Tag Archives: sweden

A Guide to Swedish Child Car Seat Safety for Americans

March 20, 2017 Mike

The Swedish approach to child car seat safety is deceptively simple, yet it results in the best child traffic safety numbers on the planet. Virtually no children die from traffic incidents in Sweden each year, and this has been the case for many years now. As far as child traffic safety is concerned, they are the standard (although their western neighbor, Norway, has followed their example, and is now demonstrating stunningly low child death rates in traffic as well). I like learning from people doing things well.

Of course, the world-class results aren’t simply due to how they restrain kids in cars–there are a number of other factors that tie in, nearly all of which are related to Vision Zero principles, a practical and philosophical belief in Sweden that no one, adult or child, should die from traffic incidents. This manifests itself in areas like nation-wide laws requiring driving with headlights on 24/7, using snow tires throughout the winter months, an acceptance of traffic cameras everywhere, extremely low alcohol limits for driving, $2000 driving licenses, and traffic speeds and road designs based on the trauma limits of the human body.

But today’s article isn’t about any of these factors, although I love writing about them. Today’s article is a quick guide to how Swedes approach car seats with their kids. Today, we’ll pretend we’re Swedish parents, and look at the kinds of seats they choose and why. The great news is that the Swedish approach is rather simple, yet quite effective, as evidenced by the near-nonexistent death rates for young children from traffic. There are only three main seats used: the infant seat, the rear-facing convertible, and the high back booster.

What kinds of car seats do Swedish parents use with infants and babies?

The first car seat nearly all Swedish children use is the infant seat (known as the cradle abroad). This is essentially the same approach as in the US; the infant seat is easy to carry and can be moved in and out of a vehicle without waking a sleeping baby (very important). Swedish parents will typically use it for the first six to nine months of life. Naturally, it’ll be rear-facing.

A great example of an equivalent infant seat in the US is the Chicco KeyFit 30. It doesn’t need to have a high height or weight limit; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s easy to install and easy to carry. It’ll be used for less than a year before parents get tired of carrying it and switch to the next seat.

What comes after the infant seat, and how long do the Swedes use it?

After the infant seat, the Swedes, well-versed in the importance of extended rear-facing, invest in a rear-facing convertible seat. The typical Swedish family will rear-face until 4-5 even though there isn’t actually a law in the country requiring parents to do so. What you’ll find is a deep cultural knowledge of the value of rear-facing due to an effective and long-lasting public awareness campaign began by the government and media with guidance from research conducted throughout the country.

Parents don’t feel like outliers when rear-facing until 4-5 because everyone else is doing it; it isn’t known as “extended rear-facing” there, and parents don’t have to justify to fellow parents or spouses why they haven’t turned their car seats around. It’s just what you do.

An Extend2Fit will let you rear-face most kids until 5 and forward-face most kids until at least 6 while costing well under $200.

In Sweden, you can buy car seats that allow you to rear-face all the way to 55 pounds, potentially allowing rear-facing until 6 or even longer. In the US, our best seats–The Graco Extend2Fit, Clek Fllo, Diono Rainier, Clek Foonf, and Diono Pacifica–allow you to rear-face until 50 pounds, which is a great improvement over how the car seat scene looked just a few years ago here. Fifty pounds will be enough to allow you to make it until 4 or 5, which is how long you’ll find the typical Swedish child rear-facing. The kids don’t protest it there because their parents treat it as normal, as do their grandparents and everyone else they come into contact with.

Among seats available in the United States, the Extend2Fit is one of my favorite examples for this phase, as it not only features one of the highest weight limits at 50 lbs, it also features the highest height limit (it’s 49″, or the same as the forward-facing height limit), which means you’ll might even be able to rear-face until 6 or 7 if you really want to, depending on the height of your child.

In comparison, in the US, children are only required to rear-face until 1 in all but 4 states, and 75% of children are forward-facing by their 2nd birthday. That’s too soon. Aim for at least 4 if at all possible.

What comes after rear-facing in Sweden, and for how long? And what about harnessed seats?

Once parents stop rear-facing in Sweden, they don’t typically use harnessed forward-facing seats. In fact, the general Swedish perception is that booster seats are actually safer than forward-facing seats for children of an appropriate age (i.e., 4+). The reasons for this involve research in Sweden regarding how the harness system may put more load on the neck by restraining the rest of the body (and allowing the neck to snap forward), compared to how the body moves more completely when in a seat belt, spreading forces across the body.

As a result, parents will typically move from a rear-facing convertible directly to a high-back booster. The particular booster they choose doesn’t matter too much as long as it’s a high-back booster; the reason behind this is that they keep the child in place even if she or he falls asleep in the car.

