I am thankful for the progress which has been made in traffic safety and underride protection. And I am asking you all to hang in there with us and keep pushing for more.
How would Mary have celebrated her 17th birthday today? Well, I don’t know for sure. But I know that she would have enjoyed making her own homemade pizza with us tonight. (Or would she have chosen something else for her birthday meal?)
I know that she would have been glued to the TV or her computer watching the Olympics. She loved watching the 2012 Summer Olympics!
Whatever she would have chosen to do on her special day, Mary would have made the most of it because “every day’s a holiday with Mary” and she knew how to live joyfully — when she wasn’t grumpy, that is.
I just discovered that the photos below were ones that Mary took on August 6, 2012 — the day she became a teenager and the last birthday she would ever celebrate:
I also just noticed from these photos from her camera that Mary gave her beloved Gertie a bath on her 13th birthday (the beloved stuffed toy given to her by AnnaLeah so many birthdays before).
Notice the photos Mary took that same day of some of her favorite books (probably her birthday presents from AnnaLeah, whom I can’t ask to be sure) — including an American Girl one about a gymnast!
And I most definitely would not have launched a new petition on Mary’s birthday to ask NHTSA to mandate SIDE GUARDS on trucks so people wouldn’t die from going underneath the sides of trucks:
Good news for those of us who travel on the roads. . . There will soon be a safety product on the market: a side guard to prevent passenger vehicles — as well as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcycle riders — from riding under the sides of large trucks upon collision.
Airflow Deflector already supplies a line of truck side guards — aimed mainly at pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcycle riders — and has been installing them on city-owned trucks in Boston and New York, two cities committed to Vision Zero.
As a result of opportunities to network with others at the May 5 Underride Roundtable, Robert Martineau has teamed up with Perry Ponder of Seven Hills Engineering to manufacture and market his side guard invention, Angel Wing. Robert recently shared this good news with me:
“We are excited to launch this product which will be ready for market by the early fall. We will be communicating with different people as to get it tested, certified and tried on trucks as part of a fleet valuation. Still some details to work out but we are now in production.
“We believe this is a very good start and will fit the business model that the transportation industry knows and understands as it does address the issues that face the transportation market both from an economization of fuel and underride safety.“
Another side guard designer, Aaron Kiefer, continues to develop his invention with the goal of making it a viable alternative for protecting people from the deadly side underride which he sees in his work as a crash reconstructionist. His guard actually attaches to the rear guard on trucks thereby strengthening the underride protection for collisions at the back of the truck as well as providing protection on the sides.
Given the vast number of trucks without side guards and the potential for horrific underride deaths and injuries just waiting to happen, I am encouraged to see this progress and look forward to more of the same.
Now what we need is a federal mandate for side underride protection on all large trucks. (Stay tuned for an online petition for Side Guards.)
August 7, 2016 UPDATE We just launched an online petition at Care2 petition site calliing on NHTSA to Mandate Side Guards On Large Trucks To End Deadly Side Underride Crashes.
If we can take away anything immediately (while waiting for an in-depth investigative report) from Joshua Brown’s fatal crash with his Tesla, I hope it is the understanding that preventing Death by Underride cannot depend solely on crash avoidance technology. What we should be going for is not either/or but both/and.
The Tesla did not prevent the crash because the side of the truck was too high up to engage/connect with any of the safety technology. Had a side guard — which is not a federal requirement — been on the truck, there might have been no crash or at least no underride. Joshua Brown might still be alive.
This is a clear case where even the most-advanced crash avoidance technology was not able to prevent a tragic underride death. If side guards had been mandated and installed, perhaps the outcome would have been quite different.
There are too many factors and conditions which can result in a collision between a large truck and a smaller passenger vehicle. And without adequate underride protection, the smaller vehicle is going to end up under the larger, too-high truck so that the crashworthy features of the car do not function as intended. The truck then comes into the occupant space [Passenger Compartment Intrusion = PCI] — causing horrific death or serious injuries.
My goodness, it makes me mad just to re-read the posts which I have written over the last three years since our deadly (for those who experienced underride) crash and recall the ongoing attitude of non-responsibility of some parts of the trucking industry to do their part in helping to solve this solvable problem!
I have included the links to those posts along with the beginning paragraphs:
Clarifying the ATA Position on Underride Guards After last week’s announcement by NHTSA of their initiation of the rulemaking process for underride guards, I have had four interviews. So far, I have seen two of the articles and both of them included a statement, obtained from the American Trucking Associations (ATA), which disturbed me when I read them. I posted about it and you can read my thoughts here. . .
