Traffic (58 page)

less likely to wear helmets: C. Peek-Asa and J. F. Kraus, “Alcohol Use, Driver, and Crash Characteristics Among Injured Motorcycle Drivers,
Journal of Trauma,
vol. 41 (1996), pp. 989–93.

those who are sober: See, for example, R. D. Foss, D. J. Beirness, and K. Sprattler, “Seat Belt Use Among Drinking Drivers in Minnesota,”
American Journal of Public Health,
vol. 84, no. 11 (1994), pp. 1732–37.

attributed to the driver: Emmanuel Lagarde, Jean-François Chastang, Alice Gueguen, Mireille Coeuret-Pellicer, Mireille Chirion, and Sylviane Lafont, “Emotional Stress and Traffic Accidents: The Impact of Separation and Divorce,”
Epidemiology,
vol. 15, no. 6 (November 2006).

and gender differences): G. Whitlock, R. Norton, T. Clark, R. Jackson, and S. MacMahon, “Motor Vehicle Driver Injury and Marital Status: A Cohort Study with Prospective and Retrospective Driver Injuries,”
Injury Prevention,
vol. 10 (2004), pp. 33–36.

Spain to California: See, for example, T. Reuda-Domingo and P. Lardelli-Claret, “The Influence of Passengers on the Risk of the Driver Causing a Car Collision in Spain: Analysis of Collisions from 1990 to 1999,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 36 (2004), pp. 481–89, and Judy A. Geyer and David R. Ragland, “Vehicle Occupancy and Crash Risk,” UCB-TSC-RR-2004-16, Berkeley, Institute of Transportation Studies, 2004; paper accessed at
http://repositories.cdlib.org/its/tsc/UCB-TSC-RR2004-16
.

if there’s a passenger: Actually, if one
is
involved in a crash, a passenger is still a good bet. The added mass, it has been suggested, could reduce a driver’s fatality risk in a frontal collision by 7. 5 percent. See Leonard Evans, “Causal Influence of Car Mass and Size on Driver Fatality Risk,”
American Journal of Public Health,
vol. 91, no. 7 (July 2001), pp. 1076–81.

passengers in the car: Geyer and Ragland, “Vehicle Occupancy,” op. cit.

with passengers onboard: Li-Hui Chen, Susan P. Baker, Elisa R. Braver, and Guohua Li, “Carrying Passengers as a Risk Factor for Crashes Fatal to 16-and 17-Year-Old Drivers,”
Journal of the American Medical Association,
vol. 283 (2000), pp. 1578–82.

held for female drivers): B. G. Simons-Morton, N. Lerner, and J. Singer, “The Observed Effects of Teenage Passengers on Risky Driving Behavior of Teenage Drivers,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 37 (2005), pp. 973–82.

their male comrades: Ronald Kotulak, “Increase in Women Doctors Changing the Face of Medicine,”
Jerusalem Post,
August 2, 2007.

alcohol-related fatal crash: Information on crashes in Montana and New Jersey is drawn from Rajesh Subramanian, “Alcohol-Related Fatalities and Fatality Rates by State, 2004–2005,” DOT HS 810 686, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, December 2006: available at
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov
.

found on rural roads:
Growing Traffic in Rural America: Safety, Mobility and Economic Challenges in America’s Heartland
(Washington, D.C.: Road Information Program, March 2005).

any other road: ibid.

(nearly 75 percent in 2005):
Chicago Tribune,
January 12, 2005.

or even while driving: Laura K. Barger, Brian E. Cade, Najib F. Aya, et al., “Extended Work Shifts and the Risk of Motor Vehicle Crashes Among Interns,”
New England Journal of Medicine,
vol. 352, no. 2 (January 13, 2005).

vehicle on the road: This does not have to do entirely with the vehicle, of course. As Charles Kahane of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration points out, pickup trucks, at least historically, have tended to be driven more often in rural environments and more often by men—two risk-inflating variables. See Charles J. Kahane, “Vehicle Weight, Fatality Risk and Crash Compatibility of Model Year 1991–99 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Report DOT HS 809 662, October 2003.

other kind of vehicle: See, for example, Gerard, Fischbeck, Gengler, and Weinberg, “An Interactive Tool,” op. cit.

pickups also impose: Several hundred people per year in the United States are also killed riding in the unprotected cargo beds of pickup trucks. See C. L. Anderson, P. F. Agran, D. G. Winn, and S. Greenland, “Fatalities to Occupants of Cargo Areas of Pickup Trucks,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 32, no. 4 (2000), pp. 533–40.

on drivers of other vehicles: See Marc Ross and Tom Wenzel, “The Effects of Vehicle Model and Driver Behavior on Risk,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 37 (2005), pp. 479–94.

more energy in a crash: See Marc Ross, Denna Patel, and Tom Wenzel, “Vehicle Design and the Physics of Traffic Safety,”
Physics Today,
January 2006, pp. 49–54.

drivers of smaller cars: Leonard Evans, “Mass Ratio and Relative Driver Fatality Risk in Two-Vehicle Crashes,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 25 (1993), pp. 609–16.

