Promoting Best-Practices and Supporting Crash Victims
A U.S. Senator for Massachusetts has slammed “egregious failures” by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) for its lack of oversight, which he says is linked to an increase in fatal, truck-involved crashes.
Whenever a forensic crash investigation has not been completed — something which typically takes many days — it is very unwise for anyone at a crash scene to speculate about the cause of the incident. It is not rare for things that look obvious to prove entirely inaccurate.
Around 3:39 p.m. on Sunday, March 1, 2020, Wyoming Highway Patrol was notified of two crashes involving multiple vehicles on Interstate 80, one eastbound near milepost 181 and the other on the westbound side at 184.
There were 30 vehicles involved in the multiple crashes on the westbound side of the Interstate, and three people were killed.
The Golden Rule of Safe Driving would have prevented this! (Below)
Continue reading “Two Serious, Multi-vehicle Crashes on I-80, Wyoming (with video)”
It is a well-known fact that a mere handful of crash-types are the major killers on roads. These include impaired driving, distracted driving, drowsy driving, speed, vulnerable road users, and so on. However, although these are indeed the biggest issues, this is not the full story and it is regrettable that people aren’t made more aware of the many other factors and causes.
Continue reading “Factors Which Contribute to Road Crashes — a list of 78”
Just yesterday, we posted excerpts and our comments regarding the Road Safety Annual Report 2019, and America’s poor performance by comparison with the vast majority of other developed nations.
It has long been known that one of the key features in highway safety is the overall attitude of the people in the region or country concerned — the ‘road safety culture’.
Continue reading “Better US Road Safety Culture may be as Important as Vision Zero”
I’ve just had a great conversation, this evening, with a pilot who was at the next table to mine at dinner.
Our initial topic came from him and was about the safety comparison between air travel and driving, so I asked whether he was aware that for every person killed in commercial flights worldwide, each year, over 2,160 people are killed in road crashes. Yes, a ratio of more than 2,000-to-1, and even the number of people killed annually just on America’s roads is over 60-times greater than the total number of plane-crash fatalities worldwide.
Continue reading “A Pilot’s Comparison of Safety in Planes Versus Cars”
Here we are again — the riskiest time of the year for having a collision with a deer on America’s roads — October, November and December.
Deer-strike collisions are stunningly common in the USA. It has been estimated that there are around 1.5 million deer killed in this manner every year.
News Release — Washington DC — Oct. 2, 2019
The National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday called for new national requirements for seating and seat belt systems on limousines, citing evidence gathered in investigations of accidents in New York, Illinois and New Jersey.
The NTSB’s Safety Recommendation Report recommended that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration require lap/shoulder belts for each passenger seating position on all new vehicles modified to be used as limousines. It also requires seating systems in these vehicles to meet minimum performance standards to ensure their integrity during a crash.
In the 1960s, as a boy still at home with my parents, I started to see early road safety messages on British television, and key among these were film clips about not drinking alcohol and then driving.
The following decade, I joined the police — first in a three-year cadetship in which college played a major role, then as an officer. And during those early police years, I started to more fully understand the tragic devastation caused by people who drink alcohol before driving.
The video above is from 1978, my second year on Traffic Patrol
Continue reading “An Excellent, Uncompromising Message about Drinking and Driving”
Because of the complexity of the subject, the finalized crash and casualty statistics for 2017 have just been released by NHTSA.
In that year, in the USA, there were an estimated 6,452,000 police-reported traffic crashes, in which 37,133 people were killed and approximately 2,746,000 people were injured.
Continue reading “The Latest Crash and Casualty Figures for the USA”