Streetsblog Capitol Hill

A 2011 study by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety comparing cities with red light cameras to those without them found that in the 14 largest U.S. cities, the cameras reduced fatal red-light-running collisions by 24 percent. Click to enlarge. Image: IIHS

Gawker dished out some richly-deserved ridicule to Tennessee State Senator Jon Lundberg yesterday, following reports that he is co-sponsoring legislation to outlaw the specific speeding camera that nabbed him doing 60 in a 45 zone last October. Lundberg denied that the incident had any impact on his decision to sponsor in the legislation, and contested the violation to boot.

But the case is a telling one. State governments around the country have demonstrated hostility to automated enforcement programs. Twelve states specifically forbid the use of speed enforcement cameras, except in very limited circumstances, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Nine states prohibit red light cameras. Others, like New York, have yet to enact legislation that would enable cities to use these traffic enforcement tools.

A proposed ban in Iowa failed narrowly in the Senate last year and one is currently under consideration in Ohio.

The Ohio legislation, framed as a defense of due process and privacy, has received mostly favorable coverage in the press and has enjoyed the support of groups like the Ohio ACLU and Ohio PIRG. One Ohio PIRG official characterized speed cameras as “cash cows designed to rip off drivers.” Ohio Lawmaker Ron Hood went so far as to assert that red light cameras are themselves a safety hazard.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute on Highway Safety, told the Washington Post last year that these kind of debates tend to get distorted: “Somehow, the people who get tickets because they have broken the law have been cast as the victims.”

Lost in these debates is the fact that automated enforcement saves lives. A 2011 study by IIHS comparing cities with red light cameras to those without them found that in the 14 largest U.S. cities, the cameras reduced fatal red-light-running collisions by 24 percent. Even more impressive, they seemed to promote safe driver behavior more generally. The researchers found that cities with red light cameras saw 17 percent fewer fatal crashes at signalized intersections, per capita, than cities without cameras.

Between 2004 and 2008, that added up to 159 lives saved in those 14 cities alone. If automated enforcement had been installed in all 99 of the U.S. cities with populations over 200,000, some 815 lives would have been saved over those four years, the report found.

Read more…

For many troops who have served in U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combat is just one of many dangers they face. Upon returning home, they have higher rates of suicide, homelessness, and mental illness. Now we can add another threat to the list:  Car crashes.

Sgt. Mark Ecker II, left, recovered from the loss of his legs in Iraq only to die behind the wheel of his car in Massachusetts. Photo: Myspace

The Washington Post published an astonishing article yesterday about the little-known epidemic of automobile deaths among combat veterans. Those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are 75 percent more likely to die in a motor vehicle crash than civilians – and that’s after they leave service. We’re not talking about while they’re driving around IED-infested streets in war zones. We’re talking about the road from mom’s house to Wal-mart.

Here are the horrifying facts:

Motor vehicle crashes have long been a serious problem in the military. From 1999 through 2012, a period spanning peacetime and the two wars, as many active-duty military personnel died in noncombat motor vehicle crashes both on and off duty (4,423) as were killed in the Iraq war (4,409).

Further research is needed, but the evidence suggests that “motor vehicle crashes will join suicide and interpersonal violence as a fatal, if indirect, consequence of the war on terrorism.”

An in-house study by the insurance company USAA shows that the rate of at-fault crashes is 23 percent higher for Army vets in the six months after a tour than in the six months before they left. And each tour compounds the risk: “Troops with three deployments had 36 percent more accidents, compared with 27 percent more in the twice-deployed and 12 percent in people deployed only once.”

People familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder probably won’t be surprised that after troops return home, they are easily distracted by obsessively checking around them for potential dangers. They often drive aggressively. They often drive drunk. They fear using seat belts because they could “get in the way of a rapid escape.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs is working with vets on safe driving and now offer vets driver-rehabilitation programs at 40 locations across the country. The Army gives out a brochure called “Post-Combat Driving: The American Road.”

When we talk about the importance of multiple transportation options, we often talk about people who can’t drive, or don’t, or shouldn’t. Senior citizens sometimes fall into that category. Children always do. People with disabilities. Who would have guessed that America’s combat vets fit into that category? But it appears that they have much to gain from modes of transportation in which a momentary lapse of judgment or a sudden feeling of panic wouldn’t have such dire consequences.

