Archive for March 31st, 2009

Following up on a story I mentioned a while back, a driver in DeKalb County, Georgia, who struck and killed a child at a crosswalk in front of a school, despite a crossing guard and a line of stopped cars, has been charged with “misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter.” My first question is: Do the words misdemeanor and manslaughter appear anywhere else together save the curious field of traffic law?

The second is a bit from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story:

“Misdemeanors can be punished by up to one year in jail. State law makes vehicular homicide a misdemeanor except in certain cases such as drunken driving or ignoring a stop sign on a stopped school bus.”

Well, first, if a driver claims to not see the stop sign on a stopped school bus, is that the same as ignoring it? Second, is there any reason for a driver to less cautious at a cross-walk in front of a school than around a school-bus dispensing children? If the law makes legal protections for children being dropped off from a bus, why wouldn’t it do the same when they are in a protected crosswalk, under the care of a crossing guard?

(Thanks Lucas)

Traffic gets up a great write-up over at Popular Mechanics, via Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds. Here’s an excerpt:

The safety-through-danger approach extends to cars. Modern cars are quiet, powerful and capable of astonishing grip in curves, even on wet pavement. That’s swell, of course, until you suddenly lose traction at 75 mph. The sense of confidence bred by all this capability makes us feel safe, which causes us to drive faster than we probably should. We don’t want to make cars with poor response, but perhaps we could design cues—steering-wheel vibration devices, as in video games?—that make us feel less safe at speed and encourage more care. Designers could make cars feel faster at lower speeds, instead of slower at higher speeds. Done right, this might even make driving more fun. In college I drove an Austin-Healey 3000 that somehow felt faster at 45 mph than my Mazda RX-8 (or even my Toyota Highlander Hybrid) feels at 75 mph. That was a good thing.

The traffic example demonstrates a general phenomenon of modern society: With the best of intentions, we tend to replace situations that call on the use of our wits with situations that we can sleepwalk through, and the solutions to matters with any serious consequences are postponed to the indefinite future. That’s a comfortable way to live, and there are good reasons to be glad of it—we’re not in a situation where one bad harvest means starvation, after all—but if you can postpone problems indefinitely, a lot of problems will be postponed. Yet the future eventually arrives.

Jessica Zafra raises a salient question about VW’s Phaeton, whose name is derived from the figure in Greek mythology who, in a quest to confirm that sun-god Helios is his father (as mother Euripides has confessed), takes Dad’s sun chariot out for a spectacularly ill-fated ride. As she asks: “Is it a good idea to buy a car named after a terrible driver who died in a spectacular crash?”

Perhaps consumers were hip to this — VW no longer makes the car, after all.

(Via Peter Stothard)

I was struck by the arresting difference in these two photos, from the IIHS’ recent tests on roof strength for small SUVs. The first, the Volkswagen Tiguan, looks like as if it didn’t go through the test. The second, the Kia Sportage, looks like a safe was dropped on it from ten stories up.

The Kia spokesman, who undoubtedly has some explaining to do, noted that the IIHS rating, “by itself, does not provide a complete assessment of a vehicle’s ability to protect occupants in these complex events.”

Well, this actually makes me feel even more leery; the IIHS performs one simple test — in reality, in a complex real-world event, there’s that many more ways for the roof to collapse, or for something else to go wrong.

Given the cost discrepancy between the VW and the Kia, this brings up an unfortunate reality of the car business — safety features cost money. I am reminded of a slide (pictured below) of a presentation by Tom Wenzel, which shows how car resale value is associated with risk. Of course, we can’t chalk this up entirely to “vehicle factors,” as we need to know who’s driving each kind of vehicle, how much and where they’re driving, etc. etc.

This distinction is not generally made in the media; as one will see articles like “the ten safest cars on the road.” But those are drawn from crash tests, not real-world insurance claims and fatality/injury figures. Perhaps “theoretically safest cars” is better. Wenzel’s presentations also do a great job of showing the complexity of car safety — e.g., that there’s more to it than sheer mass (there’s a weak relationship between weight and car safety, he notes, unless one accounts for the manufacturer; in other words, the quality of vehicle design seems more important than sheer size).