BIKE: NYTimes.com Article: Once World Leader in Traffic Safety, U.S. Drops to No. 9

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Once World Leader in Traffic Safety, U.S. Drops to No. 9

November 27, 2003
 By DANNY HAKIM 



 

The United States, long the safest place in the world to
drive and still much better than average among
industrialized nations, is being surpassed by other
countries. 

Even though the nation has steadily lowered its traffic
death rates, its ranking has fallen from first to ninth
over the last 30 years, according to a review of global
fatality rates adjusted for distances traveled. If the
United States had kept pace with Australia and Canada,
about 2,000 fewer Americans would die because of traffic
accidents every year; if it had the same fatality rate as
England, it would save 8,500 lives a year. 

Many safety experts cite several reasons the United States
has fallen in the rankings, despite having vehicles
equipped with safety technology that is at least as
advanced as, if not more than, any other nation. They
include lower seat-belt use than other nations; a rise in
speeding and drunken driving; a big increase in deaths
among motorcyclists, many of whom do not wear helmets; and
the proliferation of large sport utility vehicles and
pickup trucks, which are more dangerous to occupants of
other vehicles in accidents and roll over more frequently. 

"Our fatality rates are lowering, but not to the degree
they have lowered in other regions of the world," said
William T. Hollowell, director of the Office of Applied
Vehicle Safety Research at the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration. 

Traffic deaths and injuries are growing as a global health
issue. The World Health Organization, preparing a report on
the issue, says traffic accidents will become the world's
third-leading cause of death and disability by 2020, up
from ninth today - a toll particularly costly because
victims are so often young adults. 

Indeed, automobile accidents will be the main subject of
World Health Day next April, supplanting diseases like
H.I.V./AIDS and malaria. 

"It's going to be a bigger World Health Day than usual
because of the magnitude of the issue," said Dr. Etienne
Krug, director of the World Health Organization's
department for injuries and violence prevention. 

"Because there's very little emphasis on it, and emphasis
on other health problems, we don't expect to make progress
on traffic safety, which is why the ranking is expected to
get worse," Mr. Krug said. He was mainly referring to the
developing world, where preventing traffic injuries lags
behind fighting disease. 

Industrialized nations like the United States are well
ahead of developing nations like China, where death rates
are not only far higher but also rising. 

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has laid out an
ambitious target of reducing the nation's traffic death
rate to 1 death per 100 million miles traveled from 1.5
deaths by 2008. That would translate into roughly 12,000
fewer deaths per year, given projections for increased road
use. Last year in the United States, 42,815 people died in
traffic accidents, the most since 1990. 

"Here we are losing 43,000 people," Mr. Mineta said. "If we
had that many people die in aviation accidents, we wouldn't
have an airplane flying. People wouldn't put up with it.
They ought not to put up with 43,000 uncles, aunts,
mothers, dads, brothers and friends whose lives are snuffed
out by traffic accidents." 

Getting to his target would require a radically faster pace
of improvement. As of last year, the death rate in the
United States had fallen to 1.51 deaths per 100 million
miles traveled from 1.58 in 1998. 

Since 1970, the United States traffic death rate has fallen
from nearly 4.8 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. By
2000, the rate in Britain had fallen to 1.2 deaths per 100
million miles from 6.1 in 1970. The new figure is the
lowest traffic death rate compiled by the Organization of
Economic Cooperation and Development, which collects a
variety of statistics from industrialized countries. 

Australia's death rate has fallen from 7.13 in 1971 - the
country did not estimate distances traveled the previous
year - to 1.45 in 2001. Canada's death rate is slightly
less. 

Other nations have much higher rates. Turkey's was close to
11.74 deaths per 100 million miles in 2001 and the Czech
Republic was 5.21. The economic organization's median
figure in 2001 was about 2.1 deaths. 

The Bush administration is mainly focusing on seat-belt use
and drunken driving in the near term because they are two
major areas where the United States lags some other leading
nations. 

Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, administrator of the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration, said: "If everybody buckles
up, we can save between 7,000 and 9,000 lives a year. That
would drop our fatality rate off the table. The only way
you get to 1.0 is to deal with these very important human
factors." Most traffic safety experts agree that the seat
belt remains the world's most effective safety device. The
nation's usage rate has risen considerably over the past
couple of decades, to nearly 80 percent today. But top
safety regulators in Canada and Australia say their use of
seat belts is about 10 percentage points higher. 

One reason more Canadians and Australians buckle up is
so-called primary seat-belt laws that allow the police to
stop motorists simply for not wearing a seat belt. Less
than half of the states in this country have such laws. 

Dr. Runge has been lobbying states to add primary belt
laws. A provision in a federal highway financing bill
before Congress would divide $600 million among states that
either have primary belt laws or reach a 90 percent usage
rate. 

Drunken driving rates are also on the rise in this country.
Last year, almost 18,000 people died in alcohol-related
accidents, the most since 1992. 

The administration is pushing for broader use of sobriety
courts, which emphasize counseling and treatment as well as
jail time. And Dr. Runge wants local jurisdictions to
designate special prosecutors for drunken driving. Another
problem is motorcycle deaths, which have risen more than 50
percent since 1997. Only 20 states require riders to wear
helmets, down from 47 in 1975, when federal highway
financing was tied to helmet laws. 

The most contentious topic in the safety debate is the
effect of sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and
minivans. Such vehicles made up about a fifth of new
vehicle sales in 1980 but now account for more than half.
Studies by the traffic safety agency have shown that light
trucks, particularly big sport utilities and pickups, pose
considerably more risk to the occupants of cars than other
cars do. 

Sport utilities are also no more safe than cars for their
own occupants, traffic statistics show, because advantages
they get from their bulk are offset by a greater propensity
to roll over. 

A new study by two researchers, Marc Ross from the
University of Michigan and Tom Wenzel from the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, estimates that 3,500 fewer
people would die each year if 60 percent to 80 percent of
the light trucks - sport utilities, minivans and pickups -
on the road were cars or station wagons. 

But the auto industry has disputed such claims. And other
studies have attributed thousands of deaths to another
cause: fuel economy regulations adopted in the 1970's
forced automakers to make lighter passenger cars. But the
weights of cars as well as light trucks have been rising
for the past decade and a half. 

Dr. Leonard Evans, a top safety researcher who retired
after more than three decades at General Motors, said any
potential improvements in vehicle design would be far
outweighed by improvements in driver behavior. He believes
the regulators and the news media are too focused on
blaming vehicles. 

"We've got to have much more focus on avoiding rather than
surviving crashes," he said. 

The administration is aiming at both driver and vehicle.


Dr. Runge pressured the industry to collaborate on an
effort to make sport utilities and pickups less dangerous
to people in cars. And a revamped rollover rating system,
due next year, seeks to better inform the public about
rollovers, which account for more than 10,000 deaths each
year. 

Mr. Hollowell, a top researcher at the traffic safety
agency, said the death rate in the United States had not
fallen further for several reasons unique to the country.
"The motorcycle fatalities have gone up, the rollovers have
gone up, which is a function of a greater numbers of light
trucks and vans, and another aspect, in vehicle to vehicle
crashes, is that we have a changing fleet," he said. 

Dr. Runge, who early in his tenure took heat from Detroit
for critical remarks about sport utilities, said, "We've
got the safest vehicles in the world, so when you consider
where we fall in the scheme of things, we can't blame the
vehicles." 

He asserted: "We have a unique fleet in this country and
we're addressing that. But we could have the perfect
vehicles, and until we address the human factors we're not
going to change our ranking." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/national/27SAFE.html?ex=1070934218&ei=1&en=25adb683f1207225


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