Safety In The News

Driving blind: Children killed every week because of back-overs
New federal rules could change rear-visibility standards for vehicles
The tragedies unfold with striking similarity: An Idaho father runs over his 22-month-old son while preparing his pickup for a wash, a Washington man kills his fiance's 3-year-old when he rolls out of the driveway without seeing her tricycle, a Texas teen backs over a 14-month-old boy who had crawled across his path from a neighboring driveway. Heartbreaking? Yes. But hardly a rarity in the United States where children die every week in driveways and parking lots from San Diego to St. Paul.
"I don't think people have a clue as to how serious it is," said Janette Fennell, president and founder of KidsAndCars.org, a national advocacy group focused on preventing childhood injuries and death around vehicles. But it is a deadly serious problem -- so serious that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration soon will release new rules for rear visibility in vehicles.
Unsuspecting motorists run over an estimated 50 children a week in residential driveways or parking lots across the country. At least two of those children die, according to data compiled by KidsAndCars.org.
Tragically, seven out of 10 of those deaths are caused by a direct family member. And all of them are preventable.
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62 Percent Reduction in Lane Departure Related Accidents
Santa Ana, Calif. Iteris, Inc., a leader in the traffic management market that focuses on the application and development of advanced technologies and Prime, Inc., a refrigerated, flatbed and tanker truck fleet based in Springfield Missouri, today announced that after carefully tracking the effectiveness of Iteris’ AutoVue Lane Departure Warning (LDW) system over the past four years, Prime has reduced rollover and run-off-road accidents by more than 62 percent. Prime now has over 4,000 trucks equipped with the Iteris LDW and has been tracking the miles of both the trucks equipped and not equipped since January 2006. Over that time, the trucks that were equipped with Iteris’ LDW systems accumulated 761 million miles, while the non-equipped trucks accumulated 902 million miles. Performance was tracked based on a calculation of the number of accidents per million miles. The per-million-mile rate for run-off-road and roll-over accidents was 62 percent less on the trucks equipped with Iteris’ LDW system. Prime estimates this computes to 84 fewer accidents. Using the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s $91,000 average estimated cost per large truck accident, this could have resulted in a savings of approximately $7.6 million.
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National standards sought for teen drivers
Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
As prom season begins, the issue of phased-in driving privileges for teens is heating up.
Three Democratic senators are pushing legislation to create a national graduated driver licensing (GDL) law. They say it would replace a patchwork of state laws with a single national standard that encompasses proven safety policies for novice drivers.
New Jersey just strengthened its GDL law, adding a first-in-the-nation provision requiring teens with a driver’s permit or probationary license to display a special decal on their license plates.
Illinois is considering reducing the amount of time that teenagers can drive on weekend nights. Fresh scrutiny surrounds Minnesota’s GDL law after 18 people, many of them teens, were killed in one week in highway crashes.
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AAA pushing a nationwide ban on texting while driving by 2013
Submitted by Amandeep Dhaliwal 09/28/2009
Terming texting while driving as "dangerous distraction," the automobile club AAA is vehemently pushing the need for introducing a nationwide ban on text messaging while driving.
In its endeavor to persuade federal and state governments to pass laws banning text messaging by drivers in the US, the association has proposed that sending, writing or even reading text messages or e-mails while driving should be prohibited in all 50 states by 2013.
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Secretary LaHood: Michigan Becomes the 24th State to Ban Texting
4/30/2010
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today commended Governor Jennifer Granholm for signing an anti-texting bill into law making Michigan the 24th state with such a ban. The newly-signed legislation explicitly prohibits a person from reading, writing or sending text messages while driving a vehicle in Michigan. Granholm signed the bill into law on Oprah Winfrey’s No Phone Zone Day program.
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