Three of the best dedicated boosters on the market today are the Clek Oobr, Peg Perego Flex 120, and Maxi-Cosi RodiFix, and I’d give the edge to the RodiFix because, like most Swedish car seats (and European ones in general), it doesn’t feature cup holders. The lack of arm rests also means your kids won’t get the seat belts stuck on them while buckling themselves in. If you’re on a smaller budget, the Britax Parkway also does a great job. Whichever seat you choose, it’s worth looking for ones that include LATCH connectors, as these will allow you to permanently attach the seats to your vehicle, preventing them from becoming projectiles when they aren’t buckled in.

Swedish parents use booster seats as long as the law requires (there is a law here regarding this), which is until they’re 135 cm tall, or 53″ tall. This is a rather common law throughout the EU.

But aren’t harnessed forward-facing seats safer than booster seats?

It’s a common belief in the US that forward-facing harnessed seats are safer than booster seats, and this is true in certain contexts. It’s true when children should still absolutely be rear-facing (i.e., under 4), simply because children who are boostered too early are at tremendous risk for suffering abdominal injuries or submarining out of their car seats.

Even beyond 4, children who don’t sit properly will be safer in harnessed seats (which force them to sit correctly) than in boosters, where they can move themselves out of safe positions. However, once children are mature enough to sit properly (i.e., straight up in the centers of their seats), there is no safety difference between harnessed forward-facing seats and booster seats. The NHTSA recommends waiting until 8 (or until children outgrow their forward-facing seats) to cover all bases here, but it’s likely that most children who are 6 or older will be able to sit appropriately enough to use booster seats.

When do Swedish parents stop using car seats and just use seat belts?

Swedish parents typically stop using car seats and switch their kids to seat belts once they’re at least 135 cm (53″) tall. See the NTF’s responses for more information here. Their recommendations are generally in line with those of the NHTSA, which recommend that children stay in booster seats until they have good belt fit, which they state is generally around when they’re between 8 and 12 years old.

Do you recommend following the Swedish approach to car seat selection?

Absolutely. The American in me wants to suggest harnessed forward-facing seats over boosters, but the evidence doesn’t support their being necessary for most children beyond 5 or 6. I do think the 5-step test for seat belt readiness is a good idea, but I also think the harness/booster debates and 5-step test aren’t nearly as important as the core element of rear-facing as long as possible. If you take nothing else from this, take that and spread the word.

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? Send me an email at carcrashdetective [at] gmail [dot] com.

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

February 21, 2017 Mike

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)

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.

Speeding IS the Magic Bullet (for Safe Driving)

February 1, 2017 Mike

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.

Why Are Swedish Roads So Safe?

July 28, 2014 Mike

Sweden is essentially the blueprint when it comes to best practices for car seat safety, but there are also a number of things we can learn from the country when it comes to general car safety. This will be the start of a series of posts investigating the safety of Swedish roads and determining what we can learn from them at a national, state, community, and individual level to make our roads safer for everyone.

This article from the Economist provides a brief primer to recent developments in Swedish road safety. A record low was set in 2013, with only 264 people dying in car crashes. The current death rate (for 2013) is approximately 3 per 100,000 Swedes, compared to 11.4 per 100,000 in the US, and 40 per 100,000 in the Dominican Republic, where the roads are the most dangerous on the planet in per capita terms.

To provide another perspective, in 2012 in the US, the most recent year for which full data is available, 33,561 people lost their lives, while the population was 313.9 million, for a rate of 10.7 per 100,000. There are around 9.7 million Swedes. If the US 2012 death rate could have been reduced to Swedish 2013 levels, only 9,417 individuals would have perished, instead of 33,561.

That’s an incredible difference, isn’t it?

The last time the US had an auto death rate as low as 3 per 100,000 was in 1912, the year the Titanic sank. Back then, 2,968 people died, and the US population as 95 million. The last time we lost only 9,000 individuals to car crashes was in 1917, when we lost 9,630, and there were 103 million in the country. By then, though, the death rate was almost was bad as it is now, as it had already soared in just five years to 9.3 per 100,000.

So what has made the difference?

Deaths from car crashes are unacceptable to the Swedish government

Well, a big part of it was the “Vision Zero” project.

In 1997 the Swedish parliament wrote into law a “Vision Zero” plan, promising to eliminate road fatalities and injuries altogether. “We simply do not accept any deaths or injuries on our roads,” says Hans Berg of the national transport agency. Swedes believe—and are now proving—that they can have mobility and safety at the same time.

