Archive for April 20th, 2009

Photo by Normko/Flickr

It is a huge loss, but as consolation we did not lose him four decades earlier, as he described in this article in the Times of London.

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself.

The warmer weather this past weekend brought out a summer car ritual, one that admittedly is on my large list of car-culture pet peeves — things like stuffed animals in the rear-window ledge, or vocoder-heavy R&B (can we call for a moratorium on this device, please?) played at top decibel on my street.

I’m talking about feet on the dashboard. OK, yeah, call me uptight, neurotic, etc., but I tend to be rather repulsed by the site of bare feet in a public environment that isn’t the beach. Maybe it was those hacky-sack players on the quad in college. In business class to New Delhi I had to gently rebuke the passenger behind me, a kindly businessman who nevertheless saw fit to rest his unadorned foot on my armrest, just behind my elbow. The profusion of “mandals” leaves me cold.

But with alarming frequency one will spy, in the neighboring lane, a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard, or even dangling out the window (of the passenger side, of course; when you see this on the driver’s side, it brings up a whole other level of concerns). The phenomenon seems to tilt, demographically, towards a male driver and a female passenger. Again, call me uptight, but if there’s one thing I don’t want on my car’s interior surfaces it’s the oils, exfoliated skin, fungal detritus, etc., of someone’s feet. But the real issue, of course, is airbag deployment. When activated, airbags burst forth at around 200 MPH (and remember, you’ll be going forward), with tremendous loads that get higher the closer one is to the airbag. According to one study:

For example, at a distance of four inches from the airbag face to the chest plate, the deploying airbag exerted a maximum load of 912 pounds when released. In the slow motion video clip captured by Dr. Kowalski’s high speed camera, one can clearly see the chest plate on the fixture bow upward as the airbag pushes against it.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to picture what would happen to one’s legs if driven forward at such speeds and loads by an airbag; I don’t have statistics, but there must be numbers on injuries caused by airbags due to non-standard seating arrangements, or some such.

I looked in my copy of Accidental Injury: Biomechanics and Prevention, by Alan M. Hanum and John W. Melvin, but found nothing on the subject of airbags and feet. I did find, however, this rather sobering passage: “A laboratory study by Lau et al (1993) examined the potential for injury from out-of-position anesthetized swine with deploying driver airbags… splenic lacerations were the most frequent abdominal injury, often extending through the thickness of the spleen.”

It’s not a direct comparison, but extrapolating from this it seems like nothing good is going to happen if a crash were to occur and your feet were propped up at eye level — whether you were wearing shoes or not.

I came across this interesting graph in a new report from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, with the lengthy title “Guidance for Implementation of the AASHTO Strategic Highway Safety Plan Volume 23: A Guide for Reducing Speeding-Related Crashes.”

I was struck by the substantial percentage (the second-highest of all road forms) of speed-related fatalities on “low speed,” non-interstate roads. I am not sure what the percentage of pedestrian fatalities were, nor the speeds of impact involved (something would be far from exact in any case), nor do I (or anyone, really) know the exact differences in exposure for driving on local roads versus high-speed highways.

But I took the figure as a sign of what sort of issues were at stake in things like the recently mentioned Prospect Park West Road Diet (in Brooklyn), which now seems to be moving forward.