-a-deadly-problem/#7f0e4026585b

* Ralph Nader

* Ben Kelley

* Mike Lemov

* Carl Nash

* Jackie Gillan

* Judith Lee Stone

The President’s Pen – Regulations

“Dozens of major regulations passed recently by the Obama administration — including far-reaching changes on health care, consumer protections and environmental safety — could be undone with the stroke of a pen by Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress starting in January, thanks to a little-used law that dates back to 1996.

And it comes with a scorched-earth kicker: If the law is used to strike down a rule, the federal agency that issued it is barred from enacting similar regulation again in the future.

The obscure law — called the Congressional Review Act — was passed 20 years ago at the behest of Newt Gingrich, then the House speaker and now a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team. It gives Congress 60 legislative days to review and override major regulations enacted by federal agencies. In the Senate, the vote would not be subject to filibuster.

The president can veto the rejection, which usually renders the law toothless. But when one party controls both the White House and Congress, it can be a powerful legislative weapon.

So far it has only been successfully used once: In 2001, a Republican Congress invoked it to eliminate workplace safety regulations adopted in the final months of President Clinton’s tenure. President George W. Bush signed the repeal two months after his inauguration, wiping out stricter ergonomics rules that had been 10 years in the making.

On Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump takes office with a Republican-controlled Congress — one that has indicated its zeal for undoing President Obama’s doings — more than 150 rules adopted since late May are potentially vulnerable to the ax, according to an analysis by the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center.

“It allows the election results to be applied almost retroactively, to snip off activity that happened at the end of the last administration,” said Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown.”  See

The Corporate Executive Pens – Designs

After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. And the numbers so far this year are even worse. In the first six months of 2016, highway deaths jumped 10.4 percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.  See statistics at https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812332

“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, said in an interview….

“Most new vehicles sold today have software that connects to a smartphone and allows drivers to place phone calls, dictate texts and use apps hands-free. Ford Motor has its Sync system, for example. Others, including Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, offer their own interfaces as well as Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto.

Automakers say these systems enable customers to concentrate on driving even while interacting with their smartphones.

“The whole principle is to bring voice recognition to customers so they can keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel,” said Alan Hall, a spokesman for Ford, which began installing Sync in cars in 2007….

But Deborah Hersman, president of the nonprofit National Safety Council and a former chairwoman of the federal National Transportation Safety Board, said it was not clear how much those various technologies reduced distraction — or, instead, encouraged people to use even more functions on their phones while driving. And freeing the drivers’ hands does not necessarily clear their heads.  “It’s the cognitive workload on your brain that’s the problem,” Ms. Hersman said….

“Insurance companies, which closely track auto accidents, are convinced that the increasing use of electronic devices while driving is the biggest cause of the rise in road fatalities, according to Robert Gordon, a senior vice president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

“This is a serious public safety concern for the nation,”  See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/tech-distractions-blamed-for-rise-in-traffic-fatalities.html

These two article in the NY Times show how we the people need the press to provide the public with the information to use our own pens to protect our safety and happiness.   Our pens can and must need be the mightiest – especially in this new world of connected citizenry.

Here’s hope for a safer future for all.

Lou Lombardo