Interesting, isn’t it? The goal of completely eliminating fatalities and injuries in collisions, and the perspective that any deaths or injuries were unacceptable. It’s an idea that would be greeted with scorn in the US, as here we accept car crashes and the needless miseries they bring as facts of life, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are preventable.

Planning has played the biggest part in reducing accidents. Roads in Sweden are built with safety prioritised over speed or convenience. Low urban speed-limits, pedestrian zones and barriers that separate cars from bikes and oncoming traffic have helped.

Planning has been mentioned by a number of sources as one of the factors that sets the US apart (in a bad way) from fellow rich countries making much bigger gains in reducing deaths. Look at that–roads built for safety over convenience. That means roads that slow travelers, since speed = death, as you’ve likely seen from so many calculations on this blog. It shouldn’t be convenient to travel at 70 or 80 mph by car; people, by far and large, aren’t capable of managing vehicles with the necessary accuracy at those speeds.

Pedestrian deaths increase disproportionally with speed

Similarly, lower speed limits in urban zones are essential. A car hitting you at 20 mph has somewhere around a 5% chance of killing you. By 30 mph, those odds jump to 50%, and by 40 mph, you’ve got a 95% chance of being dead. It’s not linear; it’s exponential. This is why car crashes become serious so quickly with even just a bit of speeding. Yet speeding runs rampant throughout the US, and we pay for it with blood.

How do we protect cyclists – and how do cyclists protect us?

The same issue arises when discussing traffic separation. Bicycles are not cars; they have no inherent protection, much like pedestrians, and must be separated from vehicular traffic, much like pedestrians. In bike-friendly countries, bicycles have dedicated lanes, like sidewalks, but for bicycles, that go everywhere roads do. As a result, people feel safe to ride, which makes the roads even safer, as drivers learn to look out for cyclists. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Building 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) of “2+1” roads—where each lane of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero. And 12,600 safer crossings, including pedestrian bridges and zebra-stripes flanked by flashing lights and protected with speed-bumps, are estimated to have halved the number of pedestrian deaths over the past five years.

This is an elaboration of previous points. The most vulnerable travelers (pedestrians and cyclists) need to be protected. 2+1 roads, furthermore, in Sweden, are frequently designed with cable barriers, which are a great way of preventing the head on collisions that take so many lives on rural roads in the US (which are where most road fatalities in the US occur). The Swedes realized that it simply didn’t make sense to have human-steered vehicles hurtling toward each other in opposite directions at breakneck speeds with nothing between them but air and a broken yellow line.

Strict policing has also helped: now less than 0.25% of drivers tested are over the alcohol limit. Road deaths of children under seven have plummeted—in 2012 only one was killed, compared with 58 in 1970.

Sobriety testing and checkpoints are considered “meddling” by “big government” in the US, but in other countries where citizens place higher weight on the collective good, these checkpoints are much more common, and the separation of alcohol and the automobile is taken far, far more seriously.

And because this is also a car seat blog, here’s another reference to that amazing commitment to child safety. Only one child under 7 died in a car collision in 2012. A direct comparison is hard to find in the US, but in 2012, 480 children 8 and under died while passengers. At the Swedish proportion (1/264), we would have expected around 127 children 8 and under to have died. The fact that nearly 4x as many died is as clear an indicator as any that the Swedes are protecting their children in cars much better than we are. I strongly suspect a default acceptance of ERF plays a significant role in this magnitude of a difference.

Eventually, cars may do away with drivers altogether. This may not be as far off as it sounds: Volvo, a car manufacturer, will run a pilot programme of driverless cars in Gothenburg in 2017, in partnership with the transport ministry. Without erratic drivers, cars may finally become the safest form of transport.

The article ends with a look toward the future and a nod toward driverless cars. While I doubt driverless cars will surpass air travel in safety per mile, I do fully believe they will overwhelmingly surpass human-driven cars in safety, and cannot wait until their presence is as prevalent as the seat belt.

Oh, and the Volvo project has already started.

So what is there to learn from this? Clearly, the Swedes are taking a different approach to auto safety than we are here in the United States. People-centered (rather than auto-centered) planning, lower speed limits, much tighter restrictions on alcohol, and a commitment to eliminating deaths, or an entirely different conceptualization of the inevitability of the auto fatality, are all reaping benefits.

When can we try this here?

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Driving in the US More Dangerous Than in Europe

April 28, 2014 Mike

In this blog, I focus on the dangers of driving vehicles in the United States and ways to minimize those risks through safe driving practices and the selection of safe vehicles. I also present a variety of case studies in effort to learn from the mistakes of others.

