Tag Archives: autosafety

To Avoid Dying in a Collision, Avoid Undivided Roads 100% of the Time

To avoid dying in a head-on collision, avoid driving on roads that look like this.
To avoid dying in a head-on collision, avoid driving on roads that look like this.

This is the latest post in a series on the IRTAD report I’ve been reading, Zero Road Deaths and Serious Injuries: Leading a Paradigm Shift to a Safe System. It’s basically a field guide to how countries around the globe have made strides in developing Safe Systems / Vision Zero / Toward Zero approaches, and it’s well worth reading. I’m a fan of the Safe System approach, and have written a number of articles related to the fundamental message that all human lives matter, and none should be–or need to be–lost due to auto crashes. I’ve included a brief listing of recent articles below. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, you’ll want to check them out. If you are, skip below; there’s more information than ever about the importance of avoiding undivided roads when driving.

Isn’t safe driving just about having the newest safety materials in my car?

It’s a common misconception that auto safety is simply a question of buying the newest car possible. While that can help, the truth is that the majority of what affects our survival on the roads has to do with how and where we drive followed by what we drive. A Safe System focuses on all three factors but gives extra importance to the where, because it’s much easier to change than the human behavior, the how, yet can be much more effective, especially with a bit of help from the how and what.

Previous Safe System articles on the how and where I’ve written involve  the top speeds for survivable protected and unprotected collisions, the magic of 43 mph as a survivability speed , how to ensure pedestrian safety, reasons why traffic cameras are our friends, how to double driving safety overnight, how driving less increases overall safety, reasons to drive with head lights, the safest road lanes, the benefits of snow tires, the impact of speed on kinetic energy, why it’s safer for adults to drive in Norway, why kids are safer in Norway, why Europe is safer for drivers, different standards in auto safety around the world, which are the safest and most dangerous states, and how speeding is the magic bullet.

To put it simply, this is my passion. There’s a lot we can do to increase our road safety as individuals, but the biggest changes come from changing the way our society views road safety, and the collective responsibility we have to make our roads safe for everyone. To that end, my most recent article on the topic involves ending the blame game and assuming a more humanistic, cooperative, and ultimately effective approach toward safer roads.

OK, I’m up to speed. What does the report say about driving safety in relation to undivided roads?

On page 92, the report notes:

Divided roads were the most effective factor in avoiding fatalities among vehicle occupants.

Slightly later, on page 92, we read:

An example of a “primary” Safe System treatment [is] a median barrier, as this will virtually eliminate (in over 90% of cases) fatal head-on crashes, while a “supportive” treatment would be a wide centreline with rumble strips that will make them less likely. It is strongly recommended that the primary treatments are employed where possible.”

This is the kind of road you want to drive on whenever possible.

This is significant. We have research suggesting the single most effective way of avoiding vehicle fatalities are to use divided roads, or to not use
undivided roads. What is a divided road? That’s answered within the second quotation; it’s a road system with a median barrier that divides two opposing lanes of traffic.  To put it another, more visual way, it’s a road that looks like the one on the left. Divided roads aren’t nearly as visually appealing as undivided ones, but they’re much, much safer. This is also why interstates are traditionally the safest kinds of roads we can drive on per mile, despite featuring the highest speeds–it’s because they’re inherently designed to avoid vehicles crashing into each other at high rates of speed.

What can we do? Do we simply avoid all undivided roads?

In a word, yes! Whenever possible, drive on divided roads. However, it’s not always that simple. Let’s answer the “what can we do?” question with a bit more detail.

If we know divided roads are the most significant factor in reducing vehicle fatalities, what do we do with this information? Well, we can certainly call or write letters to our local, state, and federal departments of transportation. We can advocate for change and point to reports like the IRTAD report above. However, while waiting and advocating for change on larger levels, we can take action on an individual level. This is where change begins. We lower that 35,000 annual fatality figure one saved life at a time.

