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Wrong turn: how the
fight to make
America
's highways safer went off course
· By: Malcolm Gladwell
· Date:
2001-08-27
Malcolm
Gladwell writes for the New Yorker ,
where this article originally appeared in June 2001. He has a web site
at Gladwell.com .
I. Bang
Every
two miles, the average driver makes four hundred observations, forty
decisions, and one mistake. Once every five hundred miles, one of those
mistakes leads to a near collision, and once every sixty-one thousand
miles one of those mistakes leads to a crash. When people drive, in
other words, mistakes are endemic and accidents inevitable, and that is
the first and simplest explanation for what happened to Robert Day on
the morning of Saturday, April 9, 1994. He was driving a 1980 Jeep
Wagoneer from his home, outside
Philadelphia
, to spend a day working on train engines in
Winslow
Township
,
New Jersey
. He was forty-four years old, and made his living as an editor for the
Chilton Book Company. His ten-year-old son was next to him, in the
passenger seat. It was a bright, beautiful spring day. Visibility was
perfect, and the roadway was dry, although one of the many peculiarities
of car crashes is that they happen more often under ideal road
conditions than in bad weather. Day's route took him down the Atlantic
City Expressway to Fleming Pike, a two-lane country road that winds
around a sharp curve and intersects, about a mile later, with
Egg Harbor Road
. In that final stretch of Fleming Pike, there is a scattering of houses
and a fairly thick stand of trees on either side of the road, obscuring
all sight lines to the left and right. As he approached the
intersection, then, Day could not have seen a blue-and-gray 1993 Ford
Aerostar minivan travelling between forty and fifty miles per hour
southbound on Egg Harbor, nor a white 1984 Mazda 626 travelling at
approximately fifty miles per hour in the other direction. Nor,
apparently, did he see the stop sign at the corner, or the sign a tenth
of a mile before that, warning of the intersection ahead. Day's son, in
the confusing aftermath of the accident, told police that he was certain
his father had come to a stop at the corner. But the accident's
principal witness says he never saw any brake lights on the Wagoneer,
and, besides, there is no way that the Jeep could have done the damage
that it did from a standing start. Perhaps Day was distracted. The
witness says that Day's turn signal had been on since he left the
expressway. Perhaps he was looking away and looked back at the road at
the wrong time, since there is an area, a few hundred yards before Egg
Harbor Road, just on the near side of a little ridge, where the trees
and houses make it look as if Fleming Pike ran without interruption well
off into the distance. We will never know, and in any case it does not
matter much. Day merely did what all of us do every time we get in a
car: he made a mistake. It's just that he was unlucky enough that his
mistake led him directly into the path of two other cars.
The
driver of the Ford Aerostar was Stephen Capoferri, then thirty-nine. He
worked in the warehouse of Whitehall Laboratories, in southern
New Jersey
. He had just had breakfast with his parents and was on his way to the
bank. The driver of the Mazda was Elizabeth Wolfrum. She was
twenty-four. She worked as the manager of a liquor store. Her
eighteen-year-old sister, Julie, was in the passenger seat; a
two-year-old girl was in the back seat. Because of the vegetation on
either side of Fleming Pike, Capoferri did not see Day's vehicle until
it was just eighty-five feet from the point of impact, and if we assume
that Day was travelling at forty miles per hour, or fifty-nine feet per
second, that means that Capoferri had about 1.5 seconds to react. That
is scarcely enough time. The average adult needs about that long simply
to translate an observation ("That car is going awfully fast")
into an action ("I ought to hit my brake"). Capoferri hit Day
broadside, at a slight angle, the right passenger side of the Aerostar
taking most of the impact. The Jeep was pushed sidewise, but it kept
going forward, pulling off the grille and hood of the Aerostar, and
sending it into a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree counterclockwise spin.
As the Jeep lurched across the intersection, it slammed into the side of
Wolfrum's Mazda. The cars slapped together, and then skidded together
across the intersection, ending on the grass on the far, southeastern
corner. According to documents filed by Elizabeth Wolfrum's lawyers,
Wolfrum suffered eighteen injuries, including a ruptured spleen,
multiple liver lacerations, brain damage, and fractures to the legs,
ribs, ankles, and nose. Julie Wolfrum was partially ejected from the
Mazda and her face hit the ground. She subsequently underwent seventeen
separate surgical procedures and remained in intensive care for
forty-four days. In post-crash photographs, their car looks as if it had
been dropped head first from an airplane. Robert Day suffered massive
internal injuries and was pronounced dead two hours later, at
West
Jersey
Hospital
. His son was bruised and shaken up. Capoferri walked away largely
unscathed.
"Once
the impact occurred, I did a spin," he remembers. "I don't
recall doing that. I may have blacked out. It couldn't have been for
very long. I wanted to get out. I was trying to judge how I was. I was
having a little trouble breathing. But I knew I could walk. My senses
were gradually coming back to normal. I'm pretty sure I went to Day's
vehicle first. I went to the driver's side. He was semi-conscious. He
had blood coming out of his mouth. I tried to keep him awake. His son
was in the passenger seat. He had no injuries. He said, 'Is my father
O.K.?' I seem to remember looking in the Mazda. My first impression was
that they were dead, because the driver's side of the vehicle was very
badly smashed in. I think they needed the 'jaws of life' to get them
out. There was a little girl in the back. She was crying."
