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October 25, 2011
SEAT BELTS CAN CAUSE INJURIES IN A CRASH!!!
Bleeding
Blood in the urine or stools can indicate internal damage caused by the pressure of the seat belt. The organs can become compressed and create urinary tract or bladder damage. In addition to bleeding when voiding, accident victims should also watch for any changes in bowel movements or urination. Endometriosis or colon obstruction can result from seat belt trauma causing bleeding and constipation, report doctors at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Coughing up or vomiting blood could indicate lung damage, respiratory tract injury or stomach problems.
Weakness
Weakness in the legs can result from damage to the lower back, the abdomen or spinal nerves. The weakness may appear in one or both legs. General feelings of dizziness or weakness could indicate symptoms of shock or internal organ damage.
Bruising
When the seat belt is pulled in a crash, bruising and muscle strains can occur in the area over which the seat belt was tugged. Swelling and skin discoloration can commonly result and usually dissipates in a couple days.
Breathing Difficulties
When a person has trouble breathing following an accident, they may have sustained damage to the organs in their chest from the pressure of the set belt. Heart or lung damage can make breathing difficult.
Stiff Neck
While a person may become sore from the pressure of the seat belt, lingering signs of more serious damage to the neck should be monitored. A whiplash injury results when the torso is held in place and the head snaps. Increasing stiffness or pain in the neck may result if a spinal injury occurred because of whiplash.
Abdominal Pain
When the seat belt crosses the kidneys and delivers a serious blunt force, the first symptoms include abdominal pain and pain in the area between the hips and ribs, report doctors at Merck. Low blood pressure and anemia can result from the blood loss. Untreated, kidney damage can lead to delayed bleeding, infections and kidney failure.
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October 24, 2011
2011 Safest Cars
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has issued its Top Safety Picks for 2011, with 66 vehicles making the grade. This year’s evaluations show that when it comes to vehicle safety features, a strong roof, one that offers exceptional protection in the event of a rollover accident, is more important than ever.
The Top Safety Pick designation is given to those vehicles that do the best job of protecting drivers and passengers in front, side, rollover, and rear crashes based on “good” ratings in IIHS tests – the organization’s highest rating. IIHS’s rating grades are “good,” “acceptable,” “marginal” and “poor.” However, last year, the IIHS toughened its standards, adding the requirement that all qualifiers must earn a “good” rating in IIHS roof-strength tests that measure how much protection is offered in a rollover crash. That stricter standard sharply narrowed the initial field of 2010 models. But many carmakers have improved the roofs of their vehicles in the last year.
“We added the roof-strength requirement after our research confirmed the importance of roof strength when it comes to the seriousness of injuries to persons involved in rollover crashes,” said Russ Rader, IIHS vice president of communications. “Federal studies on fatality and injury data showed that vehicles with stronger roofs resulted in the occupants having a much lower rate of serious injuries.”
Hyundai/Kia and Volkswagen/Audi led the pack — each have nine models in the ’11 model-year winner’s circle. Tied for second, with eight winners each, are General Motors, Ford/Lincoln, and Toyota/Lexus/Scion. Subaru is the only manufacturer that had a winner in all the vehicle classes in which it competed, with five models earning Top Safety Pick designations.
In IIHS’s roof strength test, a metal plate is pushed against one side of a roof at a displacement rate of 0.2 inch per second. To earn a “good” rating for rollover protection, the roof must withstand a force of four times the vehicle’s weight before reaching five inches of crush. This is the vehicle’s “strength-to-weight” ratio.
That IIHS standard for a “good” rating for rollover crash protection is twice as tough as the current federal standard. The IIHS estimates that the roofs it deems strong enough for a “good” rating will reduce the risk of serious and fatal injury in single-vehicle rollovers by about 50 percent, compared to roofs that meet the minimum federal requirement.