We can drive on the kinds of roads we know from research are safest, and avoid undivided roadways whenever possible. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll continue to do so as long as I read or write about stories involving fatalities on undivided roads. These are the quintessential “drifting across the midline” crashes; they’re the ones where one vehicle inadvertently enters the opposing lane of traffic and isn’t stopped until it crashes directly into another vehicle. They are violent and bloody and unnecessary. They can be all but eliminated simply by installing barriers between the lanes. Until that day comes, and these kinds of roads are eliminated or speed limited (remember that Safe System practices dictates a 43 mph limit for undivided roads), your best bet is to avoid them as much as you possibly can. You literally cut your odds of being involved in a fatal head-on crash (which, by the way, is the most frequent fatal multi-vehicle collision) by 90%–almost completely–by avoiding these kinds of roads.

Don’t wait for your state department of transportation to catch up to best practices. Start living them, and spread the word.

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Rather than “Blame and Shame”, See Road Safety as a Human Right

For long-term road safety, we need to move beyond blaming the individual road user.
For long-term road safety, we need to move beyond blaming the individual road user.

Lately, I’ve been reading a 2016 report by IRTAD titled Zero Road Deaths and Serious Injuries: Leading a Paradigm Shift to a Safe System. It’s just under 200 pages long, but it’s a great introduction to Vision Zero / Safe System / Toward Zero policies and philosophies across the globe, including within the US. I’ve written about Safe Systems in the past several times (e.g., regarding top speeds for survivable collisions, the magic of 43 mph, pedestrian safety, traffic cameras), as I strongly agree with the fundamental message that no human loss of life due to auto traffic is acceptable, and that virtually all can be prevented.

Much of the report has to do with paradigm shifts, or the necessary changes we have to undergo as a society in terms of how we perceive road safety in order to create safer environments for all road users. This evening, I found this passage to be a particularly well-written one describing necessary shifts in perspectives on road safety. It’s on page 47 in a section about creating a greater demand for road safety among citizens.

A highly effective way to engage politicians, policy makers and system designers in a debate on a Safe System is to create increased demand for road safety among citizens. The traditional societal view holds that road users bear the main responsibility for road safety hazards. It is they who should be “blamed and shamed” for incidents and measures should focus on correcting their irresponsible behaviour. In contrast, a Safe System is based on the notion that road users are citizens with rights and should be able to take part in road traffic without risking death or serious injury – even if and when they make simple human mistakes. A Safe System also posits that road safety is a shared responsibility, and thus gives citizens the right to demand safe road traffic from society.

Isn’t that just wonderful? And at the same time, completely removed from how most of us view road safety in the United States, and how most discussions regarding road safety are framed? Independence and self-reliance are highly valued traits in US society (as reflected in our lack of universal health insurance, a unique position among fellow rich nations, or our lack of guaranteed maternal leave, a unique position among all but a handful of other countries across the globe). However, the societal importance we place on a lack of reliance on society frequently results in negative consequences for many, many individuals who in aggregate, make up…society.

As a result, when a crash occurs, we look for who is at fault. This is hardly unique to the US, but our conclusions are almost always the same–we blame the end user, the driver. Whether it’s the driver who drove off the road and into a tree or the driver who talked on the cell phone and drove into the opposing lane or the driver who took the turn too fast and rolled the vehicle, there’s always a driver we can blame, and that’s where our crash investigations end. We need to get rid of the bad drivers or at least beat them into becoming better ones. If not for bad drivers, there wouldn’t be collisions, and everyone would be fine.

How else could we examine a crash besides blaming the driver?

While this is an accurate way to look at the problem, it’s not the only way to do so. More importantly, it’s rarely the best way, presuming the goal is to reduce the number of fatalities and serious crashes. The reason why this approach, dubbed “blaming and shaming” in the section above, is ineffective, is because people, by definition, are fallible. Whether the driver leaves the road because he was playing with the radio or because she was trying to avoid a deer or because he was tired or because she was trying to calm her children in the back row, the ultimate point is that the driver is leaving the road.

A Safe System focuses on how to protect the driver, passengers, and anyone else in the vicinity once that road-leaving-event is imminent. That might take the form of a more forgiving shoulder that has a guide-rail that can keep a vehicle from completely leaving the road. It might look like a ditch that has been removed, significantly reducing the risk of a fatal rollover. It might look like a wire fence installed to keep the vehicle away from trees and telephone poles. It might look like a lower speed limit on the road that reduces the likelihood of leaving the road to begin with, or any number of other features. It might be in the vehicle itself, which is equipped with lane-departure warning systems and ESC to help the driver maintain control during emergency maneuvers. Should the driver actually leave the road, it might look like a rapid emergency response service capable of reaching the road within minutes to perform first aid and hospital transport.

