It’s hard to imagine a world without seatbelts or airbags. But five decades ago, it was the norm for car manufacturers to put glamour over safety.
“It was stylistic pornography over engineering integrity,” Ralph Nader, prolific consumer advocate and several-time presidential candidate, tells Science Friday.
Seneca County in the Finger Lakes has the highest fatality rate for drunk driver in New York State 2015. However, when you look at the five-year average, Hamilton and Lewis County edge it out for deadliest for drunk drivers. The 2011-15 average shows Yates County as third, and Seneca County for per capita fatalities in the state, due to drunk drivers. It seems like a lot of people get drunk at wineries and then go for a drive in the Finger Lakes Wine Country in New York.
Data Source: Data Fatalities by State. NHTSA. https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/SASStoredProcess/guest
Without the details of how crashes happen, we tend to dismiss them as the work of “idiots”—drivers who occupy the lower echelons of driving skill and common sense. But while humankind’s measured intelligence is increasing, so is the number of deadly car crashes. After a lifetime of improvement, we saw an 8 percent jump in crash fatalities during 2015, the largest in 50 years. That number rose again in 2016, when more than 40,000 people died in collisions.
Fortunately, science is coming to the rescue. We no longer have to rely solely on dents, skid marks, and the lawyer-vetted remarks of drivers to figure out what happened and to tell us how to avoid the next crash. In a landmark study published in 2008, researchers at the University of Michigan combed the scene of 6,950 crashes to give us a more detailed analysis of what happened during each crash. Naturalistic driving studies are now equipping cars with accelerometers, sonar, sensors that track driver inputs, and lots of video cameras. Drivers sign up to participate in these studies, and they sometimes crash, leaving researchers with valuable data. We’re also benefiting from the rise of road cams—dashboard-mounted video cameras owned by everyday drivers, aka cammers, who cruise around, record crashes, and then post them on websites like Reddit.
Or why safety critical things shouldn't rely on any one person.
What are paternoster elevators? What happens when you go over the top? And can we build our own nonstop elevator? We take a ride on one of the last of these rare lifts in the Prague City Hall to learn more about engineering and design.
The New Car Assessment Program helped prove that car-buyers care about safety. But the program, now decades behind modern standards, no longer serves its purpose.