The Passion of This Safety Advocate It gets really tiresome to hear the trucking industry come up with the same statements time after time after time. Nearly every time I read an article written about our crash, there are the obligatory responses from the trucking industry. Invariably, they try to shift the responsibility off of themselves to make the changes sought after and, instead, bring up some alternative solution to the “problem.” . . .
Truck Underride Roundtable is one week away! May it be sehr gut! On June 25, 2014, after a tour of the research & design center of a truck trailer manufacturer in Georgia, I wrote down these perplexing thoughts about the too-long unresolved underride problem: Now, it is understandable, amid the multitude of demands and the tyranny of the urgent, that—without a ready solution, in fact, one which would require time and money to develop—this problem has not been given much attention. But, if those who bear responsibility for making sure that this problem gets solved (one way or another) had lost two of their beloved children—or any other loved one—I can guarantee you that they would have moved heaven and earth to find a way to prevent underride. . .
UMTRI Reviews Opposition to Proposed & Proven Truck Underride Prevention Measures Back in 1989, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute examined features proposed for improving truck safety. In other words, they reviewed NHTSA underride rulemaking from years past. What they discovered was that a proposed underride rule in 1977 was opposed by practically “the entire trucking industry – both manufacturers and haulers.” The authors of this study noted “that failure to implement a rule on underride guards took place despite extensive research indicating their expected effectiveness.” . .
When we met with DOT in March 2016 to deliver our 20,000+ Vision Zero Petition signatures, Blair Anderson (NHTSA Deputy Administrator at the time, now US DOT Undersecretary for Policy) smiled when I made the point about not either/or but both/and. He indicated that the Director had just been talking with staff about that very thing.
Let’s hope that this logical line of reasoning is widely understood and serves the purpose of moving both rulemaking and voluntary industry safety advancement full steam ahead.
Will Senator John Thune (or anyone else for that matter) hold an automotive safety hearing on the Tesla fatal crash before the November elections? That is the question raised by Lou Lombardo in his latest thought-provoking missive:
Dear Care for Crash Victims Community Members:
NHTSA has failed to protect us again by policies promoting use of motorists as guinea pigs for profits.
Will the media ask questions and demand answers of government and auto company officials that advance safety?
Will the Senate invite both Mr. Musk and Marianne Karth who, having lost two daughters in a truck underride crash , knows first hand the importance of safety policies? See http://www.fairwarning.org/2016/06/underride-crashes/
Less than a week ago, I woke up thinking, “I need to start a petition on the White House website asking President Obama to appoint a Traffic Safety Ombudsman.” The idea of such a position/role had come to me a month earlier, but nobody was responding to my request to appoint one.
Now it seemed like I needed to take action. Since the petition site indicated that if we got 100,000 signatures in 30 days, then they would respond to it, it seemed like good timing to start July 1–with July 31 as the target date.
The first step was getting the ball rolling and it has been torturous watching the number of signatures slowly creep up. Once it reaches 150, then the petition will become searchable on their website. Meanwhile. . .
Maybe we’ll get a boost from an article published today on treehugger.com by managing editor, Lloyd Alter. I had commented on his article last weekend on the Tesla crash and Tweeted a message to him.
Today he published an article about our crash story, our advocacy efforts, and our Traffic Safety Ombudsman Petition and Vision Zero goals. Perhaps this will give us a good jumpstart on the way to our 100,000 goal–and ultimately our goal of SAVING LIVES.
Aaron Kiefer has designed an innovative combination side/rear underride guard for large trucks. Recently, he tallied up the number of side underride crashes which his crash reconstruction firm has investigated.
This is what he found:
-39 passenger vehicle/commercial vehicle underride accidents in 2014, 2015, 2016 YTD (16 average annual cases*) *Approx 90% of cases were sampled
-26 side, 13 rear
-19 into dry van trailers, (13 side, 6 rear)
-10 into flatbed trailers
-10 into other trailer types/other commercial vehicles
“The driver of a Tesla Model S sedan using the vehicle’s self-driving mode has been killed in a collision with a truck, federal officials said Thursday, the first U.S. fatality using the new technology.
“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicate the crash occurred when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla at a highway intersection.”
The problem was that the car went under the side of a truck. Trucks are not required to have side guards. There was nothing for the car’s sensors to detect.