This is a different way of looking at collisions and road safety. The focus in all of these cases is to provide redundancy to a.) reduce the likelihood of a collision occurring, b.) mitigate the severity of an imminent collision, and c.)  provide life-saving response services to maximize survivability after the collision occurs. More broadly, the fault isn’t automatically assigned to the road user, should the unfortunate or unthinkable happen. The responsibility is shared among everyone who plays a role in the design of the road, the vehicles that traverse it, and the people within and without those vehicles. The road users are expected to be responsible, yes, but they aren’t expected to be perfect, because, being human, they never will be. They’re given rights–the rights to expect safe roadways and safe vehicles, and the rights to expect to live when they or their loved ones use these roadways.

This is the mentality behind a Safe System / Vision Zero approach. People are valuable, and we need to design systems to protect them, rather than to blame them for being imperfect whenever they inevitably behave like humans.

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Getting Hit By a Car is Like Falling Off a Cliff – Precipice Pictures

A few months ago, while perusing my favorite international safety organization, the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD), I came across a recent report titled Zero Road Deaths and Serious Injuries: Leading a Paradigm Shift to a Safe System. It’s 172 pages of Vision Zero talk, which made for excellent evening reading. Within the report and within a section on the efforts various countries had made to raise awareness of the dangers of auto traffic, I came across this series of graphics (on page 46) published by one of the pioneers of Vision Zero, Sweden.

Precipice pictures used in Sweden to communicate inherent road safety risks (credit: IRTAD)
Precipice pictures used in Sweden to communicate inherent road safety risks (credit: IRTAD)

Specifically, the Swedish Transportation Agency, the Swedish equivalent of the NHTSA, sought to show the public in a naturally understandable way how the risks we exposed ourselves to while driving were significant ones, based on the premise that people were inherently more likely to understand the risks of high levels of kinetic energy when applied vertically compared to when applied horizontally.

To put it simply, people naturally understand how dangerous it is to fall from great heights than we get how dangerous it is to crash into obstacles at high speeds. There are likely strong evolutionary reasons related to this that have to do with falling from trees and off cliffs, but whatever the reason, this way of connecting with people seems to have some effect in raising risk awareness.

Survival speeds and Shared Responsibilities

As a reminder, Vision Zero principles are based on the ideas that road systems should be designed in ways that eliminate the risk of death or serious injury from auto use. In contrast to the predominant way of approaching road safety in the US and in most low- and middle-income countries, the risks and responsibilities of road use are not primarily assumed to rest with the end user (e.g., the passenger vehicle occupant, the cyclist, the pedestrian, the child), but are designed to be shared equally across road users, road designers, policy makers, and vehicle manufacturers.

As a result, in the examples above, it’s not simply the responsibility of the car driver to avoid being hit by the truck while navigating the turn, or the pedestrian to avoid being hit by a motor vehicle while crossing the street. In the car/truck example, both drivers should certainly be paying attention, but the truck should be designed in a way that minimizes the risk of injury it poses to others relative to its size, while the car should also be designed to offer as much protection as reasonably possible (e.g., being equipped with a crashworthy structure, seat belts, airbags, etc). Additionally, the roadway, being one that presents a risk of head-on vehicle-vehicle collisions, should have a posted and enforced speed limit no greater than 70 kph, or 43 mph, not 45 or 50 or 55 or even 65 mph as is the case in many rural areas throughout the United States.

In the second example, the zebra crossing should be clearly marked and clearly visible to give pedestrians a clear view of traffic and traffic a clear view of pedestrians. The pedestrian should have the right of way, always, and that right of way should always be defended and enforced. The traffic on that road should not be traveling at any higher than 30 kph, or 18 mph, since it has the potential to come into contact with pedestrians, and the survival rate when hit at under 20 mph is at around 95%. The roadway should be narrow enough to naturally encourage motorized traffic to travel more slowly and cautiously, as well as to make it possible for pedestrians to traverse it without spending exorbitant amounts of time in a highly vulnerable position.