Deaths from motor vehicle crashes rose 5.3 percent in 2012, according to new numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [PDF]. It’s the first time since 2005 that fatalities have gone up. Vehicle miles traveled only rose 0.3 percent last year.

Marina Keegan and an estimated 34,079 other people died on America's roads in 2012 -- a 5.3 percent increase over 2011. Photo: NYDN

The winter was especially nasty, with 12.6 percent more deaths than the previous winter. But every quarter last year showed more traffic deaths than the same quarter in 2011. All in all, the tragic death toll of 34,080 is a shocking reversal of a six-year steady decline.

In February, the National Safety Council put its 2012 fatality estimate at 36,200.

Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities weren’t noted on the release from NHTSA, which is only an “early estimate” of the 2012 toll. We’ll have to wait until the agency releases the final numbers to see the stats for people biking and walking, which have been going up in recent years as overall deaths have been going down.

Fatalities rose the most in the northeast (>15 percent), the south (10 percent) and in the region comprising California, Arizona and Hawaii (9 percent).

Last year, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland credited the historic drop in fatalities — to a still-staggering 32,367 lives lost – to improved driving behavior, vehicle safety, and educational campaigns against drunk driving and for seat belt use. We’ll see how the agency explains the alarming increase in deaths last year.

NSC officials pointed to distracted driving and an increase in the number of heavy trucks on the roads as possible explanations for the increased bloodshed.

“In 2014, federal investment in surface transportation — which is currently about $50 billion per year — will drop to $6 billion or $7 billion. In one year.”

Rep. Peter DeFazio says underinvestment in transit is killing people, and it's about to get way worse.

Those were the dire words spoken by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) at the start of this morning’s Transportation & Infrastructure Committee hearing on MAP-21. What he meant was this: At the end of MAP-21, the Highway Trust Fund is expected to have a balance of almost zero and a $7.1 billion shortfall in 2015. Congress would have to radically reduce FY 2015 highway and transit investment levels to ensure that the trust fund remains solvent. According to AASHTO, federal highway investments would have to be cut from approximately $41 billion to $6 billion and transit investment from $11 billion to $3 billion.

“That is pathetic,” DeFazio said. “And we have to do something about it.”

Funding Cuts Force FTA to Break Agreements

T&I Chair Bill Shuster agreed. “That’s our biggest challenge moving forward,” he said. And Ranking Democrat Nick Rahall added that the sequester cuts and Congress’s inability to pass a real budget has compounded the funding crisis.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff warned that the cuts will have a profound impact on transit projects around the country:

Overall, the sequester struck $656 million from FTA’s budget. It reduced program funding for our [New Starts] capital investment grants program by almost $100 million. This will means that few, if any, New Starts construction projects will be fundable in the near term.

Read more…

After seven years of declines, traffic deaths in America rose again in 2012, according to a preliminary estimate by the National Safety Council.

More Americans lost their lives in traffic in 2012 than in 2011, reversing recent trends. Image: Kansas City Legal Examiner

An estimated 36,200 people were killed in traffic collisions last year — a five percent increase over 2011, according to the NSC. In 2011, 34,600 people were killed on American roads.

Traffic injuries increased by the same margin in 2012, with roughly 4 million Americans requiring medical care for trauma incurred in a collision, a five percent increase.

The NSC attributes the increase to an overall rise in vehicle miles traveled, speculating that the continuing economic recovery and the mild winter of 2012 were major factors leading Americans to drive more. While U.S. economic growth has become increasingly decoupled from the amount Americans drive, the link is still strong enough, apparently, that an expanding economy means more people are at risk of getting hurt or killed on the streets.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not released its final data for total miles driven in 2012 (the December report is not complete). However, for eight of the 11 months for which 2012 data is available, driving did increase over 2011 totals. If vehicle miles traveled did indeed increase in 2012, that would also represent a reversal of recent downward trends. According to the State Smart Transportation Institute, total driving had declined in six of the seven years prior to 2012. In 2011, Americans drove roughly as many total miles as they did in 1998, according to the organization.

