We're learning more tonight
about a deadly car crash at speeds
alleged to be over 100 miles per hour.
A man is dead after being hit by a car in Midtown.
It's just tragic.
The crash happened on the 10 Freeway in Fontana
killing four people.
Investigators tell us there is a possibility
that this was the result of a DUI.
Eye witnesses say it appeared the driver didn't realize
he had struck the boy and his mother until it was too late.
These are only a few of the estimated 38,800 deaths
on American streets in 2019.
And possibly even more tragically,
we actually have the technology
to prevent many of those deaths.
We're just not using it.
This is David Zipper.
He's a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School
and first wrote about this technology for CityLab.
What is the risk for people in the United States
for car fatalities?
What has been the trend there?
Well, it's not been good.
In the last decade in America,
overall road and street fatalities
have been relatively flat,
but that masks some big differences.
If you're inside of an automobile,
it's actually gotten safer.
Fatalities have gone down over the last decade
but they've spiked for pedestrians and for cyclists,
between 30% and 45% over the last decade.
And meanwhile, if you compare the United States
to other OECD countries, other Western countries
especially in Europe, we're doing much worse.
In Helsinki, Finland last year
there were literally zero deaths.
And those risks are not spread out evenly.
In fact, those most likely to be killed
as a cyclist or a pedestrian, they tend to be minorities,
they tend to be elderly, they often are low income.
So, this is actually an equity issue as much as a safety one.
Many city governments have worked hard
to address these issues, adopting safer street initiatives
around improving crosswalks and lowering speed limits.
But those measures can only go so far.
The reality is when two tons of glass, metal and plastic
hit 150 pounds of flesh and bone,
it's the human who's going to lose every single time.
This is another David, David Friedman,
and he's the Vice President for Advocacy
at Consumer Reports.
You know, one of the things we just did recently
was we put out a report that pointed out
that we could actually
cut the roadway fatalities in half
with technologies that are already out there today.
Well, let's talk about speed.
In a big country like the United States,
speed sells, people like it,
and car companies play off of those sorts of ideas
that an automobile lets you go quickly and independently.
I'm reminded of an advertisement for the Dodge Charger
that I saw myself
when I was watching the Super Bowl a few years ago.
It's a wonderful thing, this game.
It really plays on these ideas of being American.
To bring an entire nation together.
And being loyal.
Glorious moment in time.
We are thankful,
mainly because the streets
are just empty as hell right now.
It was really striking to me.
And I think it is very revealing
about how automobiles sell this concept of speed,
urban speed in particular, through their products.
I mean, when you sort of look back at history,
the automobile really showed up in American cities.
It changed the speed of the street.
That's Seleta Reynolds.
All right, let's do it.
She's the General Manager
for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation
and as she explains, lowering the speed of vehicles
can dramatically shift fatality rates.
If you are hit by a car
that is traveling 20 miles an hour or slower,
you have a 80% to 90% chance of surviving that crash
if you're on foot.
Once that car is going 40 miles an hour,
your chance of surviving that crash
plummets down to about 20%.
Cities throughout the United States
have been really trying to keep
especially vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists safe
by reducing speed limits
or encouraging drivers to go slower.
The problem is that they can violate that speed limit.
However, there is a technological solution,
a simple device called a speed governor or a speed limiter.
The speed governors have been around
for literally over a century.
Today, you can have a speed governor that is pretty simple,
saying the vehicle can never go above 40 miles an hour,
or you can have a quote unquote smart speed governor
that would adjust to the surrounding speed limit.
Are there any laws in the books
or is there any government action
to sort of put these in cars?
Well, no.
The United States, there's really been no effort
to require or even encourage speed limiters,
speed governors to be installed on personal vehicles.
In Europe, regulators have been more aggressive.
All new vehicles bought and sold in the European Union
from the year 2022 will have to be fitted
with so-called intelligent speed assistance technology.
The speed governors there are gonna be smart
in that they will use data
from a variety of different sources
to adjust based on what the surrounding speed limit is.
But, and this may end up being a big but,
a driver will be able to overcome the limit
by keeping a foot pressed down on the accelerator.
That may be helpful for a driver who wants to, say,
get around a truck on the highway,
but it does open questions about just how much protection
will be afforded to pedestrians and cyclists
from a truly reckless driver.
But there are technologies out there
that can help prevent some of the most dangerous drivers
from ever even taking the wheel.
A woman suspected of driving under the influence
is dead this morning after driving.
Many roadway fatalities occur
within a quarter mile of a pub, bar, drinking establishment,
which means either the driver or the pedestrian,
or sometimes both have been impaired.
This is Greg Winfree,
the director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute
and he points to one maybe obvious technology,
the breathalyzer.
