In our efforts to not only improve regulatory federal standards on underride guards but, also, to catalyze voluntary industry improvement, we heard back from several companies to whom we had written, including:
UPS in Atlanta (Dan)
CR England (Chad England)
Extra Mile Transportation (Brent)
J.B. Hunt (GreerWoodruff, Lowell, AK
UPS (buys from Great Dane)
FedEx
Chad England committed his company to looking into the matter seriously. (CR England) And Dean Engelage (Great Dane) invited Jerry and I to visit their Research & Design Center in Savannah in June 2014:
Jerry,
We’re looking forward to hosting you and your wife next week. I thought we would start the day off with an 8:30 am breakfast at a local favorite, J. Christopher’s which is near the hotel 122 E Liberty Street. Brandie Fuller, our VP of Marketing, will join us. Parking for the restaurant is street-side at a meter.
We’ll then head to the Great Dane office which is also close by. A series of meetings and a tour of our R&D lab followed by lunch. If all goes as planned we should be finished right after lunch.
I look forward to meeting you both and safe travels to Savannah. If you have any questions, please email me or call me.
I am in receipt of your letter and packet dated 17 Feb 14.
First, let me offer you my most sincere condolences on the loss of your beautiful daughters. I have a daughter who is two months shy of her 18th birthday, so I do not even want to imagine the heartache associated with this tragedy. I can only offer you my most sincere respect in working to turn such a tragedy into something good.
Extra Mile Transportation is a non-asset based, third party freight broker. That means that we don’t own any equipment, we contract out for everything we move. However, we are in a position to exert some influence on this matter. By copy of this email, I am requesting our Director of Logistical Solutions incorporate this awareness campaign into some of his efforts. I will be meeting with him to go over this issue and we’ll see what impact we may have.
I wish you only the best for the times you share with your other children and hope that your memories of Mary and AnnaLeah continue to have a positive impact on our safety.
All in all, we are hopeful that the combination of calling for both more appropriate regulations through Vision Zero rulemaking and, at the same time, voluntary action will yield the desired result–SAVED LIVES. Together, we can do this!
Jerry was pleasantly surprised tonight by a phone call from Greer Woodruff, Vice President of Safety & Security at J.B. Hunt. J. B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. is a trucking and transportation company that was founded by Johnnie Bryan Hunt, and based in the Northwest Arkansas city of Lowell.
Greer was calling to let Jerry know that Wabash National, a trailer manufacturer, had redesigned their rear underride guard to provide better protection at the outer edges of the guard. And he also wanted us to know that J.B. Hunt was the first to purchase the new trailers–having ordered 4,000 of them in January.
But then Greer went on to say that he had wanted to be sure and tell us about it and thank us for the letters, which Jerry wrote to J.B. Hunt–along with the major trailer manufacturers and many other trailer buyers, back in 2014 before we launched our first petition. Those letters, he said, had raised their awareness about the underride problem and spurred them on to talk to the trailer manufacturers about producing safer trailers.
That brought a smile to Jerry’s face.
We look forward to finding out more details about its design features and what level of protection it provides. Also, we hope to see additional attention given to side and front underride protection and retrofitting existing trailers as well.
Meanwhile, we are encouraged to see that progress is being made in moving toward the best possible protection with both voluntary and regulatory action. The Vision Zero Petition Book has arrived!
First set of letters which Jerry sent to trailer buyers in February 2014 (a variation of this went to trailer manufacturers):
One of the letters which went out to trailer manufacturers in February 2014:
A second set of letters went out in March 2014 to clarify our role/position:
Another letter went out asking for support to our petition request for stronger underride guards:
And then Jerry sent a follow-up letter in the fall of 2014, including with it copies of the IIHS Status Reports which had articles on underride guards:
IIHS Status Reports with articles on underride guards, which we included with the letters to the trucking companies:
Finally, after setting up our non-profit, AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety, in the summer of 2015, we wrote to all of the truck companies again–asking for their help to voluntarily find safer underride guard designs:
Also, sometime after our letter writing, we were discussing our efforts with JohnLannen at the Truck Safety Coalition. He asked for our list and said, “Thanks – I’ll follow up with Greer since I know him well. What reaction did you get?”
In our efforts to not only improve regulatory federal standards on underride guards but, also, to catalyze voluntary industry improvement, we heard back from several other companies to whom we had written, including:
Photo Album of Jerry and his girls: With Dad. . . Family Man Jerry prays for his children every morning (lifting them before their heavenly Father/Abba). He is proud of them, teases them, enjoys spending time with them, and treasures each of his special children.