Capoferri
has long black hair and a beard and the build of a wrestler. He is a
thoughtful man who chooses his words carefully. As he talked, he was
driving his Taurus back toward the scene of the accident, and he was
apologetic that he could not recall more details of those moments
leading up to the accident. But what is there to remember? In the
popular imagination--fuelled by the car crashes of
Hollywood
movies, with their special effects and complicated stunts--an accident
is a protracted sequence, played out in slow motion, over many frames.
It is not that way in real life. The time that elapsed between the
collision of Capoferri and Day and Day and Wolfrum was probably no more
than twenty-five milliseconds, faster than the blinking of an eye, and
the time that elapsed between the moment Capoferri struck Day and the
moment his van came to a rest, two hundred and seventy degrees later,
was probably no more than a second. Capoferri said that a friend of his,
who lived right on the corner where the accident happened, told him
later that all the crashing and spinning and skidding sounded like an
single, sharp explosion-- bang!
II. The passive
approach
In
the middle part of the last century, a man named William Haddon changed
forever the way Americans think about car accidents. Haddon was, by
training, a medical doctor and an epidemiologist and, by temperament, a
New Englander--tall and reed-thin, with a crewcut, a starched white
shirt, and a bow tie. He was exacting and cerebral, and so sensitive to
criticism that it was said of him that he could be "blistered by
moonbeams." He would not eat mayonnaise, or anything else subject
to bacterial contamination. He hated lawyers, which was ironic, because
it was lawyers who became his biggest disciples. Haddon was discovered
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when Moynihan was working for Averell
Harriman, then the Democratic governor of
New York
State
. It was 1958. Moynihan was chairing a meeting on traffic safety, in
Albany
's old state-executive-office chambers, and a young man at the back of
the room kept asking pointed questions. "What's your name?"
Moynihan eventually asked, certain he had collared a Republican spy.
"Haddon, sir," the young man answered. He was just out of the
Harvard School of Public Health, and convinced that what the field of
traffic safety needed was the rigor of epidemiology. Haddon asked
Moynihan what data he was using. Moynihan shrugged. He wasn't using any
data at all.
Haddon
and Moynihan went across the street to Yezzi's, a local watering hole,
and Moynihan fell under Haddon's spell. The orthodoxy of that time held
that safety was about reducing accidents--educating drivers, training
them, making them slow down. To Haddon, this approach made no sense. His
goal was to reduce the injuries that accidents caused. In particular, he
did not believe in safety measures that depended on changing the
behavior of the driver, since he considered the driver unreliable, hard
to educate, and prone to error. Haddon believed the best safety measures
were passive .
"He was a gentle man," Moynihan recalls. "Quiet, without
being mum. He never forgot that what we were talking about were children
with their heads smashed and broken bodies and dead people."
Several
years later, Moynihan was working for President Johnson in the
Department of Labor, and hired a young lawyer out of Harvard named Ralph
Nader to work on traffic-safety issues. Nader, too, was a devotee of
Haddon's ideas, and he converted a young congressional aide named Joan
Claybrook. In 1959, Moynihan wrote an enormously influential article,
articulating Haddon's principles, called "Epidemic on the
Highways." In 1965, Nader wrote his own homage to the Haddon
philosophy, "Unsafe at Any Speed," which became a best-seller,
and in 1966 the Haddon crusade swept
Washington
. In the House and the Senate, there were packed hearings on legislation
to create a federal regulatory agency for traffic safety. Moynihan and
Haddon testified, as did a liability lawyer from
South Carolina
, in white shoes and a white suit, and a Teamsters official, Jimmy
Hoffa, whom Claybrook remembers as a "fabulous" witness. It
used to be that, during a frontal crash, steering columns in cars were
pushed back through the passenger compartment, potentially impaling the
driver. The advocates argued that columns should collapse inward on
impact. Instrument panels ought to be padded, they said, and knobs
shouldn't stick out, where they might cause injury. Doors ought to have
strengthened side-impact beams. Roofs should be strong enough to
withstand a rollover. Seats should have head restraints to protect
against neck injuries. Windshields ought to be glazed, so that if you
hit them with your head at high speed your face wasn't cut to ribbons.
The bill sailed through both houses of Congress, and a regulatory body,
which eventually became the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, was established. Haddon was made its commissioner,
Claybrook his special assistant. "I remember a Senate hearing we
had with Warren Magnuson," Nader recalls. "He was listening to
a pediatrician who was one of our allies, Seymour Charles, from
New Jersey
, and Charles was showing how there were two cars that collided, and one
had a collapsible steering column and one didn't, and one driver walked
away, the other was killed. And, just like that, Magnuson caught on.
'You mean,' he said, 'you can have had a crash without an injury?'
That's it! A crash without an injury. That idea was very powerful."
There
is no question that the improvements in auto design which Haddon and his
disciples pushed for saved countless lives. They changed the way cars
were built, and put safety on the national agenda. What they did not do,
however, is make American highways the safest in the world. In fact--and
this is the puzzling thing about the Haddon crusade--the opposite
happened.
United States
auto-fatality rates were the lowest in the world before
Haddon came along. But, since the late
nineteen-seventies, just as the original set of N.H.T.S.A. safety
standards were having their biggest impact,
America
's safety record has fallen to eleventh place. According to calculations
by Leonard Evans, a longtime General Motors researcher and one of the
world's leading experts on traffic safety, if American traffic
fatalities had declined at the same rate as Canada's or Australia's
between 1979 and 1997, there would have been somewhere in the vicinity
of a hundred and sixty thousand fewer traffic deaths in that span.
This
is not to suggest, of course, that Haddon's crusade is responsible for a
hundred and sixty thousand highway deaths. Traffic safety is the most
complex of phenomena--fatality rates can be measured in many ways, and
reflect a hundred different variables--and in this period there were
numerous factors that distinguished the United States from places like
Canada and Australia, including different trends in drunk driving. Nor
is it to say that the Haddonites had anything but the highest motives.
Still, Evans's figures raise a number of troubling questions. Haddon and
Nader and Claybrook told us, after all, that the best way to combat the
epidemic on the highways was to shift attention from the driver to the
vehicle. No other country pursued the passive strategy as vigorously,
and no other country had such high expectations for its success. But
America
's slipping record on auto safety suggests that somewhere in the logic
of that approach there was a mistake. And, if so, it necessarily changes
the way we think about car crashes like the one that happened seven
years ago on the corner of Fleming Pike and
Egg Harbor Road
.
"I
think that the philosophical argument behind the passive approach is a
strong one," Evans says. A physicist by training, he is a compact,
spry man in his sixties, with a trace in his voice of his native
Northern Ireland
. On the walls of his office in suburban Detroit is a lifetime of awards
and certifications from safety researchers, but, like many technical
types, he is embittered by how hard it has been to make his voice heard
in the safety debates of the past thirty years. "Either you can
persuade people to boil their own water because there is a typhoid
epidemic or you can put chlorine in the water," he went on.
"And the second, passive solution is obviously preferred to the
first, because there is no way you can persuade everyone to act in a
prudent way. But starting from that philosophical principle and then
ignoring reality is a recipe for disaster. And that's what happened.
Why?" Here Evans nearly leaped out of his chair. " Because
there isn't any chlorine for traffic crashes ."
III. The first
collision
Robert
Day's crash was not the accident of a young man. He was hit from the
side, and adolescents and young adults usually have side-impact crashes
when their cars slide off the road into a fixed object like a tree,
often at reckless speeds. Older people tend to have side-impact crashes
at normal speeds, in intersections, and as the result of error, not
negligence. In fact, Day's crash was not merely typical in form; it was
the result of a common type of driver error. He didn't see something he
was supposed to see.
His
mistake is, on one level, difficult to understand. There was a sign,
clearly visible from the roadway, telling him of an intersection ahead,
and then another, in bright red, telling him to stop. How could he have
missed them both? From what we know of human perception, though, this
kind of mistake happens all the time. Imagine, for instance, that you
were asked to look at the shape of a cross, briefly displayed on a
computer screen, and report on which arm of the cross was longer. After
you did this a few times, another object, like a word or a small colored
square--what psychologists call a critical stimulus--flashes next to the
cross on the screen, right in front of your eyes. Would you see the
critical stimulus? Most of us would say yes. Intuitively, we believe
that we "see" everything in our field of vision--particularly
things right in front of us--and that the difference between the things
we pay attention to and the things we don't is simply that the things we
focus on are the things we become aware of. But when experiments to test
this assumption were conducted recently by Arien Mack, a psychologist at
the New School, in New York, she found, to her surprise, that a
significant portion of her observers didn't see the second object at
all: it was directly in their field of vision, and yet, because their
attention was focussed on the cross, they were oblivious of it. Mack
calls this phenomenon "inattentional blindness."
Daniel
Simons, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has done a more dramatic
set of experiments, following on the same idea. He and a colleague,
Christopher Chabris, recently made a video of two teams of basketball
players, one team in white shirts and the other in black, each player in
constant motion as two basketballs are passed back and forth. Observers
were asked to count the number of passes completed by the members of the
white team. After about forty-five seconds of passes, a woman in a
gorilla suit walks into the middle of the group, stands in front of the
camera, beats her chest vigorously, and then walks away. "Fifty per
cent of the people missed the gorilla," Simons says. "We got
the most striking reactions. We'd ask people, 'Did you see anyone
walking across the screen?' They'd say no. Anything at all? No.
Eventually, we'd ask them, 'Did you notice the gorilla?' And they'd say,
'The what ?'"
Simons's experiment is one of those psychological studies which are
impossible to believe in the abstract: if you look at the video (called
"Gorillas in Our Midst") when you know what's coming, the
woman in the gorilla suit is inescapable. How could anyone miss that?
But people do. In recent years, there has been much scientific research
on the fallibility of memory--on the fact that eyewitnesses, for
example, often distort or omit critical details when they recall what
they saw. But the new research points to something that is even more
troubling: it isn't just that our memory of what we see is selective;
it's that seeing itself is selective.
This
is a common problem in driving. Talking on a cell phone and trying to
drive, for instance, is not unlike trying to count passes in a
basketball game and simultaneously keep track of wandering animals.
"When you get into a phone conversation, it's different from the
normal way we have evolved to interact," David Strayer, a professor
of psychology at the
University
of
Utah
, says. "Normally, conversation is face to face. There are all
kinds of cues. But when you are on the phone you strip that away. It's
virtual reality. You attend to that virtual reality, and shut down
processing of the here and now." Strayer has done tests of people
who were driving and talking on phones, and found that they remember far
fewer things than those driving without phones. Their field of view
shrinks. In one experiment, he flashed red and green lights at people
while they were driving, and those on the phone missed twice as many
lights as the others, and responded far more slowly to those lights they
did see. "We tend to find the biggest deficits in unexpected
events, a child darting onto the road, a light changing," Strayer
says. "Someone going into your lane. That's what you don't
see. There is a part of driving that is automatic and
routine. There is a second part of driving that is completely
unpredictable, and that is the part that requires attention." This
is what Simons found with his gorilla, and it is the scariest part of
inattentional blindness. People allow themselves to be distracted while
driving because they think that they will still be able to pay attention
to anomalies. But it is precisely those anomalous things, those
deviations from the expected script, which they won't see.
Marc
Green, a psychologist with an accident-consulting firm in
Toronto
, once worked on a case where a woman hit a bicyclist with her car.
"She was pulling into a gas station," Green says. "It was
five o'clock in the morning. She'd done that almost every day for a
year. She looks to the left, and then she hears a thud. There's a
bicyclist on the ground. She'd looked down that sidewalk nearly every
day for a year and never seen anybody. She adaptively learned to ignore
what was on that sidewalk because it was useless information. She may
actually have turned her eyes toward him and failed to see him."
Green says that, once you understand why the woman failed to see the
bicyclist, the crash comes to seem almost inevitable.
It's
the same conclusion that Haddon reached, and that formed the basis for
his conviction that Americans were spending too much time worrying about
what happened before an accident and not enough time worrying about what
happened during and after an accident. Sometimes crashes happen because
people do stupid things that they shouldn't have done--like drink or
speed or talk on their cell phone. But sometimes people do stupid things
that they cannot help,
and it makes no sense to construct a safety program that does not
recognize human fallibility. Just imagine, for example, that you're
driving down a country road. The radio is playing. You're talking to
your son, next to you. There is a highway crossing up ahead, but you
can't see it, nor can you see any cars on the roadway, because of a
stand of trees on both sides of the road. Maybe you look away from the
road, for a moment, to change the dial on the radio, or something
catches your eye outside, and when you glance back it happens to be at
the very moment when a trick of geography makes it look as if your road
stretched without interruption well off into the distance. Suddenly, up
ahead, right in front of your eyes looms a bright-red anomalous stop
sign--as out of place in the momentary mental universe that you have
constructed for yourself as a gorilla in a basketball game--and,
precisely because it is so anomalous, it doesn't register. Then-- bang!
How do you prevent an accident like that?
IV. The second
collision
One
day in 1968, a group of engineers from the Cleveland-based auto-parts
manufacturer Eaton, Yale &Towne went to
Washington
,
D.C.
, to see William Haddon. They carried with them a secret prototype of
what they called the People Saver. It was a nylon air cushion that
inflated on impact, and the instant Haddon saw it he was smitten.
"Oh, he was ecstatic, just ecstatic," Claybrook recalls.
"I think it was one of the most exciting moments of his life."
The
air bag had been invented in the early fifties by a man named John
Hetrick, who became convinced, after running his car into a ditch, that
drivers and passengers would be much safer if they could be protected by
some kind of air cushion. But how could one inflate it in the first few
milliseconds of a crash? As he pondered the problem, Hetrick remembered
a freak accident that had happened during the war, when he was in the
Navy working in a torpedo-maintenance shop. Torpedos carry a charge of
compressed air, and one day a torpedo covered in canvas accidentally
released its charge. All at once, Hetrick recalled years later, the
canvas "shot up into the air, quicker than you could blink an
eye." Thus was the idea for the air bag born.
In
its earliest incarnation, the air bag was a crude device; one
preliminary test inadvertently killed a baboon, and there were
widespread worries about the safety of detonating what was essentially a
small bomb inside a car. (Indeed, as a result of numerous injuries to
children and small adults, air bags have now been substantially
depowered.) But to Haddon the People Saver was the embodiment of
everything he believed in--it was the chlorine in the water, and it
solved a problem that had been vexing him for years. The Haddonites had
always insisted that what was generally called a crash was actually two
separate events. The first collision was the initial contact between two
automobiles, and in order to prevent the dangerous intrusion of one car
into the passenger compartment of another, they argued, cars ought to be
built with a protective metal cage around the front and back seats. The
second collision, though, was even more important. That was the
collision between the occupants of a car and the inside of their own
vehicle. If the driver and his passengers were to survive the abrupt
impact of a crash, they needed a second safety system, which carefully
and gradually decelerated their bodies. The logical choice for that task
was seat belts, but Haddon, with his background in public health, didn't
trust safety measures that depended on an individual's active
cooperation. "The biggest problem we had back then was that only
about twelve per cent of the public used seat belts," Claybrook
says. "They were terribly designed, and people didn't use
them." With the air bag, there was no decision to make. The
Haddonites called it a "technological vaccine," and attacked
its doubters in
Detroit
for showing "an absence of moral and ethical leadership." The
air bag, they vowed, was going to replace the seat belt. In "Unsafe
at Any Speed," Nader wrote:
The
seat belt should have been introduced in the twenties and rendered
obsolete by the early fifties, for it is only the first step toward a
more rational passenger restraint system which modern technology could
develop and perfect for mass production. Such a system ideally would not
rely on the active participation of the passenger to take effect; it
would be the superior passive safety
design which would come into use only when needed, and without active
participation of the occupant. . . . Protection like this could be
achieved by a kind of inflatable air bag restraint which would be
actuated to envelop a passenger before a crash.
For
the next twenty years, Haddon, Nader, and Claybrook were consumed by the
battle to force a reluctant
Detroit
to make the air bag mandatory equipment. There were lawsuits, and heated
debates, and bureaucratic infighting. The automakers, mindful of cost
and other concerns, argued that the emphasis ought to be on seat belts.
But, to the Haddonites,
Detroit
was hopelessly in the grip of the old paradigm on auto safety. His
opponents, Haddon wrote, with typical hauteur, were like "Malinowski's
natives in their approaches to the hazards out the reef which they did
not understand." Their attitudes were "redolent of the
extranatural, supernatural and the pre-scientific." In 1991, the
Haddonites won. That year, a law was passed requiring air bags in every
new car by the end of the decade. It sounded like a great victory. But
was it?
V. Haddon's mistake
When
Stephen Capoferri's Aerostar hit Robert Day's Jeep Wagoneer, Capoferri's
seat belt lay loose across his hips and chest. His shoulder belt
probably had about two inches of slack. At impact, his car decelerated,
but Capoferri's body kept moving forward, and within thirty milliseconds
the slack in his seat belts was gone. In the language of engineers, he
"loaded" his restraints. Under the force of Capoferri's
onrushing weight, his belts began to stretch--the fabric giving by as
much as six inches. As his shoulder belt grew taut, it dug into his
chest, compressing it by another two inches, and if you had seen
Capoferri at the moment of maximum forward trajectory his shoulder belt
around his chest would have looked like a rubber band around a balloon.
Simultaneously, within those first few milliseconds, his air bag
exploded and rose to meet him at more than a hundred miles per hour.
Forty to fifty milliseconds after impact, it had enveloped his face,
neck, and upper chest. A fraction of a second later, the bag deated.
Capoferri was thrown back against his seat. Total time elapsed: one
hundred milliseconds.
Would
Capoferri have lived without an air bag? Probably. He would have
stretched his seat belt so far that his head would have hit the steering
wheel. But his belts would have slowed him down enough that he might
only have broken his nose or cut his forehead or suffered a mild
concussion. The other way around, however, with an air bag but not a
seat belt, his fate would have been much more uncertain. In the absence
of seat belts, air bags work best when one car hits another squarely, so
that the driver pitches forward directly into the path of the oncoming
bag. But Capoferri hit Day at a slight angle. The front-passenger side
of the Aerostar sustained more damage than the driver's side, which
means that without his belts holding him in place he would have been
thrown away from the air bag off to the side, toward the rearview mirror
or perhaps even the front-passenger "A" pillar. Capoferri's
air bag protected him only because he was wearing his seat belt.
Car-crash statistics show this to be the rule. Wearing a seat belt cuts
your chances of dying in an accident by forty-three per cent. If you add
the protection of an air bag, your fatality risk is cut by forty-seven
per cent. But an air bag by itself reduces the risk of dying in an
accident by just thirteen per cent.
That
the effectiveness of an air bag depended on the use of a seat belt was a
concept that the Haddonites, in those early days, never properly
understood. They wanted the air bag to replace the seat belt when in
fact it was capable only of supplementing it, and they clung to that
belief, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Don
Huelke, a longtime safety researcher at the
University
of
Michigan
, remembers being on an N.H.T.S.A. advisory committee in the early
nineteen-seventies, when people at the agency were trying to come up
with statistics for the public on the value of air bags. "Their
estimates were that something like twenty-eight thousand people a year
could be saved by the air bags," he recalls, "and then someone
pointed out to them that there weren't that many driver fatalities in
frontal crashes in a year. It was kind of like 'Oops.' So the estimates
were reduced." In 1977, Claybrook became the head of N.H.T.S.A. and
renewed the push for air bags. The agency's estimate now was that air
bags would cut a driver's risk of dying in a crash by forty per cent--a
more modest but still implausible figure. "In 1973, there was a
study in the open literature, performed at G.M., that estimated that the
air bag would reduce the fatality risk to an unbelted driver by eighteen
per cent," Leonard Evans says. "N.H.T.S.A. had this
information and dismissed it. Why? Because it was from the automobile
industry."