“was maintained very well”: Thanks to Gabriel Bridger for pointing this out. See
http://www.iihs.org
for results.

in the
New Yorker:
Malcolm Gladwell, “Big and Bad,”
New Yorker,
January 12, 2004.

Wenzel have pointed out: Tom Wenzel and Marc Ross, “Are SUVs Really Safer Than Cars? An Analysis of Risk by Vehicle Type and Model,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Seminar, July 30, 2002, Washington, D.C. Similarly, the Chevrolet Camaro (or Pontiac Firebird) and Chevy Corvette are equally risky to their own drivers, but the Corvette poses less risk to others. The researchers suspect it may be because of the Corvette’s fiberglass body and lower profile, both of which might cause less damage to others.

the statistically safest demographic?: Sometimes the statistics confound expectations. Take the Volvo V70 station wagon and the two-door BMW 3 Series. The first car conjures visions of staid Scandinavian safety and innocuous suburban commuting, while the image of the latter is of a small sports car piloted by the typically aggressive “Beemer” driver. Yet according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from 2002 through 2005, the U.S. fatality rate (per million registered vehicle years) for both cars was identical. I have no way of qualifying the difference, and there are a raft of potential statistical problems, but this leads to all kinds of speculation: Did the BMW have better crash protection? Was the safer driving of the Volvo owner offset by inferior handling? Perhaps Volvo wagons carried more passengers or logged more miles? Are BMW drivers better drivers? Or was it just a statistical fluke? As Marc Ross remarked to me in an e-mail correspondence, the relatively small number of fatalities in either car means that any variations in how the data is handled can easily throw off the results. There are a host of small factors that can corrupt the data, he explained: “For example, how long was the model in question on the road in the first year. If the model came out early, then the ‘exposure’ to crashes was relatively long in that first year. If the model came out late, the exposure was short in that first year. A different complication is that models that don’t sell so well tend to stay on the dealer’s lot, but some of them get registered [for tax reasons] by the dealer but aren’t being driven while they stay on the lot.” Therefore they have less exposure to traffic risk than might appear.

more than women: See, for example, Pew Research Center, “As the Price of Gas Goes Up, the Nation’s Odometer Slows Down,” August 8, 2006; available at
http://pewresearch.org
.

wear seat belts less often: V. Vasudevan and S. Nambisan,
Safety Belt Usage Surveys: Final Project Report
(Las Vegas: Transportation Research Center, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2006).

trucks without seat belts: Jeremy Diener and Lilliard E. Richardson, “Seat Belt Use Among Rural and Urban Pickup Truck Drivers,” Report 4–2007, Institute of Public Policy, University of Missouri, July 2007.

involved in a fatal crash: See National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Alcohol Involvement in Fatal Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes, 2003,” DOT HS 809 822, March 2005.

versus white ones?: S. Newstead and A. D’Elia, “An Investigation into the Relationship Between Vehicle Colour and Crash Risk,” Monash University Accident Research Centre, Report 263, 2007.

rental cars: In a conversation, Sheila “Charlie” Klauer noted that in the VTTI’s aforementioned 100-car naturalistic study, both younger and older drivers of leased cars were involved in more risky driving events than the owners of private vehicles. “The leased vehicle drivers were involved in just slightly more events than were the private vehicle drivers. It was consistent,” she said. “It’s kind of a rental car phenomenon, that’s what we’re hypothesizing. I think we are all a little bit more reckless when we’re in a rental car than in our own car.” I was unable to find any study in the U.S. that had tackled this question head-on, although the multiplicity of drivers any rental car has and the varieties of exposure would make it difficult to gauge risk. A study in Jordan did report a higher crash rate among rental cars, though this was complicated by the fact that younger drivers (a riskier group to begin with) seemed to be overrepresented among car renters. See Adli H. Al-Balbissi, “Rental Cars Unique Accident Trends,”
Journal of Transportation Engineering,
vol. 127, no. 2 (March–April 2001), pp. 175–77.