At the beginning of the 2010 model year, after IIHS toughened its requirement, only 27 vehicles qualified for the award, but carmakers re-worked existing designs and introduced new models with stronger roofs. This increased the number of qualifiers to 58 by September of 2010. Now, for 2011, another 10 vehicles join the winners’ list, while two discontinued models dropped off.
This means that consumers shopping for a safer new vehicle have “plenty of choices to consider in most dealer showrooms,” said Adrian Lund, IIHS president. “In fact, every major automaker has at least one winning model this year.”
Carmakers are only legally required to include the vehicle’s National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration’s safety rating on its sticker, but more of them are also including the IIHS rating, added Rader. “And carmakers also like to say in their advertising that the vehicle was an IIHS Top Safety Pick.”
One first-time winner is the Ford Explorer, which boasts a new design that includes the stronger roof-protection rating. Until this model year, the Explorer had never earned a Top Safety Pick rating. Ford also upgraded the roof of two of its midsize SUVs, the Ford Flex and Lincoln MKT, and did the same with the midsize Ford Fusion and Lincoln MKZ sedans. The latter both missed out on the initial round of 2010 winners because they did not have the required roof strength at the time.
The Ford Fiesta rounds out Ford’s winners and is the only minicar to earn a Top Safety Pick rating for the ’11 model year.
With the Chevrolet Cruze, GM offers another choice for consumers who are looking to buy a safe but fuel-efficient small car. GM designed the Cruze, which has 10 standard airbags (including ones for the knees), in such a way that it would outperform the federal government’s minimum roof strength requirements.
The other Detroit carmaker, Chrysler, added torso airbags to the redesigned Jeep Grand Cherokee to bolster side crash protection and earn a “good” side-crash rating. The previous design relied on head-curtain airbags to cushion occupants in side crashes and was only rated “marginal” for side protection.
Volkswagen’s redesigned Touareg is the only large SUV to earn a Top Safety Pick designation for 2011. The Institute doesn’t normally evaluate SUVs as big as the Touareg, but Volkswagen requested crash tests to demonstrate the new Touareg’s crashworthiness. “Big, heavy vehicles like that already start with a high level of safety, because of their size and bulk,” said Rader, “So, we typically don’t use our resources to test those, but VW asked for a special test for this redesigned version.”
None of the small pickups the Institute has evaluated qualified for this year’s award, and large 2011-model-year pickup trucks have not yet been tested.
http://autos.aol.com/article/improved-roof-strength-key-to-top-safety-pick-awards/
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October 17, 2011
Rear-End Crashes Go Up After Red-Light Cameras Go In – It Only Makes Sense!
When the nation’s No. 1 cheerleader for red-light cameras admits there might be one teensy-weensy downside to the program, you just know it’s going to be a lulu so large it couldn’t be crammed under the carpet without making a bulge the size of a circus tent.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently enthused over traffic-tickets-by-mail schemes for an entire issue of its Status Report. On red-light cameras, however, it did allow that “most studies also reported increases in rear-end crashes.”
It went on to say, “This isn’t surprising. The more people stop on red, the more rear-end collisions there will be.”
Duh!
Not to worry, however, because “photo enforcement leads to significant overall reductions in crashes,” assures Susan Ferguson, the institute’s senior vice-president for research.
Well, that depends on who’s telling the story. The institute itself did two studies, both in Oxnard, California, the most recent one published in 2001. Other studies have been done, but the IIHS roundly pooh-poohs them. Why? Because they don’t follow a curious methodology the IIHS invented especially for Oxnard.
IIHS insists that all red-light-camera studies must account for “regression to the mean” and for “spillover effects.”
Regression to the mean is a fact of life; in any one year, there could be an extraordinarily large number of crashes at a particular intersection, but over several years the count will revert back to average (mean).
Funny that IIHS insists regression be accounted for in studies at stoplights when it never considers the same factor in its studies of speed limits.
Spillover effect is IIHS’s trick for giving the cameras credit for reducing fatalities even where they aren’t. It assumes that red-light cameras at a few intersections will cause drivers to stop promptly all over town, or all over the county, or maybe all over the state, so improvements outside the cameras’ ZIP Codes are credited to them nonetheless. As statistical acrobatics go, this one is breathtaking.
