Free Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page A

Vision Zero cities. The police departments in Los Angeles and New York responded to a rash of pedestrian deaths in recent years not by cracking down on bad drivers but by stepping up the issuing of very expensive tickets for jaywalking.
    A nother deadly pattern emerged on February 13, beginning with Heidi J. Springer. The fifty-two-year-old nurse-anesthetist at the Cleveland Clinic was ejected from her BMW X5 SUV after she drifted from her lane, overcompensated by jerking the wheel when she realized what had happened, then struck the concrete center median. Pedro Padron Sanchez of Hamilton, Alabama, lost control of his Chevy Silverado pickup in similar fashion when he wandered off Highway 253 in a moment of inattention. He, too, was hurled from his truck as it overturned. At almost the same time, an eighteen-year-old driver was thrown from his car after taking a sharp curve too fast and crashing through a farm fence, rolling the car four times. Christopher Short, meanwhile, drifted off a rural road at high speed and hit a ditch along Louisiana Highway 568, not far from his hometown of Waterproof. Short’s Chevy pickup became airborne with such momentum, it crossed two lanes of traffic before landing, overturning several times on impact, and throwing him from the car. Short died on his nineteenth birthday.
    Each of these crashes—and they were not the only ones to follow this pattern this day—had three things in common. They were fatal. The drivers were hurled from their vehicles with terrible force, inflicting catastrophic injury. And none of the dead were wearing seat belts.
    The physics of car crashes are brutally simple: unrestrained people, pets, and objects turn into missiles inside cars during rapid deceleration. Isaac Newton first explained this phenomenon in 1687 with his First Law of Motion, and the merciless physics never change: if a car going a mere 30 miles per hour crashes to a sudden stop, everything that’s not anchored in place continues to move forward at the same speed, striking anything around them with tremendous force. For the average adult male in the U.S., that force can have an effect roughly the same as dropping a twelve-ton weight on his head. That’s more than twenty times the force of a professional boxer’s best roundhouse punch. And so people fly through windshields. Their bodies bend or shatter steering wheels. Passengers in the backseat fly forward into the people in the front, injuring or killing them along with themselves. And if you’re holding a baby in your arms, the infant will seem to weigh hundreds of pounds and be torn from your grasp, impossible to hold on to during impact.
    And that’s at 30 miles an hour. At 60 miles an hour, people fly through car windows and windshields like cannonballs. The official cause of death in such cases—and the single most common finding by coroners working fatal car crashes—is termed “blunt-force trauma.” This is the coldly clinical term for the internal and external injuries a human body sustains when it is turned into a high-speed projectile striking metal, road, rock, tree, or ground. The reality is much messier than the term.
    Seat belts are the single best way to avoid turning into a human missile during a car crash. The statistics on this are undeniable: the surviving passengers in fatal crashes studied in 2013 were wearing seat belts 84 percent of the time. 25 Only 16 percent of the survivors in those fatal crashes were not buckled up. There are always anecdotes of people who survived because their lack of a seat belt allowed them to be “thrown clear.” That happensfrom time to time, but far more often the unbelted are thrown to death.
    Seat belt use has steadily improved during the last half century. Overall, 87 percent of Americans say they wear seat belts when driving or riding in a car. This rate varies depending on the region and whether a particular state imposes strict fines for