Best practices aren’t secret practices; they’re just ignored ones in the United States

These are just a handful of safety modifications that should be present in two situations highlighted above. How many of them do you find present when you find yourself in either of the above scenarios? Because each factor, when present, reduces the risk of injury or death if and when a collision occurs while also reducing the risks of collisions occurring to begin with. Conversely, each factor, when absent, increases the risk of collision while simultaneously increasing injury and fatality risks should said collisions occur.

Best practice in auto safety isn’t a mystery; we know what should be done. The trick is to convince the people with the power to put best practices into place that it’s worth more to make these changes than it is to accept things the way they are.

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When Should Your Teenager Get a Driver’s License? Not Before 18!

The later teens drive independently, the safer they become behind the wheel
The later teens drive independently, the safer they become behind the wheel

In the United States, we have a heavy driving culture. Millions of teenagers began driving throughout the country as soon as they’re eligible to take their driver tests, which is at 16 in most states, with the notable exception of New Jersey at 17. However, as is often the case when comparing actual practices to best practices, just because teens can legally drive from when they turn 16 doesn’t mean this is what’s best–neither for teens, nor for society. An analysis of the risk teen drivers pose to themselves and others, as well as comparisons of driving and licensing patterns in comparable countries around the globe, suggests the age for independent driving and licensing shouldn’t be 16, but 18. Let’s take a closer look at why together.

Teens are most likely to be involved in fatal collisions at 16

 The numbers are clear: 16-year-olds are more likely to be involved in collisions, fatal or otherwise, than drivers of any other age. Specifically, the IIHS chart above notes the rate of fatal crash involvement per 100 million miles traveled was 9.1 at 16, compared to 6.6 at 17 and 3.8 at 18. From 18, the rate of fatal crash involvement remained virtually constant between 3.6 and 3.8 until drivers reached the 30-34 age bracket, at which point the rate of fatal crash involvement dropped again to 1.8. I’ve written about teen crash involvement before, and while the risks are primarily related to male teens, this is a problem we need to tackle with all teenagers and all parents.

This chart alone explains why teenagers shouldn’t drive alone at 16. Simply waiting a year cuts the risk of death by 27%, and waiting another year until 18 before independent driving cuts the risk by 58% compared to the risk of death faced by a 16-year-old driver. To put it another way, if 100 16-year-olds were involved in fatal crashes in their first (and final) year of driving, it’s likely that 42 of them would have survived their first year of driving had that cohort of 100 drivers begun driving at age 18 instead of at age 16.

If we simply delay our children’s independent driving by a couple of years, they effectively become as safe as drivers nearly a decade older. We need to give them the gift of time.

But doesn’t this just mean that 18 year olds have 2 years more driving experience than 16 year olds? What about new 18 year olds vs new 16 year olds?

It’s tempting to think that the only reason the driver death rates drop so dramatically between 16 and 18 is because all of the 18 year olds have the benefit of the 2 years of driving and hopefully not dying between 16 and 18. However, numerous studies have found this to be erroneous, whether in the US, Canada, or overseas.

A Canadian study found in 1992 that novice 16 year olds were more likely to be injured while driving than novice 17 or 18 year olds, with novice drivers defined as those with under a year of experience. A meta analysis of 11 studies since 1990 found the same results: 16 year old new drivers were more likely to crash than new older drivers.

It’s not about driving experience; it’s about cognitive development and life experience. Sixteen year olds simply aren’t as ready to drive as 18 year olds. Giving them lots of training before they turn 16 doesn’t change this, whether that training comes from parents or from driving instructors. This doesn’t mean that supervised driving time is meaningless for teenagers; it’s very valuable. However, it can’t overcome, statistically speaking, the increased risk of allowing unsupervised driving before 18. A 14-year old with 400 hours of supervised driving experience is still going to be a poorer driver than a 16-year old with 200 hours of supervised experience, because training time can’t overcome maturity when the maturity gap becomes too large. By the same measure, that 16-year old with 200 supervised hours will, statistically speaking, still be a much more dangerous driver than an 18-year old with 100 supervised hours.

