Crash Safety Systems Needed in U.S. Passenger Vehicles and Buses
After traffic fatalities rose by more than 1,000 last year over the year before, reversing a trend of declining fatalities that had held since 2005, the U.S. government began trying to speed up the process of having certain automatic vehicle safety systems installed in new passenger vehicles. 72% of the increase in accident deaths occurred in the first three months of the year. That steep rise was attributed in part to the unseasonably warm winter last year. Our Houston collision injury attorneys remark that most of those additional traffic deaths involved motorcyclists and pedestrians.
One new automatic safety system the U.S. NHTSA would like to see is a passive detector of driver inebriation. But that device is at least five years away from viability according to estimates. Another system would involve automatic seatbelt detection of whether vehicle occupants were buckled in. Safety experts say that installing such a detection system is more cost effective than designing additional safety measures to protect unbelted passengers and drivers who might otherwise be thrown around inside a vehicle or ejected during a crash. Yet a third system involves automatic collision warnings to help drivers take evasive action.
Ironically, our Houston collision injury attorneys note that this government push for additional passenger vehicle seatbelt safety systems comes at the same time as an article discussing the government’s failure to implement seatbelt requirements on commercial buses. Safety experts have recommended seatbelts on commercial buses for at least 45 years. The NTSB recommendation was driven by a fiery crash in the Mojave Desert near Baker, California in 1968 where a drunken driver slammed into a bus. That fiery crash killed 19 people.
The NTSB accident investigation found that most of the passengers had survived the actual crash, but were so injured and disoriented by being thrown around during the impact that they were unable to escape the subsequent fire. Had the passengers been seat-belted in, they would likely have been less severely injured, less disoriented, and more able to escape the fire. (Source: Joan Lowy, Associated Press, by way of the Houston Chronicle, 11/12/13)
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