However, this does not mean that I believe the solution to auto safety involves the use of ever larger vehicles. In fact, the truth of the matter is that there are a range of countries in which the risks of dying in auto collisions are significantly lower than they are here in the US. An article in Newsweek provides a brief introduction to this point.

(A map of Blood Alcohol Limits in Europe).

“Americans die on the roads at twice the rate of Europeans. Against all rich countries the U.S. doesn’t fare much better. The World Health Organization calculates an average of 8.7 fatalities per 100,000 people in high income countries compared with 11.4 in the U.S. and only 5.5 in the European Union. Subpar road safety in the U.S. shows up in other measures too, such as deaths per car or deaths per mile driven.”

The difference in those rates is significant. The US auto fatality rate of 11.4 per 100,000 people is not only higher than the 8.7 rate in fellow rich countries, it is more than twice as high as the EU rate of 5.5.

As Bernasek notes, these differences are unlikely to simply be a result of the greater public infrastructure available in the EU than in the US and the resultant decrease in reliance on personal transportation, as the US discrepancy is also visible in higher rates of deaths per car or deaths per mile driven in the country. Whichever way you slice it, people tend to die more when in cars while driving in the US than when driving in the EU.

The differences, however, do not lie specifically in vehicular design, as one might expect. While auto safety testing is a significant force in the EU (e.g., the Euro NCAP), cars in the EU are not significantly larger or heavier than they are in the US. If anything, they are, on average, smaller. So what else could it be?

Driving Safety in Sweden Doesn’t Prioritize Convenience

“So what are other countries doing that we’re not? Some countries made road safety a priority and got results. Sweden for instance, has a zero-tolerance policy on traffic-related deaths and injuries, and it has been building roads for safety rather than speed or convenience. Last year, 264 Swedes died on the roads, the lowest level ever, around three fatalities per 100,000 people.”

Bernasek astutely describes the focus a number of other countries place on road safety. In Sweden, where the Volvo car company was born, the goal of traffic deaths and injuries is to reduce them to zero, which has led to a policy of building roads with safety foremost in mind instead of roads that make it easier to speed or more convenient for the automobile. As a result, Sweden’s fatalities last year were 264, an all time low (since the early years of the automobile, of course), reflecting a death rate of 3 per 100,000. Think of how many fewer head on collisions we’d have in the US if we phased out undivided highways, for example. So many of the stories I cover are directly the result of individuals crossing center lines.

“Other countries have focused on drunk-driving laws. Researchers found random breath testing is the single most effective way to reduce deaths related to driving and alcohol. Australia had significant success in lowering road deaths related to alcohol by introducing widespread breath testing and its death rate is now around five fatalities per 100,000 people. In general, other rich countries tend to allow less alcohol in drivers’ blood than prevailing limits in the U.S.”

This is a key, key point. The US limit of 0.08 is one of the highest in the world of rich countries. In Sweden, for example, the limit is 0.02, or 1/4th of the US limit. Studies have shown that as few as *one* drink results in measurably poorer driving abilities than those found in completely sober drivers, yet the 0.08 limit in the US permits several drinks before a person is declared unfit to drive. As a result, year after year, 1/3rd of fatalities on the road in the US are linked to alcohol, which is reflected in the crashes I study on this blog.

Views on Speeding Differ in Europe from US

“Last, enforcement of speed limits is stricter in many European countries. Speed cameras, for instance, can be very effective. Speeding tends to be haphazardly enforced in the U.S., where it is sometimes considered an important source of revenue rather than a means of ensuring safety.”

The topic of speed cameras is a hotly contested one in the United States. Many drivers tend to see them as money traps, but the research shows they significantly reduce the risk of red light running, which is a significant factor in the incidence of side impact collisions, which tend to be much more likely to lead to fatalities than front impact collisions. Similarly, the tendency in the US for states to grant ever-higher speed limits also has negative consequences on the likelihoods of individuals to survive collisions at such speeds.

I will write more about these issues in the future. The key point to remember, however, is that no amount of focus on vehicular safety will make the roads safe to everyone unless driver behaviors (e.g., speeding, alcohol consumption) are modified along with environmental factors (e.g., road design, traffic cameras). Oh, and it’s also important to make sure we’re following best practices with regard to how we transport children. It’s no coincidence that Sweden, with its incredibly low auto death rates, also leads the world in protecting children in cars.

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35,000 Americans will die this year on the road. You don't have to be one of them. A car seat and car safety blog to promote best practices for families.