VISIONZERO CRASH DEATHS AND ZEROSERIOUS INJURIES The Delivery of a Vision Zero Petition 2016 In Memory of AnnaLeah and Mary Karth VISIONZERO CRASH DEATHS AND ZEROSERIOUS INJURIES VISIONZERO CRASH DEATHS AND ZEROSERIOUS INJURIES The Delivery of a Vision Zero Petition March 2016 AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety © 2016 Marianne W. Karth. All rights reserved. Published by AnnaLeah & Mary For Truck Safety Interior design, layout, and production: Isaac Karth First Edition annaleahmary.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is lovingly compiled in memory of AnnaLeah Karth (forever 17) and Mary Lydia Karth (forever 13) Precious ones, your lives were cut far too short. Contents Contents vii Introduction ix I Vision Zero 1 1 What is Vision Zero? 3 2 Why Are We Advocating For Vision Zero? 5 3 Traffic Injuries & Fatalities Data 9 4 Truck Underride: A Practical Application of a Vision Zero Goal 11 II Petition 15 5 Petition Letter to Secretary Foxx 17 6 About the Signers 19 7 Selected Comments by Signers of the Vision Zero Petition 21 8 Signatures to the Petition 25 9 Comments by Signers of the Petition 483 vii viii CONTENTS III Executive Order 493 10 Why do we need a Vision Zero Executive Order? 495 11 What is Needed to Bring About a National Vision Zero Goal? 501 11.1 Action One: Set a National Vision Zero Goal . 502 11.2 Action Two: Establish a White House Vision Zero Task Force To Achieve Significant Crash Death Reduction . 503 11.3 Action Three: Sign a Vision Zero Executive Order To Au- thorize Vision Zero Rulemaking Policies . 507 12 Petition Letter to President Obama 513 13 Letter of Support for the AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety Vision Zero Executive Order Petition 515 14 Selected Comments From Current Executive Order Petition Signers 519 A Vision Zero Posts from AnnaLeahMary.com 523 A.1 Chronologically archived: . 523 A.2 Alphabetical listing of Vision Zero posts: . 529 Introduction In the aftermath of losing our two youngest daughters, AnnaLeah (17) and Mary (13), due to a truck underride crash on May 4, 2013, we became aware of far too many facts about traffic fatalities. Along the way, we discovered that a global movement is underway-called Vision Zero. This term was coined in Sweden and has as its basis acouple of “ethical rules” 1: • “Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society” • “Whenever someone is killed or seriously injured, necessary steps must be taken to avoid a similar event” Every life is worth saving; there is no person who will not be missed by someone: 2 In an effort to do more than just put a bandaid on the problem, we launched a campaign to call for major change in how safety laws and regulations are determined. This book is a compilation of our request for a National Vision Zero Goal and for a Vision Zero rulemaking policy. It includes our petition letters to President Obama and DOT Secretary Foxx—along with the signatures and comments of thousands of people who signed the petitions and are speaking up with us to call for a move Towards Zero Crash Deaths & Serious Injuries. 1http://www.monash.edu/miri/research/reports/papers/visionzero 2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyvrkEjoXI ix Part I Vision Zero 1 1 What is Vision Zero? Vision Zero, in the simplest language, is the embracing of a vision or hope that we could work toward reducing crash deaths (and serious injuries) to zero. That no one would ever die in a traffic crash. It is, ofcourse, understood that—life being what it is—we will never actually reach zero. But Vision Zero insists that certainly such a goal is desirable and, in fact, so much so that everything humanly possible should be done to accom- plish it. One life at a time. To do anything less would be unthinkable. What would a Vision Zero philosophy/goal/policy mean to us as a coun- try? Here is how Neil Arason, Canadian author of No Accident, views Vision Zero: “I think people have different views about vision zero but here is mine. The airline industry does not apply cost benefit anal- ysis to fixing aviation problems. They just fix problems and that is that. Using a cost benefit model is incompatible with vision zero because it applies trade-offs and vision zero does not entail that. Vision zero is about making the system a safe one and does not assign value to a human life because doing that, the thinking goes, is unethical.” 1 This book is a compilation of our request fora National Vision Zero Goal and for a Vision Zero rulemaking policy. It includes our petition letters to President Obama and DOT Secretary Foxx—along with the signatures and comments of thousands of people who signed the petitions and are speaking up with us to call for a move Towards Zero Crash Deaths & Serious Injuries. 