[sustran] 117 Deaths Each Day

[Gerry Hawkes]

Following is an article on automobile deaths from today's New York Times online at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/opinion/13KRIS.html?th

Gerry Hawkes

www.eco-systems.org

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OP-ED COLUMNIST 
117 Deaths Each Day
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 13, 2004


Here's a pop quiz. Rank the following in order of the number of American lives they claim in a typical year: food, guns, terrorists, flu and cars.
Ready? The most deadly are automobiles, which kill 117 Americans a day, or nearly 43,000 a year. Then comes flu, which (along with pneumonia, its associated disease) kills 36,000 people. Third is guns: 26,000 deaths. Fourth, food-borne illness: 5,000. And finally, terrorism, which in a typical year claims virtually no U.S. lives - with horrific exceptions like 2001. But antiterrorism efforts get most of the attention and the resources.

To a point, that's sensible. The train bombings in Madrid are a reminder of our vulnerability. President Bush is right to emphasize the risk from W.M.D., because a single nuclear bomb could claim 500,000 lives.

Still, we need a balance in confronting threats, and I don't think we've found it. Watch President Bush's campaign ads, and it's clear that he's overwhelmingly focused on the war on terrorism - in 2001, he called it "my primary focus." As he put it this year, "I'm a war president."

Mr. Bush's intensity and unwavering purpose comforted the nation in the aftermath of 9/11. But America is too complex to have national policy reduced to the single overarching priority of counterterrorism.

"It's an important threat, but it cannot be the organizing principle of our foreign policy," argues Ivo Daalder, a former national security official who is co-author of "America Unbound," an excellent (and respectful) book about Mr. Bush's administration. "There are worse threats out there. Climate change. H.I.V./AIDS."

Or, I would say, nuclear proliferation. Or cars.

Vehicle fatalities don't get attention because they occur in ones and twos. If people died at the same rate but in one horrifying crash a month that killed 3,500 people, then Mr. Bush and Congress would speedily make auto safety a priority and save thousands of lives a year. As Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said: "If we had 115 people die a day in aviation crashes, we wouldn't have a plane in the sky."

"Driving a car is one of the most dangerous things we do," note Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, two Yale professors, in their book about innovative thinking, "Why Not?" They note that a major effort by Sweden has reduced traffic deaths by encouraging seat belt use, converting intersections to traffic circles (they "soothe" traffic), replacing rigid guardrails with new rails or cables that absorb or "catch" cars, and exhorting cyclists to wear helmets. The upshot is that Sweden 's accident rate is one of the lowest in the world.

"If the United States could achieve Sweden's current standard, this would save 12,500 lives per year," the authors say.

Granted, it seems less presidential to call for more guardrails than to invade Middle Eastern countries. And, in fairness, President Bush's head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Dr. Jeffrey Runge, is pushing hard to save lives in unheralded ways, from improving S.U.V. design to getting drivers to check their tire pressure.

A month before Dr. Runge took up his post, several teenagers were rushed to the hospital where he worked as an emergency room physician. The driver in their car, a 17-year-old redhead named Sarah Longstreet, was known in her high school for her friendliness and her Bible Club activities. She wore a seat belt and her air bag inflated, but she died when a Ford Explorer veered across the center line and plowed right over the hood of her Mazda. That incompatibility in the two cars' designs made her one more unnecessary auto fatality - and she became "sort of an angel to me," Dr. Runge said.

So when I asked him about priorities, he answered this way:

"First off, we have to do everything we're doing for counterterrorism," he said. "There's nothing that we're doing that we shouldn't be doing, and you can make the case that we should be doing more. . . . However, we're still losing 115 people a day on the highways, and basically the perpetrators of those deaths also fit within a profile" - such as alcohol abusers.

Governing the U.S. is like playing 200 simultaneous chess matches (while whiny columnists second-guess every move on every board). The terrorism chessboard is among the most important, but if we could just devote a bit more energy to the others, we could save thousands of lives - including the life of the next Sarah Longstreet.  
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