Jerry shares our story at the Fall 2015 Sorrow to Strength conference in DC hosted by the Truck Safety Coalition:
On May 5, 2014, we delivered 11,000 AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up for Truck Safety petition envelopes to DOT in Washington, DC.
This time around, thanks to Jerry’s brainstorm, we are delivering the petitions in a bound copy ofThe Vision Zero Petition Book. All of the first 16, 516 signatures (and any comments which they made) will be in the book, along with the letters to President Obama and Secretary Foxx and a whole lot of other information which I compiled to spell out how we are asking them to implement our Vision Zero petition requests–creatively arranged by Isaac.
Two weeks from today, on March 4, we will be delivering the book to DOT and to various legislators as well as dropping off a copy at The White House. In addition, Care2 will be printing a binder with all of the signatures–up to printing time–and get it to us on February 29; we will take that along to deliver to DOT.
Five boxes of the book arrived today! Excited to see what will come about!
We have been members of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) throughout our homeschooling years ever since the oldest of our nine started learning to read. This week I received a postcard from them wondering if we wanted to renew our membership because we had missed the annual date.
So I needed to call and tell them that we didn’t need to renew because Mary, our youngest who would have been sweet sixteen, was never going to finish high school.
A simple but excruciating phone call which had me hard put to verbalize the facts and weeping before it was over. . .
“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is announcing a meeting that will be held in Washington, DC on March 10-11, 2016 to explore ways to promote evidence-based behavior change in a traffic safety setting.
“The Driving Behavioral Change in Traffic Safety workshop will include presentations and discussions on a number of topics including analysis and feasibility of using different approaches to changing behavior; exploring promising untested strategies; identifying long-term pathways to eliminate fatalities; and considering how evidence-based behavior change strategies can be used in the broader policy discussion.
“Attendance at the meeting is limited to invited participants because of space limitations of the DOT Conference Center. However, the meeting will be available for live public viewing on the NHTSA Web site (www.nhtsa.gov).” Meetings: Driving Behavioral Change in Traffic Safety
Sounds promising. . . I hope to see meaningful results which can be widely-dispersed. And focused on while also addressing environmental and vehicular causes of traffic deaths.
Note: While taking classes at the University of Michigan in 1979 for my Master of Public Health degree in Health Behavior & Health Education, one of the things I learned, which has stuck with me, is that fear is not always the best motivator for changing behavior. In other words, knowing that something you do could end your life or that of someone else doesn’t necessarily change our actions. It doesn’t always sink in.
That needs to be kept in mind as we attempt to encourage better driving behavior.
After launching the Vision Zero Petition online, I waited a bit before I signed myself. I took a moment to decide what comment to make.
596: Marianne Karth, Rocky Mount, North Carolina,
United States
There is no one that this does not potentially impact in some way. We
are asking for bold and decisive action to reduce tragic, preventable crash
fatalities. Don’t wait until it touches you personally to move heaven &
earth to identify and require the best possible protection. Once a loved
one becomes a motor vehicle crash statistic, it will be too late–they will
not come back to you.
Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. . . But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. . . You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get….It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’ (pp. 24-25)
Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. . .For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. (p. 26)
“I want to be famous somehow. I don’t know how but I just do.” Mary Karth, April 2013. (Photo 2005)
The Save Lives Not Dollars: Urge DOT to Adopt a Vision Zero Policy Petition reached 16,500 signatures today. I guess you “got” your wish, Mary, because a lot of people have heard about you and your sister and are standing with us to speak up for safer roads.
32,719 people died in U.S. traffic crashes in 2013. Two of those people were my daughters, AnnaLeah (17) and Mary (13). That number decreased to 32,675 deaths in 2014–down by 44, but still far too many deaths in my book. In fact, early estimates show 2015 trending higher.
And how many of those deaths were due to truck underride and could have been prevented by a stronger, more effective underride protection system? Underride deaths are preventable and unnecessary and now is the time to take extreme action to reduce these deaths–no matter who caused the crash!
I survived a horrific truck crash in which our car was pushed by a truck into the rear of another truck. Backwards. My daughters in the back seat were not so fortunate; they went under the truck and the truck broke their innocent bodies.
