Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (13 page)

Expanding on White's work, a more detailed study out of Berkeley looking at the effect of vehicle weight on safety found that for every additional 1,000 pounds in a vehicle's weight, it raises the probability of a death in any other vehicle in a collision by 47 percent.
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The added cost to society of overweight vehicles is $136 billion a year—costs that the owners of SUVs do not bear, the study's authors concluded. In order to make up for the added death and injury their vehicles cost the rest of the country, their fair share of the gasoline tax would have to be raised from the current 18.4 cents to $2.17 per gallon, the authors calculated.

Imposing this charge as the cost of using an inherently more deadly vehicle would, advocates argue, amount to removing a subsidy and allowing market forces to take over—which would likely dry up demand for heavy vehicles. But for a country that professes to believe in the power of markets more than public subsidies, there is absolutely no will or interest in having drivers pay the true cost of their choices. The U.S. government has not raised the gasoline tax since 1993.

On a more positive note, vehicle obesity is trending down for other reasons. After weights rose 26 percent overall for all vehicles between 1980 and 2006, government mandates to increase fuel economy are slowly nudging car weights in the other direction. The average U.S. passenger vehicle weighs in at just under two tons. Automakers are, if very cautiously, looking at substituting lighter aluminum and carbon-fiber composites for some heavier steel parts, which theoretically could cut vehicle weight in half with no loss of safety protection. Other trends, such as the arrival
of fully autonomous cars, could shift Americans toward even smaller vehicles because virtually every crash that took place on Friday the thirteenth could, theoretically, have been avoided by replacing human drivers with robotic ones. The arms race toward big, heavy cars as the “safer” choice would end.

B
rian Bayers, newly elected as Elk Creek magistrate for Spencer County, Kentucky, ran through his morning routine on February 13 like any other workday. He got his eighteen-month-old son, Jackson, dressed, fed, and ready for preschool. With his wife already off to work this frigid day, Bayers decided to dash outside and back his pickup truck into the driveway, where it could sit idling while the heater warmed the interior. When he returned to his house, he saw the front door he thought he had left closed now stood wide-open. Worried for his son, he ran inside, looking and calling for Jackson, but he could not find the boy. In a panic, Bayers ran back outside, fearful that, if his son had somehow gotten past the latched door—something he had never been able to do before—Jackson would be at risk of falling into a pond on the family's rural property. Then Bayers spotted the crumpled form of his only child beneath the pickup.

The toddler had somehow gotten outside right behind Bayers, trying to follow his dad out the door. He had trundled into the truck's blind spot as Bayers backed up. Jackson had been knocked over and run over by the front tires as the pickup backed into place. He died instantly.

Bayers called 911 for help, knowing there could be no help, then called his wife, Amanda, who rushed home from work so they could hold and rock their only child, whose pictures decorated seemingly every available surface in their home.

When backing up, motor vehicles don't have a “blind spot,” as
many drivers believe. They have a blind
zone
. The Kansas-based advocacy group Kids and Cars has made this message a key part of its crusade to prevent backover collisions. One illuminating poster the group distributes shows a photograph of a black SUV next to a house, with sixty-two preschoolers sitting cross-legged behind it, covering most of the driveway. None of the children are visible to the driver behind the wheel.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that the inherently poor visibility behind most cars and trucks, coupled with driver complacency about the risks of backing up, leads to 210 deaths and 15,000 injuries a year. Nearly a third of the dead are under five, and another quarter are adults over seventy. Kids and Cars estimates that fifty children under the age of fifteen are backed into or over every month, with forty-eight of them requiring emergency care and two dying.

Backup video cameras for cars that eliminate the blind zones have been available for decades. (Prototypes were first demonstrated in the 1950s.) Safety advocates and parents of children who died in someone's blind zone have campaigned to make them as ubiquitous as safety belts since the turn of this century, and federal legislation in 2007 mandated backup cameras in all new cars,
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though implementation has been repeatedly delayed as the deaths and injuries continue. They finally were scheduled to be installed on all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds sold in the U.S. by May 2018. The federal rule calling for this was only finalized in 2014.
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Some automakers are already voluntarily providing backup cameras in their cars ahead of the requirement.

Cameras alone can reduce but not cure the backover risk, because drivers are still required to pay attention to the video display. Only an automated system that overrides the driver and prevents collisions by braking the car when an object is behind could do that. That technology exists—several new models of
big-rig trucks on the road now have similar forward-looking collision avoidance systems in place already—but there is no mandate to put it on passenger cars.

Meanwhile, Brian Bayers agonizes over what might have been done to save his son from death, and other families from the same devastating loss and guilt. “What if I had a back-up camera on my vehicle? What if I had my window rolled down?” he said during a wrenching television interview he granted in order to warn other parents of the danger he never thought about before.
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“I think: what if I just picked my child up and carried him with me to my car?”

F
ridays are usually among the worst days for drunken driving. Friday the thirteenth was no exception, marked by a litany of people killed for doing nothing more than being on the same road with a drunk—for doing nothing more than trusting in the choices made by every other driver on the road.

At 2:00 p.m. outside Pittsburgh, one man was killed and two other people injured when a sport-utility vehicle made a left turn in front of an oncoming car on Pennsylvania Route 56. The crash turned into a police manhunt when the alleged driver of the SUV, thirty-four-year-old Jeremy Jonathan Blystone, ran from the scene. Blystone had a prior conviction for drunk driving and was wanted by police in three states.