NSC officials also pointed to distracted driving and an increase in the number of heavy trucks on the roads as other possible factors in the increased bloodshed.

Read more…

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a new rule requiring automakers to install event data recorders, known as EDRs or black boxes, in all light passenger vehicles. While the rule would expand the number of vehicles equipped to record critical information in the moments preceding a crash, that alone won’t aid investigations of traffic deaths or strengthen cases against reckless drivers. For black boxes to help get to the bottom of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, changes to local crash investigation procedures and to EDR technology itself need to happen as well.

Clara Heyworth was killed by a driver whose black box data was wiped away before police thought to look for it. Photo via New York Times

Most cars already have black boxes. They’ve been around since 1996, and NHTSA says about 96 percent of 2013 models have them. The agency wants to make that 100 percent, starting in September 2014.

Black boxes on airplanes get more press than those in cars, since they’ve helped piece together the factors behind some high-profile plane crashes. In cars, event data recorders can tell you how fast the vehicle was going, whether the brake was activated, the force of the crash, the state of the engine throttle, when the airbag deployed, and whether a vehicle occupant’s seatbelt was buckled.

All good information. But black boxes don’t always work if it was a pedestrian or a cyclist who was struck.

Event data recorders are part of the airbag safety system. They’re what tells the airbags to deploy. And if the crash isn’t forceful enough to trigger the airbags, the EDR doesn’t record the data.

James Harris of Harris Technical Services, which provides expert reconstruction of traffic crashes, says black boxes “have been known to” record crashes with pedestrians, but “it’s not absolute.”

Sensors mounted around the edge of the car might detect a person there, but if the crash isn’t forceful enough to set off an airbag deployment, the black box probably won’t record it.

“If their body makes contact with the front of the car near one of the forward sensors – ah! Now you might have a record started,” Harris told Streetsblog. “They’re not designed for that necessarily. What we’re looking at are forces.”

It’s yet another vulnerability that comes with being a “vulnerable street user.” Flesh and bone — or even a bike frame — often won’t cause a severe enough impact to register with the black box. Harris said a bigger, heavier vehicle, like a Lincoln Continental, while being more likely to cause damage, is actually less likely to record a crash with a pedestrian or cyclist because of its greater mass relative to the victim. Meanwhile, the NHTSA rule doesn’t encompass heavy trucks or buses, which aren’t required to have black boxes installed.

When it comes to using black box data in crash investigations and reckless driving prosecutions, much needs to happen at the local and state level before the technology is consistently applied to hold dangerous drivers accountable. In cases where EDRs do record a crash involving a bicyclist or pedestrian, police and district attorneys rarely use the information.

Read more…

Public interest journalist Stuart Silverstein at FairWarning.org has uncovered the fact that red states (defined as those that went for Mitt Romney in the last election) have higher traffic fatality rates than blue states (those that went for Barack Obama). The correlation is striking, Silverstein says, but he’s at a loss to explain it:

The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest-fatality states were blue. What’s more, the place with the nation’s lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia.

Massachusetts was lowest among the states, with 4.79 road deaths per 100,000 people. By contrast, red Wyoming had a fatality rate of 27.46 per 100,000.

The numbers are based on 2010 fatality statistics from the NHTSA.

Silverstein asked a few sources to weigh in — including Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” and former federal auto safety researcher Louis V. Lombardo — but they couldn’t quite put their finger on what’s going on.

“It may be something we don’t have a definitive answer for,” Lombardo said.

“This is someplace where you would not expect to see a partisan divide,” Frank said.

I’m not nearly as smart as either of these guys, but I couldn’t help noticing that there are different travel patterns in the (mostly rural) red states and the (more urban) blue states. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

Read more…

Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan each had a harrowing story to tell about the perils of automobiles, while talking up the car industry.

The vice presidential debate last night took an unexpected turn toward traffic safety, amid a lot of predictable chest-thumping about saving Detroit. After Vice President Joe Biden said what is by now a standard favorite in the administration repertoire – “Romney said, let Detroit go bankrupt” — Rep. Paul Ryan countered with this: “Mitt Romney’s a car guy.”

