99% Invisible - 287- The Nut Behind the Wheel

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

In the past fifty years, the car crash death rate has dropped by nearly 80 percent in the United States. And one of the reasons for that drop has to do with the “accident report forms” that police officers fill out when they respond to a wreck. Officers use these forms to document the weather conditions, to draw a diagram of the accident, and to identify the collision’s “primary cause.” All that information gathered on the side of the road goes from the accident report form into a federal database: the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Car companies, safety advocates, and regulators comb through this data constantly, looking for patterns that help them understand how and why people die in car wrecks. In turn, this information helps designers and engineers create safer vehicles and roadways. The data informs all kinds of design decisions around car safety — everything from speed limits to mandatory seat belts. But this culture of heavily regulated, data-driven, auto-safety engineering did not always exist. In fact, for decades, automakers tried to keep data about car wrecks to themselves. They not only resisted making cars safer, they argued the very idea of a “safe car” was impossible. The Nut Behind the Wheel

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When somebody gets in a car wreck, there's a group of people who rush to the scene to examine exactly what happened. Is Derni accident's working right now, Joe? They're called. Police officers. We can talk about reports and this and that, but maybe we can go right out. This is New York State Trooper Frank Bandiro.

And writing Shotgun with Bandiro is Stan Alcorn from the investigative reporting podcast Reveal. I went for this ride along last spring. Not so much to see a wreck as to see the paperwork. Oh and something else I want to show you. Our accident reporter is right here. In the past 50 years, the car crash death rate has fallen by nearly 80 percent, and one of the reasons for that drop has to do with this accident report form. It's where Bandiro writes down the weather, draws a diagram of the wreck, identifies its primary cause. So you've got like a whole list of possible causes.

Oh yeah. I don't know if you can read those little things, but there's a million. I mean, try to cover all the basic. Okay, so we're gonna call the base- The eight there. Animal action can go- Exactly. Say a deer is crossing a roadway. I try to tell my wife that the safest thing to do is to slow down as much as you can without being unsafe and drive straight through the animal. Really? Yes. As we join the Long Island commuters on the southern state parkway, a call comes in over

the radio. This turned out to be just a fender bender, but if it were one of the more than 30,000 fatal car accidents that happened each year. I'd stay in here for now. The information gathered on the side of the road would go from that accident report form into a federal database. The fatality analysis reporting system. Anyone can use this database.

In car companies, safety advocates and regulators are combing through it constantly, looking for patterns that help them understand how and why people combing through it constantly, looking for patterns that help them understand how and why people die in car wrecks. Which then helps designers and engineers create safer vehicles and roadways. The data informs all kinds of design decisions around car safety. Everything from speed limits to mandatory seat belts. But this culture of heavily regulated data-driven

auto-safety engineering, it did not always exist. In fact, at first, automakers tried to keep data about car wrecks to themselves. They not only resisted making cars safer, they argued the very idea of a safe car was impossible. The story starts in the early 20th century. When car ads didn't talk about their safety features, they talked about styling. From the rakeish flair of its new flight swept rear fenders, right up to its bold but elegant new front styling,

the new power style Chrysler emphasizes the forward look of power in motion. Looks like it's still moving. Even when it stops, some design. A Chrysler safety director actually compared cars to women's hats, saying that, quote, they have to have special attractiveness, and sometimes they even compromise with function.

When safety was discussed, it wasn't about the car. It was about the driver. Unfortunately, there are drivers amongst us who are poor sports. Within 25 years of the first known fatal car crash, automobiles had become the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. But all those deaths were blamed on the, quote, nut behind the wheel. They are the wreckers who caused the accidents that may and kill. In other words, cars don't kill people. People kill people.

The whole notion that the machine could have some sort of impact on the likelihood of you surviving a car crash wasn't even on the radar during the first half of the 20th century. This is Amy Gangloff, a historian whose studies auto safety. Safety wise, how would you characterize the cars then and compare them to the cars of today? the 20th century. This is Amy Gangloff, a historian who studies auto safety. Safety wise, how would you characterize the cars then and compare them to the cars of today? Um, in large part they were death traps. Forget seat belts and airbags. The first cars had windshields made out of regular old plate glass.

If your head went through it, you could get stuck with shards of glass pressing into your neck. But before someone could come up with a safer car, someone had to come up with the idea that cars could be safer. Gangloff traces that idea to a self-taught scientist named Hugh De Haven. You tell me how it's done. This is an old cassette tape I tracked down of De Haven being interviewed. The project really started in 1917 and 18 when I was flying through our flying floor.

