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Passenger seat belts will soon be a requirement on commercial buses – a measure that the National Transportation Safety Board has long advocated but didn’t have the authority to enforce. Yesterday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has the legal authority to establish transportation safety standards, told Congress that it will require commercial motor coaches to have safety belts for their passengers.
After being bogged down by bureaucracy and industry concerns for years, federal automobile roof crush standards finally became tougher. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced the new roof strength standards last week. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that the new standards, which are double the current standards for vehicles weighing up to 6,000 pounds, “will significantly strengthen vehicle roof standards and improve rollover crash protection.”
The Ford Pinto is a car that became notoriously associated with fuel-fed crash fires in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the compact vehicle showed a propensity for catching fire when involved in even low-speed crashes. In 1977, a Ford Memo revealed that the company was aware of design problems with the Pinto that made it more susceptible to crash-related fires, but that it had deemed the overall benefits of redesigning the automobile – which included preventing an average of 180 deaths each year – to be not worth the cost – an estimated $11 per automobile.
After analyzing the events surrounding a 2008 Utah bus rollover in which nine people died and 43 were injured, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that two situations fundamentally contributed to the deadly accident: driver fatigue and the lack of federal regulations to protect bus passengers. The American Association of Justice (AAJ) responded to the report by calling for a close review – and a possible revision – of federal transportation safety regulations proposed during the Bush Administration and currently pending.
Consumer and safety advocates nationwide are praising President Obama’s reported nomination of Chuck Hurley to serve as the next leader of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – the government agency that sets the standards for automobile roof crush strength. Actually, setting roof crush standards is not something the NHTSA has done much of since 1971 — the year it established the alarmingly weak standards that are still on the books today. Safety advocates hope that Hurley will overhaul the weak standards, which were written so many decades ago, by the auto companies and for the auto companies.
For years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers have resisted even the slightest boost in roof crush standards. Now, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has stepped in to raise the bar on roof strength standards.
An activist and advocate for higher automobile roof strength standards believes that the federal government’s latest delay will ultimately benefit the consumer.
As we have reported in the past, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a branch of the Department of Transportation, decided in 2005 to boost its archaic standards for roof strength, issuing a deadline of mid-2008 to accomplish that.
In November, we reported that federal U.S. standards for vehicle roof safety were dangerously low, and that the decision to raise the standards, even just to a level still inferior to that of many foreign auto manufacturers, has been continually delayed. Then, just yesterday we speculated as to whether a bailout of the auto industry would mean better, safer American cars.
Unfortunately, it looks as if the Department of Transportation is just as dysfunctional as the American auto industry in its ability to do the right thing … or anything at all.
On June 2, 2008, after many years of prodding by consumer advocacy groups and attorneys, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a consumer advisory concerning aging tires. This follows numerous lawsuits involving Explorer/Firestone rollovers, which made the public aware of the potential dangers of tire aging. Additional industry documents and studies have made clear that tires more than six years old are hazardous to drivers, and can result in tread separations, crashes and rollovers.
In June, we reported that the U.S. Senate panel reviewing a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposal for increased standards in roof strength had asked the agency to delay its decision, originally scheduled for July 1. The NHTSA agreed to further review of the policy, and set a new date for release on Oct. 1. Yesterday, the agency announced another delay, pushing the decision back to December, according to a report in the Detroit News.
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