So now we’re running for president based on our penchant for power steering? Ryan didn’t say much more about Romney’s rich history with the car industry, like Romney’s dad running American Motors in the 50s. Instead, Ryan pivoted to talk about Romney’s personal generosity, through the lens of a horrific automobile accident:

They keep misquoting him, but let me tell you about the Mitt Romney I know. This is a guy who — I was talking to a family in Northborough, Massachusetts the other day, Cheryl and Mark Nixon. Their kids were hit in a car crash, four of them — two of them, Rob and Reid, were paralyzed. The Romneys didn’t know them. They went to the same church. They never met before.

Read more…

When to take grandma’s keys away: In the United States, this question treated is largely treated as a family matter.

A study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that traffic collisions declined significantly after doctors warned elderly patients about health issues that could impair safe driving. Photo: Katv

But that is not the case in Canada, where the government requires doctors to report to licensing authorities when their patients start showing signs that, behind the wheel, they might pose a danger to themselves or others. A recent study from the New England Journal of Medicine has raised the question about what role physicians should have in helping determine fitness for driving.

Researchers found that a group of 100,000 Ontario patients identified by doctors as potentially unfit to drive were involved in 45 percent fewer severe road crashes following the doctor’s warning — whether they stopped driving altogether, drove less, or simply drove more carefully. Licensing agencies revoked licenses between 10 and 30 percent of the time when alerted by a doctor.

But even the study results highlight what a sensitive matter retiring an elderly individual’s driving privileges can be, especially in a society where, in so many residential locations, losing the ability to drive can mean a near total loss in independence.

The study also found an increase in mood disorders, like depression, among those who were singled out by doctors. In addition, one in five such patients switched doctors — a fact that might help explain why U.S. doctors have not necessarily been eager to interject on this issue.

According to Transportation for America, about four in five seniors live in rural or suburban communities that are largely car dependent. But some seniors may find that alternatives to driving aren’t as insurmountable as they might seem. NPR reports that 87-year-old Benjamin Benson was unhappy when his family suggested he hand over the keys. But he soon realized it wasn’t a death sentence:
Read more…

Last week, U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood helped NYC transpo commish Janette Sadik-Khan launch a new phase of the “LOOK!” campaign, with pavement markings instructing texting pedestrians to wake the hell up. He made a comment that made its way into his blog post about the event, as well as other media reports on the event, and it caught the attention of Streetsblog NYC’s crack reporting team.

Sadik-Khan and LaHood show off new sidewalk safety markings in NYC, just after LaHood said 80 percent of dead pedestrians were victims of their own jaywalking. Photo: Stephen Miller

What LaHood said was that many pedestrian deaths that occurred nationwide in 2010 were easily preventable, as “nearly 80 percent happened because someone was jaywalking.”

That hits like a ton of bricks, doesn’t it? Drivers dart around in powerful, heavy, dangerous contraptions at high speeds while texting, tweeting, eating, and shuffling through their iPods, and it’s the person hoofing it that’s to blame? Eighty percent of the time?

Turns out he was misquoting some data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which showed that in 2010, 79 percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred at non-intersections. Someone on LaHood’s staff looked at that statistic and figured “jaywalking” was pretty much a synonym for whatever was happening there.

A U.S. DOT spokesperson acknowledged that LaHood was referring to the NHTSA numbers and said, “He was not speaking about the fault or cause of those accidents.”

I don’t know who was ruled at fault in all of those crashes, but I do know for sure that being killed at a non-intersection doesn’t necessarily mean you were jaywalking. Maybe a drunk driver swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk. Or a motorist didn’t look when pulling out of an alley or driveway — U.S. DOT confirmed that curb cuts don’t count as “intersections” in this case. Besides, not all crosswalks are at intersections.

And then there are cases, like that of Raquel Nelson in Georgia, where there simply is no intersection. In suburban areas, you can walk half a mile before you get to an intersection or even a crosswalk. It’s not that no one ever needs to walk across the street, it’s just that planners have ruled that they must take their lives into their own hands when they do.

NHTSA already laid enough blame on pedestrian crash victims with its report, by focusing on how often they were intoxicated. For the secretary himself to say at a major press event that fully four out of five people mowed down by cars were “jaywalking” and therefore at fault is just wrong. It obscures the truth that motorists —  not pedestrians – cause the most havoc on our streets.