The underride problem is just one example of the fixable problems we need to address. Michael Lemov has written an eye-opener, Car Safety Wars: One Hundred Years of Technology, Politics, and Death in which he tells us that in the more than 110 years since the first traffic crash in 1898, more than 3.5 million Americans have been killed and more than 300,000,000 injured in motor vehicle crashes [p.9]. This, I learned, is 3x the number of Americans who have been killed and 200x the number wounded in all of the wars fought by our nation since the Revolution [p.10]. Imagine.
Worldwide it was estimated that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2004.[2] Also in 2010 alone, around 1.23 million people were killed due to traffic collisions.[3]This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of deathamong children 10–19 years of age (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured)[4] and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States[5] (45,800 people died and 2.4 million were injured in 2005).[6] It is estimated that motor vehicle collisions caused the deaths of around 60 million people during the 20th century,[7] around the same as the number of World War II casualties.
Lemov’s book sheds light on many things including the fact that, although the blame was often put on the driver for crashes in the 20th century, in fact crashes and crash deaths are additionally caused by other factors including environmental and vehicle factors. He uses a term which I had never heard before–post-crash injury or “second collision.” He describes it this way: ”
It is the collision of the occupants of a vehicle with its interior, or the road, after the initial impact of a car crash. Ultimately the creativity of a few scientists, doctors, and investigators. . . developed an understanding of what actually happens to a human body in a car crash. . . Researchers gradually developed ideas they hoped would prevent this second collision. [p.16]
We can thank these researchers for paving the way for improved vehicle safety, including things like seat belts, air bags, and even car seats that lock in position. But, for far too long, it has been a major battle –as Lemov says, a car safety war — to bring about changes which will save lives.
Our own crash demonstrated the many factors which can contribute to the occurrence of crashes as well as to the deaths and horrific injuries which too often occur as a result. We learned the hard way that many of these are preventable and that Our Crash Was Not An Accident.
Following that, we worked to promote underride research and have helped to organize an international Underride Roundtable on Thursday, May 5, 2016, when researchers, government officials, and industry leaders will gather to discuss truck underride crashes and how to reduce the risks for passenger vehicle occupants, bicyclists, and pedestrians. We will explore the scope of the problem and how regulation and voluntary action can help address it. There will also be a demonstration of underride guard performance in a crash test.
I learned that one of the biggest obstacles was that public policy and more specifically DOT rulemaking is impacted by a requirement for cost/benefit analysis which tips the scale in the favor of industry lobby and the almighty dollar and makes a mockery out of the word safety. Human life becomes devalued in the process when a safety measure is rejected because it “may not have significant safety consequence.”
This is illustrated in the history of Federal rulemaking on truck underride guards outlined by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, where it was indicated that in
1974: US Secretary of Transportation says deaths in cars that underride trucks would have to quadruple before underride protection would be considered cost beneficial.
I determined to battle such an inconceivable, incomprehensible, and unconscionable attitude and determined to find a better way to protect travelers on the road. After talking with numerous engineers who either were convinced that safer underride guards could be made or had already designed ones, I also discovered a global movement that calls for the reduction of crash deaths and serious injuries: Vision Zero – An ethical approach to safety and mobility.
Why are we devoting our lives to pushing for a DOT Vision Zero policy? Because I truly believe that it can have an impact not just on truck safety but on all issues related to highway and auto safety–including auto safety defects, driver training requirements, all kinds of impaired driving (including distracted driving, drunk driving, and driving while fatigued), and proven national traffic safety standards which should be adopted by all states.
Add your voice to ours! Sign & share our Vision Zero Petition. Help us persuade President Obama to set a National Vision Zero Goal & to sign a Vision Zero Executive Order which will allow DOT to adopt a Vision Zero rulemaking policy.
We are taking these petitions (almost 16,000 signatures to date) to Washington, DC, on March 4, where we will be meeting with DOT policy officials to discuss the need for this radical change in how our nation protects the travelers on our roads.
It is time to stop acting like the value of a human life can be measured with and compared to corporate $$$. Every delay costs someone their life.
Let’s get it right, America. Somebody’s life depends on it. Lots of somebodies.
In order to move the United States Towards Zero Crash Deaths, I am asking President Obama to first set a National Vision Zero Goal and then to write a memorandum which would establish a National White House Task Force to actually make things happen to reduce crash deaths across the roads of our country.
Here is my idea for what a Vision Zero Task Force would look like:
