On the Road (SUVs)

Highway safety has been improving for years, and it's good to see the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finally catching up with reality. In releasing its annual report on traffic fatalities Tuesday, the agency said U.S. roads are now safer than ever.

That's good news, especially in August, when folks are packing up the family SUV for a week at the beach. But what a change from the doom and gloom of a year ago, when the agency warned that highway fatalities were at the "highest level since 1990" and suggested that the "grim" numbers were a reason to shame states into passing draconian drunk-driving and seat-belt laws.

The statistics released this week show that highway fatalities were down in 2003 -- to 42,643 from 43,005 in 2002. But that doesn't tell you much about safety until these numbers are placed alongside the amount of driving people are doing. The key statistic is fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. That number hasn't changed much in recent years -- 1.48 in 2003, 1.51 in 2002 and 1.51 again in 2001.

Sport utility vehicles have been NHTSA's favorite whipping boy in the past and it's hard to shake the habit. The agency comes down hard on SUVs for their high "rollover" rate. But like last year, it fails to point out that while SUVs are more likely than regular cars to roll over during a fatal wreck, they aren't likelier to be involved in a fatal wreck in the first place.

Will all due respect to the Wall Street Journal, they are absolutely incorrect on this. When measuring highway safety performance, unit fatality rates (per vehicle-miles traveled) are only slightly more relevant than overall numbers of fatalities. The problem with these kinds of performance measures is that they neglect to take into account the most important factors in the reduction of highway fatalities from one year to the next: reductions in medical response time (increased usage of cell-phones and on-board vehicle technology such as ON-STAR), and improvements in medical treatment for life-threatening injuries.

A more accurate method of assessing highway safety would be to simply add fatalities and injuries and report them as a combined "bodily harm" figure. This may not be totally correct, since the growth of civil litigation "lottery awards" has probably encouraged more and more people to report injuries over time. If that is the case, then the single most accurate means of measuring highway safety over time would be to quantify the number of reported accidents (whether there were any injuries or not), and report them on a unit basis.

My wife was hit by three trucks on an Interstate Highway. One rammed her from the rear. This spun her into a second truck that was passing her. This spun her in the opposite direction, and a third truck creamed into the side of her and knocked her off the road. Her car did not turn over. She was driving a Suburban. In any other car, she would have been killed. She wasn't scratched. I'm going to keep her in Suburbans.

Here's another bizarre anomaly in those statistics:

A city like New York, which has some of the worst roads -- as well as the worst drivers -- in the country, usually ranks very high as a safe city for driving, according to these statistical measures. The reason for this is that the city is so congested that vehicles rarely travel fast enough to cause much damage to motorists who are involved in accidents.

If they measured highway safety in terms of overall accidents instead of fatalities, New York would rightly be identified as one of the worst cities in the country for traffic safety.

My son decided to buy a small mint condition red sports car on EBAY...it was a great deal. However, in the two months he's been driving it, he's been hit twice by pick-ups. They simply can't see the car. The first accident occurred at a red light, he was in the right lane, and a truck from the middle lane decided he indeed needed to turn right. He simply turned his vehicle into my sons red car. The driver was profusely apologetic and stated he had no idea a vehicle was next to him at the light.
Two weeks ago he was hit again, after turning into a driveway...the car has been written off.
He is now getting an SUV...which is a safer vehicle to drive.

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