Delaying licensing until 18 gives parents more time to drive with their teens

Besides the maturity that comes with having two additional years of life experience, a significant reason why teenagers are safer drivers at 18 than they are at 16 is because they have more experience behind the wheel. However, what we want is to give them supervised experience so they aren’t gaining experience while engaging in risky behavior (e.g., driving at night, driving with passengers, having minimal supervised hours, etc). To that end, when we require our teens to wait before obtaining their licenses, we can spend more time driving with them and modeling and monitoring safer driving tactics. We can take the time to choose safer vehicles for them rather than simply choosing the cheapest ones we can find because we feel pressured to reward them as soon as they turn 16.

Remember: teenagers driving in and of itself isn’t the problem; most teens manage to drive responsibly enough while under their learners’ permits or while taking their drivers’ tests to obtain licenses. The problem is that when teenagers drive on their own, there is a strong tendency for them to leave behind responsible driving habits and engage in risky behavior. The more time we spend driving with them, the more likely they are to internalize safe driving habits that they’ll be more likely to use when we don’t drive with them.

Sweden and Norway don’t license their teens until  they turn 18

Finally, it’s worth considering the practices of countries with significantly safer driving cultures than those domestically. Sweden and Norway feature two of the lowest auto death rates on the planet per capita (at <3/100,000 people, compared to roughly 10-11/100,000 in the US), and both countries also feature the lowest rates of child auto fatalities on the globe. What do they do to keep their youngest drivers safe?

You guessed it: both countries restrict the age of licensure for car driving to 18. Both countries allow supervised driving before 18, just as in the US, but neither country allows teenagers to get behind the wheel without adults until they turn 18, without exception. They have extensive driver preparation and training programs as well, and in Norway, in particular, it can cost up to $4,000 to obtain one’s license before all is said and done, due to the various safety classes one must take on the way to licensure.
What can we take away from all of this?

Driving is a serious responsibility, not only for the driver but for every other citizen who may be impacted by the driver’s competence. In Sweden and Norway, where citizens are less likely to die from auto traffic than in any other wealthy country on the planet, no one drives a car before s/he turns 18. There’s just too much at stake. On the way to driving at 18, teens get lots of supervised practice, take lots of classes, and need to prove their competence in a number of ways. They take driving seriously there. Here, we lose approximately 2,600 13-19-year-olds each year. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change the driving culture.

However, it starts with changing how we view driving, and how easily we’re willing to turn over the keys to our children. We can’t wait for the laws of 50 states to come together toward best practice; there isn’t a single state that’s following best practices yet. But as parents, we can take the first steps and make sure we aren’t putting our children in harm’s way any sooner than necessary, and not a minute before we’ve shared everything we know with them about safe driving. The stakes are too high to treat driving as a simple rite of passage.
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If you find the information on car safety, recommended car seats, and car seat reviews on this car seat blog helpful, you can shop through this Amazon link for any purchases, car seat-related or not. Canadians can shop through this link for Canadian purchases.

Speeding IS the Magic Bullet (for Safe Driving)

The quickest way to drive more safely is to drive more slowly.
The quickest way to drive more safely (year round) is to drive more slowly.

The NHTSA, or National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is the governmental organization in charge of monitoring, proposing, and enforcing road safety policy throughout the United States. There are a great many things they get right, including their position that the approximately 35,000 people who die each year in the US shouldn’t be dying.

However, there are also points they miss due to an overfocus on the United States as a unique entity…

and not simply as one of many wealthy countries interested in increasing road safety with the potential to learn from other wealthy countries. A recent NPR article discussed Vision Zero, the NHTSA, and our slowly changing climate of road safety. Let’s look at it together, as well as the most significant things that were and weren’t said.

Zero. That’s the stated goal of transportation officials in the U.S., no traffic fatalities by 2046. Zero deaths is a movement that began in Sweden. There, it’s called Vision Zero. The idea is simple. “No loss of life is acceptable.” That is the one sentence motto of Sweden’s campaign.

The opening paragraph nicely summarizes both Vision Zero…

which I’ve discussed in multiple prior articles, and the US’ current take on it, which aims for zero traffic deaths 30 years from now. That’s much later than I’d like to see the goal, but it’s at least a start to have a goal, and to have it relatively soon in the future. The Vision Zero mentality is where we have to begin, after all, with the idea that no deaths are acceptable, and that all lives are valuable.