But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The obvious way to gauge the payoff of red-light cameras is to compare intersections with cameras to those without, then zoom in on crashes actually caused by drivers running red lights. Instead, IIHS considered all crashes at all 125 signalized intersections in Oxnard and concluded that injury crashes dropped by 29 percent due to the cameras, even though they were installed at only 11 intersections.
Spillover effect, don’t you know.
Skeptics will notice that crashes went down rather randomly all over town, and some ordinary intersections outperformed those with the gotcha equipment. The cameras look remarkably ineffectual until, just in time, spillover effect arrives to snatch victory from the jaws of ho-hum.
Skeptics will also notice that these IIHS studies, which pretend to be about red-light running, never bother to isolate those crashes specifically caused by running red lights. Why? It says, “The crash data did not contain sufficient detail to identify crashes that were specifically red-light-running events.”
This is believable only to those who’ve never heard of police reports. Oxnard, like most California jurisdictions, reports crashes according to the California Highway Patrol protocol, which includes a “primary collision factor,” i.e., the cause of the crash. Those reports are collected into a CHP database (SWITRS). Running red lights falls under the category of “stop signals and signs.” According to Steve Kohler of the CHP, it includes stop signals and stop signs. Nothing else.
Since all signalized intersections in Oxnard are, by definition, controlled by signals and not stop signs, red-light running should be neatly isolated as a “primary collision factor.” When IIHS finds numbers that support the story it wants to tell, it jumps on them like a trampoline. When it hides from numbers as it did in this case, you can bet they go the wrong way.
IIHS has refused to release the study’s raw data so that others may verify its conclusions, but Jim Kadison, a disarmingly sincere member of the National Motorists Association, went directly to SWITRS for crash data on the nine signalized Oxnard intersections used in the first IIHS study. He smelled something funny in IIHS’s breakdown of crashes; just nine percent were rear-enders. Across the nation, it’s about 40 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Looking at the data, Kadison could reduce rear-enders down to a single-digit share only by narrowing the definition of intersection to “between crosswalks.” Narrowing that way chops off the entire approach to the intersection, exactly where rear impacts happen. It looks like IIHS purposely designed its study to avoid seeing rear-enders.
Sure enough, when he opened the “intersection” to include crosswalks and 100 feet each side of them, rear crashes rose to a more normal share. Over this enlarged zone, rear-end crashes increased by 33 after red-light cameras were installed. At the same time, side impacts dropped 25 percent. Kadison concludes that the cameras merely trade one type of crash for another.
IIHS’s claim of safety from cameras is flatly contradicted by a number of cities that have tried them. “At some intersections [with cameras] we saw no change at all, and at several intersections we actually saw an increase in traffic accidents,” admitted San Diego police chief David Bejarano on ABC News’s Nightline.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, station WBTV had this to say, “Three years, 125,000 tickets, and $6 million in fines later, the number of accidents at intersections in Charlotte has gone down less than one percent. And the number of rear-end accidents, which are much more common, has gone up 15 percent.”
In Greensboro, the News & Record reports, “There has not been a drop in the number of accidents caused by red-light violations citywide since the first cameras were installed in February 2001. There were 95 such accidents in Greensboro in 2001, the same number as in 2000. And at the 18 intersections with cameras, the number of wrecks caused by red-light running has doubled.”
The granddaddy of all studies, covering a 10-year period, was done for the Australian Road Research Board in 1995 (cameras went up in Melbourne in 1984). Photo enforcement “did not provide any reduction in accidents, rather there has been increases in rear end and [cross-street] accidents,” wrote author David Andreassen in the page-one summary.
Red-light cameras turn out to be a very expensive way to crank up rear-end crashes. Motorists in Washington, D.C., alone pay a half-million dollars a month in fines. That’s not enough, IIHS says. It wants points on driving records, too.