(less regard for life?): Guy Stecklov and Joshua R. Goldstein, “Terror Attacks Influence Driving Behavior in Israel,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
vol. 101, no. 40 (2004), pp. 14551–56.

than in the front: Evans,
Traffic Safety,
op. cit., p. 56.

some 28,500 lives: C. Hunter Sheldon,
Journal of the American Medical Association,
November 5, 1955.

from seat belts: John Adams notes that from 1970 to 1978, in a sample of major Western countries that adopted seat-belt laws during the period, “the group of countries that had not passed seat-belt laws experienced a greater decrease [in fatalities] than the group that had passed laws.” In the United Kingdom, he writes, the drop in fatalities in 1983, the first full year after the belt law was passed, was “nothing remotely approaching” the predicted decline of one thousand deaths a year. The only segment of fatalities that dropped dramatically, he notes, was fatalities during the “drink-drive hours” of early Saturday and Sunday mornings—in response, he argues, to a stepped-up campaign against drunk driving. The drop in fatalities at other times, he suggests, was no higher than the annual 3 percent decrease already taking place. “No studies have been done to explain why,” he writes, “after the seat-belt law came into effect in Britain, seat belts were so extraordinarily selective in saving the lives of those who are over the alcohol limit and driving between 10 at night and 4 in the morning.” See John Adams, “Britain’s Seat-Belt Law Should Be Repealed,” draft of a paper for publication in
Significance,
March 2007.

colors would make more sense): R. G. Mortimer, “A Decade of Research in Rear Lighting: What Have We Learned?,” in
Proceedings of the Twenty-first Conference of the American Association for Automotive Medicine
(Morton Grove, Ill.: AAAM, 1977), pp. 101–22.

improved reaction times: See, for example, J. Crosley and M. J. Allen, “Automobile Brake Light Effectiveness: An Evaluation of High Placement and Accelerator Switching,”
American Journal of Optometry and Archives of American Academy of Optometry,
vol. 43 (1966), pp. 299–304. For a good history of brake lights and the various issues involved, see D. W. Moore and K. Rumar, “Historical Development and Current Effectiveness of Rear Lighting Systems,” Report No. UMTRI-99-31, 1999, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor.

cut by 50 percent: The trial is described in John Voevodsky, “Evaluation of a Deceleration Warning Light for Reducing Rear-End Automobile Collisions,”
Journal of Applied Psychology,
vol. 59 (1974), pp. 270–73.

to around 15 percent: Charles Farmer, “Effectiveness Estimates for Center High Mounted Stop Lamps: A Six-Year Study,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 28, no. 2 (1996), pp. 201–08.

crashes by 4.3 percent: See Suzanne E. Lee, Walter W. Wierwille, and Sheila G. Klauer, “Enhanced Rear Lighting and Signaling Systems: Literature Review and Analyses of Alternative System Concepts,” DOT HS 809 425, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, March 2002.

inventors had hoped: Critics of the chimsil have attributed its underwhelming impact in part to the idea that drivers do not necessarily brake when they see brake lights illuminated. The chimsil, this critique goes, offers more information, but more of the
same
information. It says nothing, for example, about how quickly a car is decelerating or whether it has, in fact, stopped—a key consideration given the majority of rear-end collisions involving stopped cars. The work of R. G. Mortimer has provided the most thoroughgoing critique of the chimsil. See, for example, R. G. Mortimer, “The High-Mounted Brake Light: The 4% Solution,” Society of Automotive Engineers Technical Paper 1999-01-0089, 1999.

by
someone else: L. Evans and P. Gerrish, “Anti-lock Brakes and Risk of Front and Rear Impact in Two-Vehicle Crashes,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 28 (1996), pp. 315–23.

non-ABS drivers did: Elizabeth Mazzae, Frank S. Barickman, and Garrick J. Forkenbrock, “Driver Crash Avoidance Behavior with ABS in an Intersection Incursion Scenario on Dry Versus Wet Pavement,” Society of Automotive Engineers Technical Paper, 1999-01-1288, 1999.

braking the wrong way: A. F. Williams. and J. K. Wells, “Driver Experience with Antilock Brake Systems,”
Accident Analysis & Prevention,
vol. 26 (1994), pp. 807–11.

“close to zero”: Charles J. Kahane, “Preliminary Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Antilock Brake Systems for Passenger Cars,” NHTSA Report No. DOT HS 808 206, December 1994.

“has never been explained”): Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,
Status Report,
vol. 35, no. 4 (April 15, 2000).