1http://annaleahmary.com/2015/12/starting-tzd-traffic-safety- conversation-who-should-pay-for-the-cost-of-saved-lives/ 3 4 CHAPTER 1. WHAT IS VISION ZERO? The book also includes an appendix full of annaleahmary.com2 posts writ- ten on how and why Vision Zero should be applied. For example, one of the posts describes why we are pushing so hard to get people to sign a Vision Zero petition. What difference would it make anyway? The reason we are devoting our lives to pounding on this door and asking for change is that our daughters may have lost their lives due to the lack of a Vision Zero policy. A decision which concluded that recommended changes would not be cost effective—in other words, that it would supposedly cost more toim- plement safety measures than the lives saved would be worth—may have led to lax underride guard standards. If the best possible protection had been pursued when the regulations were last updated (1996), the trucks on the road today (including the one on the road May 4, 2013) might be much safer to be driving around. Mary and AnnaLeah might even still be around. Furthermore, the issue of underride guards is just one among many prob- lems which, if a National Vision Zero Goal were in place, could be ad- dressed more compassionately—as if human lives were really more impor- tant to us than our pocketbook. There is also a drafted Vision Zero Executive Order as a recommendation for outlining a means of implementing a National Vision Zero Goal and granting DOT the authority to adopt a Vision Zero rulemaking policy. Finally, there is a draft for a presidential memorandum mandating a task force to address these issues in a collaborative effort at a national level in order to establish national traffic safety standards which should be adopted by all states. 2http://annaleahmary.com 2 Why Are We Advocating For Vision Zero? 32,675 people died in U.S. traffic crashes in 2013.1 Two of those peo- ple were my daughters, AnnaLeah (17) and Mary (13). That number decreased to 32,675 deaths in 2014. Down by 44, but still far too many deaths in my book. In fact, early estimates show an increase in traffic fatalities in 2015. 2 I survived a horrific truck crash in which our car was pushed by a truck into the rear of another truck. Backwards. My daughters in the back seat were not so fortunate; they went under the truck and the truck broke their innocent bodies. Underride deaths are preventable and unnecessary and now is the time to take extreme action to reduce these deaths—no matter who caused the crash! Let’s not wait for collision avoidance technology to kick in before kicking out preventable underride deaths! The underride problem is just one example of the fixable problems weneed to address. Michael Lemov has written an eye-opener, Car Safety Wars: One Hundred Years of Technology, Politics, and Death, in which he tells us that in the more than 110 years since the first traffic crash in 1898, more than 3.5 million Americans have been killed and more than 300,000,000 injured in motor vehicle crashes [p.9]. This, I learned, is 3x the number of Americans who have been killed and 200x the number wounded in all of the wars fought by our nation since the Revolution [p.10]. Imagine. 1http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/traffic- deaths-decline-in-2013 2http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2015/2014- traffic-deaths-drop-but-2015-trending-higher 5 6 CHAPTER 2. WHY ARE WE ADVOCATING FOR VISION ZERO? Are you aware that Death by Motor Vehicle is one of the leading causes of deaths? “Worldwide it was estimated that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2004.[2] Also in 2010 alone, around 1.23 million people were killed due to traffic collisions.[3] This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among children 10–19 years of age (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured)[4] and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States[5] (45,800 people died and 2.4 million were injured in 2005).[6] It is estimated that motor vehicle collisions caused the deaths of around 60 million people during the 20th century,[7] around the same as the number of World War II casualties.”3 Lemov’s book sheds light on many things including the fact that, although the blame was often put on the driver for crashes in the 20th century, in fact crashes and crash deaths are additionally caused by other factors including environmental and vehicle factors.