Submitted by Cedric Hughes on Tue, 07/20/2010 - 13:50
No Serious Injuries by 2020
At last year’s Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference in Sydney, Australia, Volvo Car Corporation’s government affairs director Anders Eugensson outlined Volvo’s vision: no one killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car by 2020. He described 11 years to reach zero deaths and zero serious injuries as “only two vehicle generations” and said, while Volvo still has lots to learn about the technologies needed to reach this ambitious objective, a three phase process is underway.
Submitted by Cedric Hughes on Tue, 07/13/2010 - 14:15
When Are You Too Old to Drive?
A recent Road Rules article about the dangers posed by intersections quoted Transport Canada’s Quick Look at Intersection Crashes in Canada to the effect that, “older drivers (aged 65 years or older) are much more likely to commit an infraction leading up to an intersection crash than most other drivers.” Also that “more middle-aged motorcyclists are being killed or seriously hurt in intersection crashes” and that “more pedestrians, especially seniors, are being killed in intersection crashes.” In short, the topic of intersection safety collided with the topic of aging drivers.
Submitted by Cedric Hughes on Tue, 07/13/2010 - 14:12
Automobile Safety as a Marketing Message
In 1994, Paul Ingrassia and Joseph White, respectively the Wall Street Journal's Detroit bureau chief and deputy chief, summarized their Pulitzer prize-winning beat reporting on the management turmoil at General Motors in a book optimistically called, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry.
Submitted by Cedric Hughes on Mon, 06/28/2010 - 09:39
Traffic Deaths: A Public Health Crisis
From 1979 to 2004, if the US downward trend in the annual number of fatalities from crashes had kept pace with Canada’s—our fatalities dropped from 5,933 to 2,875 or roughly fifty percent—the US total would have been 25,500. Instead, in 2004 in the US, 42,836 people were killed in crashes and since then, the annual total has hovered around 37,000. Recently, to mark the beginning of ‘summer road trip season’, The New York Times asked eleven traffic safety experts to blog about “the one thing that could be done to reduce highway deaths.”
Submitted by Cedric Hughes on Mon, 06/14/2010 - 11:06
Tolerance for Death on the Highway?
Just before Memorial Day, in a nod to the traditional start of summer road trip season, the New York Times Room for Debate blog invited eleven road safety experts to answer whether the United States should be working harder to reduce fatalities from crashes—the number while trending downward “still hovers around 37,000 fatalities a year”—and to identify the one thing that could achieve this.