That's the Canadian Air Force in World War I. When he was just like 24 hours away from being commissioned, he had a horrific plane accident. I ruptured my liver. I ruptured my pang trance. I ruptured my gall bladder. Good. I ruptured my pankance, I ruptured my gallbladder, good, I ruptured my kidneys. While he was in the hospital, he had his kind of moment of his epiphany.

I had no loss of consciousness around head injury, but I did have these abdominal injuries. He concluded that there was a sharp knob on his safety belt that had probably led to his injuries. And so he started thinking that perhaps we can package human beings better. Not just in airplanes, but also in cars. The Haven started by crash testing objects, dropping eggs onto padding from higher and higher heights.

He found an egg could survive a 100 foot fall if it landed on a three-inch thick rubber mat. Then he turned to human beings, tracking down the people behind actual newspaper headlines, like, girl falls 10 stories, lives, and tells of it. And he learned that we are just like eggs. We can survive seemingly unsurvivable collisions, if the impact is spread out over time and space. Like when you fall into soft dirt or get thrown into a seat belt instead of the windshield. Finally, he turned to what was actually happening to people's bodies in the most prolific source of high-speed collisions. Cars. To do that, he called up hospitals, corners, and police officers, most of whom thought he was nuts.

Why would the thought of be so nutty? It's a crazy, well actually it's a very simple thing. People in those days and people through this day feel, if you get in a crash, you're going to get hurt. When you're not avert in a crash, you look, it's what they call the Jesus factor. You can't calculate it. The Haven's crazy theory was that what happened to people's bodies in a car crash was not just luck. It wasn't something you couldn't calculate or change. It was a predictable product of the car's design. It seems so common sense now, it's hard to even register it,

but at the time, it was revolutionary. And in the 40s and 50s, to Haven would prove it was true. In 1953, he partnered with the Indiana State Police for a year-long study. And with their photos and reports from doctors and coroners, he was able to isolate which parts of the car were the most dangerous in a crash and there were things that we don't even think of now like hard unpadded dashboards and steel mobs with sharp edges that would

end up stuck in people's skulls. Yeah he's diagnosing exactly what's causing the injuries inside the car. And what does he find? What exactly does he find is causing most of these injuries. The steering column, the steering column itself was not collapsible. So if you had a front end collision, the steering column would push up and might even push through somebody's chest, like a spear that might actually impale somebody. The solution was the now ubiquitous collapsible steering column,

a technology that saved 79,989 lives as of 2012, according to one government study. That's more than anything except the seat belts. But collapsible steering columns wouldn't become standard equipment until 1967, more than a decade after the results of De Haven's Indiana study were published, because car companies just did not want to deal with his findings. Car companies were very paranoid about having a discussion about safety. In the 1950s, because a discussion about safety was pretty much going to guarantee that people start

thinking about the dangers of driving. And it's just not fun to drive when you're thinking about a knob getting embedded in your skull or a steering column being jammed into your chest. I mean, one of the things that you have in this definitely looking directly at is our mortality. And it's kind of the analysis of risks in general require us to think about something that is a society we rarely ever want to think about. But for society to think about it would take more than academic research.

It would take politics. You want to have my name so you remember who I am? Sure we do that. You want to say who you are? This is Joan Claybrook. Joan Claybrook would eventually be in charge of auto safety for the United States, but in 1965 she was a political novice coming to Washington for the first time as a fellow for the American Political Science Association.

And I signed up to work with a member of Congress from Atlanta, Georgia, and he was concerned about the kids in his neighborhood being killed in car crashes. And he had read unsafe at any speed. Unsafe at any speed was an unlikely bestseller by a car safety obsessed young lawyer named Ralph Nader. So I read Ralph Nader's book and that was the first time that I realized that the car design was crucial in your survival and the car crash. The book took research by people like Hugh De Haven and turned it into a scorching

indictment of the auto industry. It showed car companies had actually patented safety technology, including the collapsible steering column. They just weren't using it. I had gotten to know Rafa with this period because I was one of the most willing audiences for all the things he wanted to do. Behind the scenes, Joan Claybrook worked with Ralph Nader on a bill to regulate the auto industry for the first time. Nader would give testimony in front of Congress that sounded like a grad student reading

his overly academic thesis paper. Just for flavor, here's some from 1967. I missed their frenetic activity to serve their corporate employers. These lawyers became afflicted with a tunnel vision that brings with it the familiar lawyer malady known as retainer astigmatism. Boring as that sounds, the auto industry was terrified of regulation and of nature. And that's why the auto industry hired a gum shoe to trail NATO and get some dirt on them and try and district credit them.