One of the tragic coincidences is that as economic activity increases and more people with jobs are on the road, traffic fatalities go up. U.S. drivers put in a record 1.58 trillion miles on the road in the first half of this year, the Federal Highway Administration said this week. That’s a 3.3 percent increase over the same period in 2015. Meanwhile, the rate of deaths is up by more than 10 percent.

This is old news in the auto safety world, but it’s always new to normal folks;

…the more you drive, the greater your odds are of being involved in a collision, fatal or otherwise.

There are plenty of reasons to drive less, whether from ecological, financial, familial, or spiritual reasons, but one of the most basic reasons to drive less should be because the less you drive, the safer you are. It’s a lot cheaper than buying the latest and greatest technology, too.

“The really sad part is that in the United States we accept 35,092 people dying on the roadways and thinking that’s okay. It should be unacceptable,” says Mark Rosekind, the head of NHTSA. Rosekind’s father was a motorcycle policeman in San Francisco, who was killed on the road in the line of duty. “There are too many stories like this,” Rosekind says.

I completely agree with Mark Rosekind here; the subtitle of this blog has to do with those 35,000 people and how to avoid you or our loved ones joining them each year. If you’re reading this blog, or any information related to car seat safety or auto safety in general, you’re already ahead of the game, because most people aren’t reading this kind of information and most people have no idea how much of a bloodbath our roads are.

The truth is that our annual traffic statistics are the equivalent of a 9/11 every month on the roads, over and over and over again.

This isn’t something that comes up during the elections; you won’t hear President Obama or Trump talking about 35,000 fatalities each year, even though your odds of dying in a car crash are thousands of times higher in the US than your odds of dying in a terrorist attack. It’s not attractive news; it doesn’t sell papers. But it’s real.

Practically, getting to zero is not only an ambitious goal, but a complex one as well. In Sweden, a premium is placed on safety over convenience, traffic or speed. Low urban speed limits, strict policing of drunk driving, bike lanes with barriers separating cyclists from traffic, and smart pedestrian crossings are some of the solutions implemented.

This is absolutely true; however, it underemphasizes a crucial point–

The speed limits are a huge, huge part of the equation.

Yes, the separated cycling traffic is significant (best practice suggests people in cars and people not in cars shouldn’t mix when road speeds can surpass 20 mph). Yes, cultural abhorrence of drunk driving is important (the blood alcohol limit there is .02%, compared to the boozehound limit of .08% in the US). However, the recognition and implementation of road design and speed limits in concert with the physiological tolerances of the human body make up the majority of the equation. There are speeds the human body can’t survive. Keep traffic below them, and you keep people alive. It’s as simple as that if we want it to be.

“There isn’t actually a single magic bullet. It’s not like you can say if the entire country just changed its speed laws then we’d get rid of all fatalities on the road,” Rosekind warns.

This is where Rosekind goes off track. Technically, he’s right that we wouldn’t eliminate every traffic fatality by lowering speed limits; there’d still be the occasional freak accident here and there.

But there’s a reason why most fellow rich countries have sliced their roadway fatalities…

by an average of close to 75% in the last fifteen years while the US has only dropped by around 33%, and it’s not because all the other countries are keeping cyclists away from drivers; the primary reason has to do with following Vision Zero speed limits in roadway design. The longer we make excuses for a fundamental error in roadway design throughout the country, the longer we’re going to suffer tens of thousands of needless deaths year after year.

The next time you drive on an undivided roadway with a speed limit above 45 mph, know that you’re driving on a road that wouldn’t exist in Sweden. The next time you drive through a city with a speed limit above 30 mph, know that you’re driving on a road that wouldn’t exist in Norway. The next time you drive through a neighborhood or past a cyclist at more than 20 mph, know that you’re driving on a dinosaur-age level of road design that’s going extinct around the world. These are unsafe designs, and we need to get rid of them if we really want to get rid of road deaths. Everything else is just taking the long, winding, and potentially useless way home.

If you find my information on best practices in car and car seat safety helpful, you can do your shopping through this Amazon link. Canadians can shop here for Canadian purchases. Have a question or want to discuss best practices? Join us in the forums!