Dear Care for Crash Victims Community Members:
People who want to make future Mothers Days happier need to see and hear people who have already done so much to know more about “How It’s Done”. See
What should Hours of Service Rules be for safety on the roads?
I have often thought that if anyone in a position of responsibility for governing this question were required to spend one week riding with a truck driver before voting or acting on it in the Executive or Judicial branches, the rule would be closer to:* 40 hour week* 5 day week maximum
* 8 hour day with 1/2 hour for lunch and two 15 minute breaks in each 4 hour stretch.
Dear Care for Crash Victims Community Members:
Nader to give us all information, insights and inspiration on how to advance safety. See C-Span Interview at
Trucks.com reports on the Conference that included testimony from safety advocate Marianne Karth and others.
“The industry should “move heaven and earth to make the best-possible protection,” said Marianne Karth.
Karth’s teenage daughters AnnaLeah and Mary, riding in the back seat, died from injuries in a 2013 underride accident. Karth’s Ford Crown Victoria was hit by a truck, spun, hit again and shoved backwards under another semi-trailer, flattening the rear of the passenger compartment.
Federal regulations require trailers and some straight trucks to be equipped with rear underride guards – the bars than hang down on the back of trucks and trailers. In fact, regulation requiring modest underride guards have been in place in the U.S. since 1953.
“It’s incredible that we have vehicles today that we can underride,” Molloy said.…
There’s uncertainty over the seemingly straightforward notion of how many people are killed each year in all types of underride accidents.
Federal data from the widely used Fatality Analysis Reporting System logged 5,081 deaths from 1994 to 2014.
Yearly counts range from a low of 198 in 2001 to a high of 299 in 2002. The 2014 count is 228; 2015 data aren’t available yet.
But a September 2013 report from the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine calculated that fatalities from one type of underride collision, the side-crash, are about three times as frequent as the federal data indicates. That’s why some critics are saying the federal data does not represent an accurate fatality count from all types of underride crashes.
The underride crash problem has been debated for decades. Back in 1991 NHTSA rejected extending requirements to prevent underride crashes, stating, “Combination truck side underride countermeasures have been determined not to be cost effective.”
See https://www.trucks.com/2016/05/06/traffic-experts-debate-how-to-prevent-deadly-truck-crashes/
The January 2016 petition by Consumer Watchdog, the Center for Auto Safety and Joan Claybrook, former NHTSA Administrator and now President Emeritus of Public Citizen, asked the agency to require Automatic Emergency Braking, a set of three new technologies to prevent collisions, as standard equipment. But in March, NHTSA announced that it had reached a secret agreement with twenty automakers allowing them to roll out weakened versions of the technology on a “voluntary” basis over a ten year period, evading formal federal safety protections.
The groups said “Americans will pay a heavy toll in deaths and injuries” for NHTSA’s “abdication of its regulatory responsibilities,” calling it “unprecedented in the history of the agency.” See http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-advocates-demand-federal-agency-act-on-auto-safety-petition-300273449.html
The quo has been revealed. Watch the DOT Revolving Door for the quid to follow at the end of the Obama Administration.
The deaths and injuries not prevented will follow later.
Lou
Automotive News reports:“Toyota’s James Kuffner is among a global band of safety experts proposing a radical goal for the auto industry: zero traffic deaths.
The target may be unattainable, safety advocates concede. But they say it is possible to virtually eliminate the 30,000-plus annual highway fatalities in the U.S.
Kuffner, chief technology officer at the Toyota Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., says that if the industry moves decisively, within a decade “the probability of being killed in a traffic accident would be smaller than being killed by lightning.”
But automakers must speed the usual decades long pace of adoption of new technology, safety experts say, and get advanced data-crunching, crash-avoidance and communications capability into vehicles as quickly as possible.
“The longer it isn’t deployed,” Kuffner says, “the more people die.”
The war on traffic deaths would require profound changes to vehicles, the way they operate and the way they’re regulated.
And it would upend many industry norms. Can automakers sell safety instead of performance? Will their customers love robotic cars that don’t crash — but travel cautiously, carefully obeying traffic laws?”