This was one of the greatest self-owns in American political history. General Motors didn't get any turn on NATO, but word got out, they were trying to undermine him and it made General Motors look just terrible. And that's what they did and that's what made him a national hero. Yeah. He gave him a lot of power. In just a few months, the car companies had helped energize a movement to regulate car companies. And that movement succeeded.

I was distinguished to members of the Congress and the administration and friends. On September 9, 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressed more than 200 guests at the White House Rose Garden, including Ralph Nader and the President of General Motors. What they heard was a president talking about cars in the language of public health. Our years now, we've tolerated a raging epidemic. He called it highway disease, a disease that had killed more than three times as many Americans

as all our wars, and despite our technological advances, we were failing to cure it. In this age of space, we're getting plenty of information about how to send men into space and how to bring them home. Yet we don't know for certain whether more auto accidents are caused by faulty breaks or by soft shoulders or by drunk drivers or even by the deer crossing the highway. And with that, LBJ started signing bills. Traffic safety act will ensure safer, better protected cars in the event of an accident. That bill created a new federal agency,

what's now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It had the power to make car companies install seat belts and collapsible steering columns, and to set up those crash databases. And in case that wasn't enough, this bill to create a powerful government agency to regulate what were then some of the largest companies in the country,

it passed with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. The 60s were a very different time. Thank you, Chavu, very much. The technologies that were mandated in the 1960s, like seat belts and collapsible steering columns, are still saving thousands of lives each year. But the car crash death rate has continued to drop decade after decade, in part because of smaller, subtler design changes.

And to understand how those changes happen, you have to go back to the government databases of car crashes. The ones fed by police officers like Frank Bandero and used by safety engineers like Matt Brumbolo. Matt Brumbolo is an engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety or IHS. On his desk he has both a car headlight and a giant paper book of federal regulations. It's reading the federal register. Yeah. It's my fun pastime.

About 10 years ago, Matt was looking at that government database of fatal crashes. And waited, government ran website. Sifting through the data, he noticed something. People dying in head-on crashes in cars that were rated safe in head-on crash tests. A lot of these crashes had a distinctive look. The passenger side was okay, but the driver's side looked like a giant had destroyed the corner of the car with a croquet melt, pushing the bumper past the engine. And the wheel is often pushed either completely off or pushed way back towards the occupant space. Did it take some time to recognize or was it like immediate?

It's fairly immediate. He immediately recognized that this was a kind of crash these otherwise safeguards just hadn't been designed to withstand, which to Matt was an opportunity. We can probably do something about it. Something like designing a new crash test. The test IHS has been doing since 2012. I went one of these crash tests for the BMW X1. And in the hours before the main event, it's kind of how I imagine it would be backstage

before a show with a team of people running around, making tiny cosmetic tweaks to the star. Except the star is a compact SUV and instead of hair and makeup, there are sensors and instruments. And huddled in one corner of the room, engineers from BMW. It's here basically here just to make sure they're doing everything right? No, they're doing always everything right. No, just but you. But watching closely, because BMW has a lot riding on this, an earlier model got a marginal rating on this test,

one step below acceptable. So BMW redesigned the car. It's always designed for the new requirements. So if you have a new requirement from the IHS, we have to redesign our car. How cars do in these tests matters to car buyers, and so it matters to car makers. These days, safety sells, and it

justifies an incredibly rigorous technical process. What are you doing right now? Putting the seat belt sensor tape so it's tape that reads along these bars and tells us the movement of the seat belt. This is Tyler Ayers, dummy engineer. How many sensors are in this car right now? Right now at least for my dummy is 39 total.ar measures the crash test dummy's position down to the millimeter. Two, six, six. And he finger paints the dummy's face half pink half blue so we can see where it hits the airbags.

That's fine. Kind of. Yeah, pretty much. I said I got to jump at the circus after I leave here, painting clown faces. We're gone, right? Let's walk out of here. When we walk into the echoey crash hall, it feels like more than just a test of a car. It feels like I'm watching the whole cycle of auto safety in action.

You've got the new and improved redesign X1, and you've got this meticulous data-driven evaluation. 39 sensors sending out 10,000 samples a second. For the 17 seconds, it takes to drag the X1 up to a speed of 40 miles per hour. Destroying this car in the hopes that maybe its next incarnation can be even safer. A couple months later, the rating would be announced. The X1 went from marginal to good, and it was named an IIHS top safety pick. And this change started with Matt Brumbleau, the safety engineer, who found a need for

a new kind of crash test by going through government crash data. Well, in terms of doing the work that you do, how important are these federal databases of real-world car crashes? Yeah, they're really indispensable. Without real crash data, We are just be guessing. Few years back, the Centers for Disease Control put out a list of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. On the list are vaccines, Florida-Dated Water, and Motor Vehicle Safety.