The other driver, Thomas Pater, a sixty-one-year-old Vietnam veteran and local farmer, died in the crash. A passenger in each car was seriously injured. A three-hour police search using bloodhounds and a police helicopter ended in the nearby town of Apollo, where police caught up with Blystone after he stopped in a store, seemingly without a care in the world, to buy a pack of cigarettes.

A few hours later in Kenneth City, Florida, sixty-five-year-old Mark R. Ehrhardt died while crossing Fifty-Eighth Street a few blocks from home, run down by a Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV. The driver, forty-year-old Troy E. Donnelly, was arrested for driving while intoxicated and manslaughter after sheriff's deputies reported observing signs of impairment and Donnelly refused to submit to a breath test for alcohol. Donnelly had three previous convictions for drunken driving, the most recent in 2004.

And at 10:30 p.m., local entertainer Shane “Shaggy” Authement was making the two-mile walk from Marty J's Bayou Station, a truck stop and bar in Chauvin, Louisiana, to his family's home in the neighboring town of Montegut. Shaggy enjoyed partying as much as anyone and more than most, but the affable twenty-eight-year-old had one inflexible rule: no drinking and driving. He wouldn't do it himself. He wouldn't get in a car with someone else doing it. And he took away friends' car keys so they wouldn't do it. In keeping with his policy, Shaggy was walking home along the shoulder of Louisiana Highway 58 when a Toyota Camry driven by an alleged drunk driver struck and killed him. The fifty-three-year-old driver, from the same town as the conscientious entertainer, was charged with vehicular homicide.

Drunken driving, despite decades of tougher laws, police crackdowns, random checkpoints, and public awareness campaigns, remains the number one cause of traffic deaths. This runs counter to the widespread perception that public attitudes have turned sharply in recent years against driving drunk (after a long history of lax enforcement), so much so that the term “designated driver” has become a part of the everyday lexicon. Yet the statistics that document DWI carnage have stubbornly refused to budge in recent years. Ken Kolosh at the National Safety Council calls it “this brick wall we've hit” and identifies it as one of the main obstacles to reducing the car crash death toll going forward.

Consider these gruesome statistics:

It is true that the number of drunk-driving fatalities has fallen dramatically since their high point in the seventies, when more than 60 percent of all traffic deaths involved alcohol. Since those days, when traffic deaths from all causes peaked at 54,589, several major changes in car design and the legal drinking age combined to bring that number down.

A spike in alcohol-related crashes occurred in the seventies after many states lowered the legal drinking age to eighteen. The trend reversed after the ages were raised again in the eighties and nineties, driven in part by the lobbying and public
awareness campaigns by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization.

Separately, a 1968 federal law
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mandating seat belts in all vehicles except buses and, later, state laws requiring people to actually wear them or face stiff fines, reduced traffic deaths (though not traffic crashes) dramatically. So did subsequent collision safeguards: air bags and more crashworthy car frames and bodies. Other technologies actually prevented crashes by compensating for human error, such as antilock braking systems that became commonplace in the late eighties, lowering the risk of fatal multivehicle collisions by 18 percent and run-off-the-road fatalities (particularly loss of control on curves) by 35 percent. All of which meant that crashes, drunken or otherwise, were being survived that in the past might have been fatal.

Combined with raising the legal drinking age, these changes had cut the number of drunk driving deaths in half by the early 2000s. The drunk-driving fatality rate has been hovering in the range of one-third of all deaths ever since—which means about 12,000 deaths caused by drunk driving in 2014.

There are devices that would add a few hundred dollars to the price of a new car that prevent them from being started by a legally drunk person based on breath analysis. This technology has been used successfully in some states where judges are empowered to make it a condition of a convicted drunk driver's sentence, but this is done in a minority of cases, even those involving repeat offenders. The technology has become so simple that comparable pocket-size devices are on the market that can be clipped to a smartphone, so technology is not the barrier. Touch sensors that can measure alcohol in the blood by “sniffing” the skin are also being tested and show promise. But proposals to use drunk-driver lockout devices more widely—or to have them installed in all new cars—have garnered little support and gone nowhere,
although the payoff is potentially huge. Putting them in all new cars would be something of an inconvenience, but over fifteen years, as they gradually became ubiquitous, the gadgets would prevent an estimated 59,000 deaths, 1.25 million crash injuries, and $349 billion in crash injury costs—much, much more than the cost of adding the devices.
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There is one encouraging change in progress. Some evidence suggests that ridesharing services have reduced drunken driving arrests, at least among men and women under the age of thirty, the most frequent ridesharing customers. Every rideshare driver knows the busiest time and place for picking up a customer: outside bars at closing time. Data collected by rideshare industry leader Uber for the seventeen markets it serves in California showed a 6.5 percent decline in drunk-driving crashes involving drivers thirty years old and younger after Uber entered the market.
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T
he final fatal crash of February 13, 2015, began with a dropped mattress in the fast lane of the 55 Freeway in Santa Ana, California. At 11:40 p.m., the wayward mattress triggered a four-car chain reaction of collisions that in turn led to a hit-and-run, a manhunt, a drunk-driving arrest, two people injured, the death of one driver, and a mystery as to where the mattress came from in the first place. The northbound side of the busy 55, also known as the Costa Mesa Freeway, stayed closed until sunrise the next morning as the California Highway Patrol photographed skid marks, measured the trajectories of the cars, and slowly tried to piece together what happened beneath the harsh glow of emergency floodlights.