Since 2000, automakers have introduced an array of safety technology: forward-collision warning, rear cameras, lane-departure warning, traffic-jam assist, adaptive cruise control and the like.
Put it all together, says Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and “We’re right on the technological cusp. We have this totally new, really exciting chance to make a difference.”
The challenge is to get the technology into vehicles quickly but safely, he says. But the goal is sufficiently compelling to ensure that change will happen.
“Everyone’s got their own view of what the future is going to be,” Rosekind says. “We’re watching the future get created right in front of us.”
Much of the impetus comes from Vision Zero, a policy written into Swedish law in 1997. Its core tenet is that there is no acceptable level of traffic fatalities; the goal is zero deaths.
The policy fits the safety consciousness of Sweden’s only major automaker, Volvo, which has pledged that no one will die in an accident in a new Volvo car by 2020.
While other automakers are cautious about getting to zero — one executive marveled that Volvo’s lawyers would let the company make such a claim — Volvo r&d chief Peter Mertens isn’t backing off.
“By 2020, I think we have a good chance to be damn close to it,” he says.
With continual refinement of safety systems and adoption of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, Mertens says, it is possible to eliminate traffic deaths: “Once all vehicles are connected, then I think we can achieve zero fatalities in traffic.”
Chauffeurs or angels?
Volvo epitomizes one of two industry approaches to reducing fatalities — although they mostly differ in how quickly they propose to get to self-driving, connected vehicles.
Toyota’s Kuffner terms the two schools “chauffeur” and “guardian angel”:
• The chauffeur mode, championed by Google, uses self-driving vehicles. As Kuffner puts it, “the human doesn’t really have to participate. The car can drive itself.”
• The “guardian angel” approach uses vehicles driven by humans, but with computerized safety systems ready to intervene. Volvo and other automakers following this path say it probably will lead to fully autonomous vehicles, but improving crash avoidance and protection is more realistic in the near term….
If the crash-prevention systems follow the usual timetable, Rosekind says, “It takes 20 to 30 years for new technology to penetrate the fleet.”
But inertia shouldn’t be an excuse, advocates say. Lawrence Burns, an industry consultant and former General Motors head of r&d, says tolerance for traffic deaths is an outdated attitude.
“The acceptance of roadway fatalities for over a century is really amazing, if you think about it,” Burns says. “It’s not that the industry hasn’t improved safety. It has, but the improvement has been incremental….”
One reason for traditional automakers’ urgency is pressure from new competitors such as Google, with its self-driving cars, and Apple, rumored to be working on a car. Volvo’s Mertens says new players may speed the industry’s adoption of technology.
“We are pretty slow. The auto industry isn’t known for high speed of innovations,” Mertens says. “Others — the Silicon Valley guys that think they can do cars — I think they will help us.”
Burns puts it more bluntly, saying automakers must shift their r&d budgets toward safety: “I think we’re going to be in a dramatically different world in 2025 than we are today.
“Either the incumbents are going to redirect how they spend their money, or they’re going to have their lunch eaten.” See
Unfortunately, the annual government spending bill has become her private domain for pushing anti-truck safety measures. When trucking interests sought to significantly increase truck weights in Maine, Sen. Collins was ready to help. Last year, FedEx and others recognized a willing partner in Sen. Collins when they sought to overturn laws in 39 states, including Maine, and allow monster-sized trucks across the country.
And, for the third consecutive year, as a senior Appropriations Committee member, she slipped a provision into the bill to repeal the reasonable federal limits on the driving and working hours of truckers, although fatigue is a major cause of truck crashes.
However, this time she went even further and wrote into law an increase in the driving hours of truckers from 60 to 73 in a week. This is insane, but she has the temerity to actually claim it will be safer. This proposal had no congressional hearing, no scientific review and no public input. But it’s no problem if you are a well-connected trucking lobbyist.
Truck crashes kill 4,000 people and injure 100,000 more annually. Sen. Collins’ solution is to help corporate trucking interests protect their profits, but not public safety.”
We need a graphic showing Lady Justice holding the scales of Justice. On the heavy side a big bag of Corporate Dollars. On the light side the endless lives being lost going to heaven. From under the blindfold tears flowing from Lady Justice.
Lou