Decade after decade, cars keep getting safer, because regulators, activists, and the automobile engineers keep looking at how drivers get hurt and finding more things to improve. It's a never-ending process that always begins with data. But it is not a universal process that hasn't happened in all industries. While the odds of dying in a car crash have dropped by 80% since the 60s, the odds of dying from a firearm have actually gone up. As you've been listening to this, maybe you've been drawing parallels between car safety and gun safety. If so, you wouldn't be alone. When pundits get together to talk about the latest mass shooting,

you see Santa Barbara Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, the list grows. Somebody often brings it up. It's an interesting analogy that's actually quite telling. Virginia Tech Columbine, the list grows. Somebody often brings it up. It's an interesting analogy and it's actually quite telling. Legal expert Michael Waldman. You know, we affected who could drive, we lifted the drinking age to 21 for, so people wouldn't drive recklessly. We put in airbags, we changed car design.

In other words, we changed cars and made them safer. And, you know, the question is, are there ways to do that also with guns? Other pundits will rightly make the point that cars and guns are very different. One is designed to help a person get from point A to point B, and the other is specifically designed to injure or kill. But people in the public health fields, that's kind of beside the point. Guns are a major cause of death and injury. And whether or not those deaths and injuries are intentional, researchers want to know whether

or not they're preventable. They want to know if a change in gun design or in laws about gun ownership, or some other technique we haven't even thought of yet, could cut down on the more than 20,000 gun suicides, and more than 10,000 gun homicides that happen each year. Some experts think the first step could be to treat guns more like cars when it comes to research. For example, public health professors Stephen Terrett has called for creating something that does not currently exist. A comprehensive database of deaths like the fatality analysis reporting system, but for guns with data about the victim and the perpetrator, whether they've been shrinking,

details about the device itself. We don't have those data with regard to gun deaths, so now even though the number of motor vehicle-related deaths and gun deaths in the United States are approximately the same every year. We have data for one, we don't have data for the other. In the 80s, Tarrat used government crash data to look at airbags and child restraint loss, but then he shifted his focus to guns, and the difference was stark. Instead of just downloading government data, he had to gather his own from coroners and police departments.

Like a gun safety hew to Haven, only 50 years later. It was hard, it was expensive. And some information, like specifics about the guns used, he just couldn't get. There's been a culture that's built up around guns of not collecting information, whereas the exact opposite has occurred with regard to cars. If you had to boil it down, is there one big thing to point to that explains that difference? Well, yes, there is one big thing,

and one powerful thing to point to. It's referred to as the NRA, the National Lifeholt Association. For every chapter in the history of auto safety, there's an opposite chapter in the history of gun safety, usually written with the help of the NRA, where advocates of auto safety, sued car companies, advocates of gun rights, made it nearly impossible to sue gun makers.

Congress created a registry of drivers and then made it illegal to create a registry of gun owners. And for each of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the federal government spends each year on auto safety research, gun violence research gets pennies. And Stephen Terrett knows all of this. But of all the people I talked to, he was also the most hopeful, which I found kind of hard to understand. What lets you still be optimistic,

looking at all of those factors? You're trying your best and you're doing a fairly good job and making me sink into some swamp of despair. But I'm afraid you're not going to succeed in that. I'm not going to do it. And one of the reasons that I'm not going to do it is because I understand something about how public health has made progress over the centuries.

He points out that it took more than 50 years to really reduce smoking in this country, and even though some 27,000 lives are now saved each year by technologies like seat belts and airbags, it took decades to get people to even pay attention to car safety. Progress in public health just takes a really long time. There's hardly any examples in public health where someone came up with an idea. Everyone rallied around the flag saying, that's a wonderful idea. Let's implement it immediately. That's not how it works. Instead, it's a fight to collect the data, to identify what we can change.

And finally, to make the many small incremental modifications that eventually save tens of thousands of lives. People tend to think the car itself has the critical factor in keeping them safe on the road, but car design is just one piece of the puzzle. The engineering of things people might crash into on the side of the road plays a less obvious but nonetheless critical role in road safety too. We have some cool examples to make cars safer. And we hear about their work, thanks to public statistics and vehicle advertisements, but

there's another less visible dimension to road safety, which involves the infrastructure that vehicles often crash into. And I'm here with our digital director, Kurt Kohlstedt, to talk a little bit about that side of the equation. We tend to think of posts that support things like streetlights and telephone wires and road signs as being robust by design. I mean, they have to be to stand up to the elements, right?