The
truth is that even today it is seat belts, not air bags, that are
providing the most important new safety advances. Had Capoferri been
driving a late-model Ford minivan, for example, his seat belt would have
had what is called a pretensioner: a tiny explosive device that would
have taken the slack out of the belt just after the moment of impact.
Without the pretensioner, Stephen Kozak, an engineer at Ford, explains,
"you start to accelerate before you hit the belt. You get the
clothesline effect." With it, Capoferri's deceleration would have
been a bit more gradual. At the same time, belts are now being designed
which cut down on chest compression. Capoferri's chest wall was pushed
in two inches, and had he been a much older man, with less resilient
bones and cartilage, that two-inch compression might have been enough to
fracture three or four ribs. So belts now "pay out" extra
webbing after a certain point: as Capoferri stretched forward, his belt
would have been lengthened by several inches, relieving the pressure on
his chest. The next stage in seat-belt design is probably to offer car
buyers the option of what is called a four-point belt--two shoulder
belts that run down the chest, like suspenders attached to a lap belt.
Ford showed a four-point prototype at the auto shows this spring, and
early estimates are that it might cut fatality risk by another ten per
cent--which would make seat belts roughly five times more effective in
saving lives than air bags by themselves. "The best solution is to
provide automatic protection, including air bags, as baseline protection
for everyone, with seat belts as a supplement for those who will use
them," Haddon wrote in 1984. In putting air bags first and seat
belts second, he had things backward.
Robert
Day suffered a very different kind of accident from Stephen Capoferri's:
he was hit from the side, and the physics of a side-impact crash are not
nearly so forgiving. Imagine, for instance, that you punched a brick
wall as hard as you could. If your fist was bare, you'd break your hand.
If you had a glove with two inches of padding, your hand would sting. If
you had a glove with six inches of padding, you might not feel much of
anything. The more energyabsorbing material--the more space--you can put
between your body and the wall, the better off you are. An automobile
accident is no different. Capoferri lived, in part, because he had lots
of space between himself and Day's Wagoneer. Cars have steel rails
connecting the passenger compartment with the bumper, and each of those
rails is engineered with what are called convolutions--accordionlike
folds designed to absorb, slowly and evenly, the impact of a collision.
Capoferri's van was engineered with twenty-seven inches of crumple room,
and at the speed he was travelling he probably used about twenty-one
inches of that. But Day had four inches, no more, between his body and
the door, and perhaps another five to six inches in the door itself.
Capoferri hit the wall with a boxing glove. Day punched it with his bare
hand.
Day's
problems were compounded by the fact that he was not wearing his seat
belt. The right-front fender of Capoferri's Aerostar struck his Wagoneer
squarely on the driver's door, pushing the Jeep sidewise, and if Day had
been belted he would have moved with his vehicle, away from the
onrushing Aerostar. But he wasn't, and so the Jeep moved out from under
him: within fifteen milliseconds, the four inches of space between his
body and the side of the Jeep was gone. The impact of the Aerostar
slammed the driver's door against his ribs and spleen.
Day
could easily have been ejected from his vehicle at that point. The
impact of Capoferri's van shattered the glass in Day's door, and a
Wagoneer, like most sports-utility vehicles, has a low belt
line--meaning that the side windows are so large that with the glass
gone there's a hole big enough for an unrestrained body to fly through.
This is what it means to be "thrown clear" of a crash,
although when that phrase is used in the popular literature it is
sometimes said as if it were a good thing, when of course to be
"thrown clear" of a crash is merely to be thrown into some
other hard and even more lethal object, like the pavement or a tree or
another car. Day, for whatever reason, was not thrown clear, and in that
narrow sense he was lucky. This advantage, however, amounted to little.
Day's door was driven into him like a sledgehammer.
Would
a front air bag have saved Robert Day? Not at all. He wasn't moving
forward into the steering wheel. He was moving sidewise into the door.
Some cars now have additional air bags that are intended to protect the
head as it hits the top of the door frame in a side-impact crash. But
Day didn't die of head injuries. He died of abdominal injuries.
Conceivably, a side-impact bag might have offered his abdomen some
slight protection. But Day's best chance of surviving the accident would
have been to wear his seat belt. It would have held him in place in
those first few milliseconds of impact. It would have preserved some
part of the space separating him from the door, diminishing the impact
of the Aerostar. Day made two mistakes that morning, then, the second of
which was not buckling up. But this is a point on which the Haddonites
were in error as well, because the companion to their obsession with air
bags was the equally false belief that encouraging drivers to wear their
seat belts was a largely futile endeavor.
In
the early nineteen-seventies, just at the moment when Haddon and
Claybrook were pushing hardest for air bags, the Australian state of
Victoria
passed the world's first mandatory seat-belt legislation, and the law
was an immediate success. With an aggressive public-education campaign,
rates of seat-belt use jumped from twenty to eighty per cent. During the
next several years,
Canada
,
New Zealand
,
Germany
,
France
, and others followed suit. But a similar movement in the
United States
in the early seventies stalled. James Gregory, who headed the N.H.T.S.A.
during the Ford years, says that if Nader had advocated mandatory belt
laws they might have carried the day. But Nader, then at the height of
his fame and influence, didn't think that belt laws would work in this
country. "You push mandatory belts, you might get a very adverse
reaction," Nader says today of his thinking back then.