Breathalyzers are typically used to ensure compliance
from folks that have been convicted
of a drunk driving offense.
You know, so there's stigma.
Would I want to voluntarily put in my vehicle
a device that to a passer-by
might say this guy is a DUI guy?
The auto industry with some regulators
has been developing some new technologies
in a program called DADSS, or D-A-D-S-S
that would actually look at a driver's breath
or their touch on the steering wheel
to be able to passively determine
if there's alcohol in their system.
And then frankly they wouldn't be able
to operate the vehicle.
That technology is still a few years away.
But there's other types of technology being developed
as well that have a similar goal.
These technologies fall into what are known
as driver monitoring systems
and they can detect more than just drunk drivers.
Some of them can keep an eye on your eyes
and figure out whether or not
you've got your eyes on the road
and/or whether or not you're doing proper scanning,
so that it knows that you're consciously engaged
in the driving task.
So these sorts of driver monitoring systems
are still quite rare
and they're really put only onto luxury vehicles.
So the vast majority of vehicles sold today
and for the foreseeable future aren't going to have them.
Yeah, you know, the only exposure I've ever had
to this kind of technology is there's these Subaru ads
right now, where parents are kind of worried
about their phone-addicted teens out driving
and getting into these sort of horrific accidents.
Parents have a way of imagining the worst.
Automakers are trying to differentiate themselves
with the quality of their safety technology.
There's another one that Honda did a couple of years ago
about a guy named Mark.
Mark is the best husband and father you could ask for.
Who is praised by lots of people.
Great guy, best man at my wedding.
Just got to keep him off the dance floor.
And then it shows Mark crossing a street
and he's not really paying attention
and he's almost hit by a Honda,
but the Honda uses its pedestrian detection system
to spot him and the driver stops in time.
Pedestrian detection systems are one version
of, sort of like a broad category of safety technologies
known as advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS
Engaging green light.
Oh my God.
Automatic emergency braking.
Smart cruise control or adaptive cruise control.
Lane assist.
All of those are ADAS systems.
Those are all important safety features
when you're thinking about cars
operating in higher speed, simpler environments
but they are almost useless
when you're talking about vehicles
that are operating in complicated urban environments.
AAA did a study recently showing
that they're highly suspect
when detecting a pedestrian at night,
or when the vehicle is making a right-hand turn.
They do a really poor job
even detecting adult pedestrians.
Only detecting adult pedestrians about 60% of the time
and then when it comes to smaller pedestrians and children,
they hardly detected them at all.
In another study, AAA also found
that other ADAS technology like lane assist
and adaptive cruise control were simply unreliable.
Over 4,000 miles of driving,
researchers encountered an issue about every eight miles.
And I assume this technology,
along with any other technology,
it'll only get better over time.
But I'm curious with this technology already out there
who's really pressuring these car companies
to improve it, to make it better?
As of now, really no one.
This is all voluntary work
that's being done by the automakers.
Some of them really do invest a lot of money
and effort in it, some don't, but it's really up to them.
The shoulder belt and lap belt are now combined
so that one buckle secures both belts.
The reason we have seatbelts,
the reason we have antilock brakes
is because it was mandated by the government.
Historically however, government action around safety
often faces backlash, both by automakers and drivers.
It's always been a struggle
to get safety technology into automobiles.
It took decades to make airbags,
which are commonplace today, be mandatory.
In 1974, the federal government tried to impose
what's called a safety belt interlock.
So you couldn't turn on your car
if you weren't wearing a safety belt
and within a year, auto interests and drivers were so irate
that they forced Congress to backpedal.
So there's a long history of challenges made,
sometimes from drivers,
oftentimes from auto companies themselves.
Multiple carmakers and the automaker lobbying group
Alliance for Automotive Innovation
declined to comment for this story.
The car is so entangled
with American ideas of independence.
Built for freedom.
And cars mean that to Americans.
The open road, power and rebellion.
Nobody can tell you how to drive or what to do.
It's all about you.
And that I think leads to a real resistance
among many people for any sort of technology
that it comes across as potentially limiting their freedom,
even if it actually enhances substantially
the safety of other people in society.
You would not accept 299, 737's
which is crashing on an annual basis.
One plane crash, crashing with that level of souls on it
is not lost on society,
but for some reason in the US, we don't focus,
don't pay attention to 38,000 road fatalities,
that it's not the human cry that it should be.
We're two things in America.
We're a car culture.
We love our cars and we love our tech.
People love technology at the end of the day, right?
So, the challenge isn't the engineering.
The challenge is the political will
of getting these technologies on every car
so that we could take on
the nearly 40,000 lives lost every year
and cut that about in half.