The Highway Disease: The Nut Behind the Wheel

Today, we believe the cage (aka automobile) is safe. In the latest episode of my preferred podcast, 99% Invisible, I learnt it was not always the case. In the 1950's and 1960's car driving was a dangerous activity. Cars were designed for style and attractiveness. When safety was discussed it wasn't about the car, it was about the driver.

Sound familiar--motorcycle riders?

Meanwhile within 25 years of the first fatal car crash, automobiles had become the leading cause of accidental death in the US. But all those deaths were blamed on the nut behind the wheel.

"They are the reckless who cause the accidents, that maim and kill." In other words: cars don’t kill people — people kill people.

In the early- to mid-20th century, car ads didn’t emphasize a vehicle’s safety features. Instead, they talked about “styling” and aesthetic details. A Chrysler safety director once compared cars to “women’s hats,” saying “they have to have special attractiveness, and sometimes they even compromise with function.”

Is the styling of a motorcycle more important than it's safety?

But wait! In the past 50 years, the car crash death rate has fallen by nearly 80% and one of the reasons for that has to do with understanding the probable cause of an accident. For the more than 30,000 fatal car crashes that happen each year, information gathered on the side of the road goes from the accident report form into a federal database: the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Anyone can use this database to find patterns in crashes.

In 2009, 34,000 fatalities were recorded in the US, about 9,000 were motorcyclists and their passengers.

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 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 twentieth century,” says Amy Gangloff, a historian who studies auto safety.

“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,” says Amy Gangloff.

To force society to think about issues of cars and mortality would take more than academic research. It would take politics.

Remember Ralf Nader? His book, Unsafe at Any Speed took research by people like Hugh DeHaven and turned it into a scorching indictment of the auto industry. It showed car companies had actually patented a lot of important safety technologies — including the collapsible steering column — but they weren’t using them.

But before someone could come up with a safer car, someone had to come up with the idea that cars could be safer. And this brings me to where we're at with our thinking about motorcycles today.

Motorcycles are safer than ever before. They are a viable and safe transportation solution that can change how we move through cities and help reduce gridlock and pollution. However, it seems the collective "we" have decided that there's little we can do to improve motorcycle safety. That legislators can't do anything to improve motorcycle safety that motorcycles are inherently dangerous and we just accept that. We can't talk about motorcycle safety we'll deter people from riding. That motorcycles are "unsafe at any speed".

Clearly that's not the case. I accept the idea that motorcycling could be safer. Let's engage the academic researcher, let's engage the politicians to move the dial in keeping motorcyclists safe.

Listen to the full episode of 99% Invisible on TuneIn but you might also like Google Music. Enjoy.