"Mindless reaction. And how many tickets do you give out a day?
What about back seats? At what point do you require a seat belt for
small kids? And it's administratively difficult when people cross state
lines. That's why I always focussed on the passive. We have a
libertarian streak that
Europe
doesn't have." Richard Peet, a congressional staffer who helped
draft legislation in Congress giving states financial incentives to pass
belt laws, founded an organization in the early seventies to promote
belt-wearing. "After I did that, some of the people who worked for
Nader's organization went after me, saying that I was selling out the
air-bag movement," Peet recalls. "That pissed me off. I
thought the safety movement was the safety movement and we were all
working together for common aims." In "Auto Safety," a
history of auto-safety regulation, John Graham, of the Harvard School of
Public Health, writes of Claybrook's time at the N.H.T.S.A.:
Her
lack of aggressive leadership on safety belt use was a major source of
irritation among belt use advocates, auto industry officials, and
officials from state safety programs. They saw her pessimistic attitudes
as a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of Claybrook's aides at N.H.T.S.A.
who worked with state agencies acknowledged: "It is fair to say
that Claybrook never made a dedicated effort to get mandatory belt-use
laws." Another aide offered the following explanation of her
philosophy: "Joan didn't do much on mandatory belt use because her
primary interests were in vehicle regulation. She was fond of saying 'it
is easier to get twenty auto companies to do something than to get 200
million Americans to do something.' "
Claybrook
says that while at the N.H.T.S.A. she mailed a letter to all the state
governors encouraging them to pass mandatory seat-belt legislation, and
"not one governor would help us." It is clear that she had low
expectations for her efforts. Even as late as 1984, Claybrook was still
insisting that trying to encourage seat-belt use was a fool's errand.
"It is not likely that mandatory seat belt usage laws will be
either enacted or found acceptable to the public in large numbers,"
Claybrook wrote. "There is massive public resistance to adult
safety belt usage." In the very year her words were published,
however, a coalition of medical groups finally managed to pass the
country's first mandatory seat-belt law, in
New York
, and the results were dramatic. One state after another soon did
likewise, and public opinion about belts underwent what the pollster
Gary Lawrence has called "one of the most phenomenal shifts in
attitudes ever measured." Americans, it turned out, did not have a
cultural aversion to seat belts. They just needed some encouragement.
"It's not a big Freudian thing whether you buckle up or not,"
says B. J. Campbell, a former safety researcher at the
University
of
North Carolina
, who was one of the veterans of the seat-belt movement. "It's just
a habit, and either you're in the habit of doing it or you're not."
Today,
belt-wearing rates in the
United States
are just over seventy per cent, and every year they inch up a little
more. But if the seat-belt campaign had begun in the nineteen-seventies,
instead of the nineteen-eighties, the use rate in this country would be
higher right now, and in the intervening years an awful lot of car
accidents might have turned out differently, including one at the
intersection of
Egg Harbor Road
and Fleming Pike.
VI. Crash test
William
Haddon died in 1985, of kidney disease, at the age of fty-eight. From
the time he left government until his death, he headed an influential
research group called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Joan
Claybrook left the N.H.T.S.A. in 1980 and went on to run Ralph Nader's
advocacy group Public Citizen, where she has been a powerful voice on
auto safety ever since. In an interview this spring, Claybrook listed
the things that she would do if she were back as the country's
traffic-safety czar. "I'd issue a rollover standard, and have a
thirty-miles-per-hour test for air bags," she said. "Upgrade
the seating structure. Integrate the head restraint better. Upgrade the
tire-safety standard. Provide much more consumer information. And also
do more crash testing, whether it's rollover or offset crash testing and
rear-crash testing." The most effective way to reduce automobile
fatalities, she went on, would be to focus on rollovers--lowering the
center of gravity in S.U.V.s, strengthening doors and roofs. In the
course of outlining her agenda, Claybrook did not once mention the words
"seat belt."
Ralph
Nader, for his part, spends a great deal of time speaking at college
campuses about political activism. He remains a distinctive figure, tall
and slightly stooped, with a bundle of papers under his arm. His
interests have widened in recent years, but he is still passionate about
his first crusade. "Haddon was all business--never made a joke,
didn't tolerate fools easily," Nader said not long ago, when he was
asked about the early days. He has a deep, rumbling press-conference
voice, and speaks in sentence fragments, punctuated with long pauses.
"Very dedicated. He influenced us all." The auto-safety
campaign, he went on, "was a spectacular success of the
federal-government mission. When the regulations were allowed, they
worked. And it worked because it deals with technology rather than human
behavior." Nader had just been speaking in
Detroit
, at
Wayne
State
University
, and was on the plane back to
Washington
,
D.C.
He was folded into his seat, his knees butting up against the tray table
in front of him, and from time to time he looked enviously over at the
people stretching their legs in the exit row. Did he have any regrets?
Yes, he said. He wished that back in 1966 he had succeeded in keeping
the criminal-penalties provision in the auto-safety bill that Congress
passed that summer. "That would have gone right to the executive
suite," he said.
There
were things, he admitted, that had puzzled him over the years. He
couldn't believe the strides that had been made against drunk driving.