But sometimes those same supports actually have to serve a really different function, which is they have to break in just the right way when they get hit, which helps minimize vehicle damage. So they're designed to stand up and be sturdy, but also to get knocked down. So how does that work? One popular type of solution is called a slip- base system. Basically, instead of sticking a whole pole into the ground, which could do a lot of damage when it gets hit, workers assemble a pole out of two pieces. First, there's a low post, the top plate that just sticks up slightly above the ground.

And then another post is attached and bolted to that base. And that upper pole is the one that holds the side. Exactly. Most of what you see is that upper pole. And the idea is that when a car hits that upper pole is the one that holds the side. Exactly. Most of what you see is that upper pole. And the idea is that when a car hits that upper post, it will then break away from the lower post and cause less harm to a vehicle and less harm to its occupants.

And this also makes fixing a post a lot easier after a collision because often a new top post can just be installed on the top of the old base that just got left behind. Right. So the connecting bolts, they snap from the force of the car hitting the upper post

and the lower post stays intact. And that's really a clever solution. It's actually pretty simple when you think about it. But how did you even learn about this? Because even though you see them, they, it's not obvious. Yeah, they're everywhere. And I'll be honest, I'd never noticed them before.

And what got me interested in them is this the sky and I had a PI fan named Tom Parent wrote in about them and then I started geeking out about them. I even called my dad who's a physicist and started Gicking out with him about them and asking him about the forces and play and how it all worked. But it really hooked me was this one particular Breakaway signpost that Tom said a photo of and And rather than a pair of flat plates, like that first one I described, where the upper and lower posts connect at sort of this flat intersection, this example had angled plates. Okay, so you've shown me the picture of this one. The plates are angled. They're up in the direction of travel. Yes, exactly. And in this so-called incline slip-based system, it does something pretty remarkable. So instead of sharing just sideways, like the normal posts, the top of the

post actually flips up and out of the way. So the angled plate sends the broken post upward rather than just forward. And we've got a video of this on our website and it shows the car hitting a signpost. And then the whole sign flips up and over the car and then lands behind it. And these can work great if you know the kind of direction of travel, right? The direction from which this thing is going to be impacted. So for example, along the right hand side of a road.

Right, right. So they're flat and they're angled slip bases for individual posts, but there are lots of other types too, right? Oh yeah, there's a lot of really neat variations. Like on some roadside signs, for example, they have like two posts supporting them, one on either side.

And one breakaway post, for example, closer to a lane can flip up and out of the way while the other post actually holds up the sign, and therefore the vehicle can just pass like right underneath the sign. Oh, so it doesn't even break away. Just the bottom, the one half kind of collapses. Exactly, like it's on a hinge, and it just kind of flips up and out of the away. It's just the bottom, the one half collapses. Exactly.

It's on a hinge and it just flips up and out of the way. Let's the cargo through and then it just stays in place. And then there's a bigger version of this on telephone poles, which have hinges all the way up at the top so they can actually break away at the base. And instead of them just crashing down on the car, they just swing out of the way. And the other posts take up the load of those lines on either side.

So the telephone lines hold up the rest of the telephone pole once the pole was broken away. That's amazing. Yeah, and it could still do damage, right? It could still hurt the lines, but it's less likely to bring like the whole system down on top of you or to have this like wooden post just crush your car. Wow, that's amazing. And once you start looking for them, you start seeing these breakaway systems just all

over the place. And the droids and the mechanisms vary. There's a lot of different specific subtypes, but usually it's that connection near the ground in one form or another that gives them away. Oh, that's remarkable. Kirt and I also recently worked on a video with Christoph Hoverson of Vox Media about improving traffic safety by removing signs entirely. Urban designers call it a shared space approach and it's a very data driven but also complex and pretty controversial. So you can check out that video and also see images and videos of break-way posts in action on our website. It's 99pi.org.

This show is produced by Stan Elcorn and edited by Delaney Hall, mixed in tech production by Sheree Fusev, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director, the rest of staff includes Avery Chauvin, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Thanks to the Medical Center Archives of New York Presbyterian, Wild Cornel, for the audio of You to Haven. This story came to us from the podcast Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, and if you want more deep reporting in your ears, you should really subscribe

to Reveal. Every week, they're working with investigative journalists around the country and around the world to expose wrongdoing, hold people accountable, and just tell great stories. Like how the town of Kermit, West Virginia ended up with 9 million hydrocodone pills, or what the Pizzagate pedophilia conspiracy theory tells us about Russian trolls. Find Reveal on Radio Public or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 99% invisible is a project of KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

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