"You've got to hand it to MADD. It took me by surprise. The
drunk-driving culture is deeply embedded. I thought it was too
ingrained." And then there was what had happened with seat belts.
"Use rates are up sharply," he said. "They're a lot
higher than I thought they would be. I thought it would be very hard to
hit fifty per cent. The most unlikely people now buckle up." He
shook his head, marvelling. He had always been a belt user, and
recommends belts to others, but who knew they would catch on?
Other
safety activists, who had seen what had happened to driver behavior in
Europe and
Australia
in the seventies, weren't so surprised, of course. But Nader was never
the kind of activist who had great faith in the people whose lives he
was trying to protect.He and the other Haddonites were sworn to a theory
that said that the way to prevent typhoid is to chlorinate the water,
even though there are clearly instances where chlorine will not do the
trick. This is the blindness of ideology. It is what happens when public
policy is conducted by those who cannot conceive that human beings will
do willingly what is in their own interest. What was the truly poignant
thing about Robert Day, after all? Not just that he was a click away
from saving his only life but that his son, sitting right next to him, was
wearinghis seat belt. In the Days' Jeep Wagoneer, a fight
that experts assumed was futile was already half won.
One
day this spring, a team of engineers at Ford conducted a crash test on a
2003 Mercury. This was at Ford's test facility in
Dearborn
, a long, rectangular white steel structure, bisected by a
five-hundred-and-fifty-foot runway. Ford crashes as many as two cars a
day there, ramming them with specially designed sleds or dragging them
down the runway with a cable into a twenty-foot cube of concrete. Along
the side of the track were the twisted hulks of previous experiments: a
Ford Focus wagon up on blocks; a mangled BMW S.U.V. that had been
crashed, out of competitive curiosity, the previous week; a Ford
Explorer that looked as though it had been thrown into a blender. In a
room at the back, there were fifty or sixty crash-test dummies, propped
up on tables and chairs, in a dozen or more configurations--some in
Converse sneakers, some in patent-leather shoes, some without feet and
legs at all, each one covered with multiple electronic sensors, all
designed to measure the kinds of injuries possible in a crash.
The
severity of any accident is measured not by the speed of the car at the
moment of impact but by what is known as the delta V--the difference
between how fast a car is going at the moment of impact and how fast it
is moving after the accident. Capoferri's delta V was about twenty-five
miles per hour, seven miles per hour higher than the accident average.
The delta V of the Mercury test, though, was to be thirty-five miles per
hour, which is the equivalent of hitting an identical parked car at
seventy miles per hour. The occupants were two adult-size dummies in
orange shorts. Their faces were covered in wet paint, red above the
upper jaw and blue below it, to mark where their faces hit on the air
bag. The back seat carried a full cargo of computers and video cameras.
A series of yellow lights began flashing. An engineer stood to the side,
holding an abort button. Then a bank of stage lights came on, directly
above the point of impact. Sixteen video cameras began rolling. A voice
came over a loudspeaker, counting down: five, four, three... There was a
blur as the Mercury swept by--then bang
, as the car hit the barrier and the dual front air bags
exploded. A plastic light bracket skittered across the floor, and the
long warehouse was suddenly still.
It
was a moment of extraordinary violence, yet it was also strangely
compelling. This was performance art, an abstract and ritualized
rendering of reality, given in a concrete-and-steel gallery. The front
end of the Mercury was perfectly compressed; the car was thirty inches
shorter than it had been a moment before. The windshield was untouched.
The "A" pillars and roofline were intact. The passenger cabin
was whole. In the dead center of the deflated air bags, right where they
were supposed to be, were perfect blue-and-red paint imprints of the
dummies' faces.
But
it was only a performance, and that was the hard thing to remember. In
the real world, people rarely have perfectly square frontal collisions,
sitting ramrod straight and ideally positioned; people rarely have
accidents that so perfectly showcase the minor talents of the air bag. A
crash test is beautiful. In the sequence we have all seen over and over
in automobile commercials, the dummy rises magically to meet the
swelling cushion, always in slow motion, the bang replaced by Mozart,
and on those theatrical terms the dowdy fabric strips of the seat belt
cannot compete with the billowing folds of the air bag. This is the
image that seduced William Haddon when the men from Eaton, Yale showed
him the People Saver so many years ago, and the image that warped auto
safety for twenty long years. But real accidents are seldom like this.
They are ugly and complicated, shaped by the messy geometries of the
everyday world and by the infinite variety of human frailty. A man looks
away from the road at the wrong time. He does not see what he ought to
see. Another man does not have time to react. The two cars collide, but
at a slight angle. There is a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree spin. There
is skidding and banging. A belt presses deep into one man's chest--and
that saves his life. The other man's unrestrained body smashes against
the car door--and that kills him.
"They
left pretty early, about eight, nine in the morning," Susan Day,
Robert Day's widow, recalls. "I was at home when the hospital
called. I went to see my son first. He was pretty much O.K., had a lot
of bruising. Then they came in and said, 'Your husband didn't make
it.'"
Read
more. Brian
O'Neill of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rebuts
Malcolm Gladwell's interpretation of Haddon's work. (PDF format.)
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