crash | Advanced Drivers of North America

Tennessee Talks About the Horrors of ‘The Knock at the Door’

We are posting this saddening topic here on the ADoNA website in the hope that it helps in the THSO’s aim of persuading people not to become the cause of a tragedy which requires this terrible outcome.

Photo of a Scene from the 'Knock at the Door' video — Scene from the ‘Knock at the Door’ video

The Tennessee Highway Safety Office (THSO) recently distributed a public service announcement called “The Knock at the Door,” to show what easily qualifies as the worst job in the world, namely the personal delivery by police and other law enforcement officers of fatality messages to unsuspecting loved ones. A very large proportion of such messages relate to road and highway crashes.
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Emergency Roadside Extraction, Treatment and Evacuation of Crash Casualties

Years ago, in professional circles, we used to talk about “The Three E’s” of road (or highway) safety, and these were:

Education
Engineering
Enforcement

The belief was if one taught people adequate and accurate information — including high-quality driving lessons — about staying safe on the roads, and the engineers designed and built safer roads and vehicles, and the police enforced the laws to make people drive to better standards, then safety would be maximized.

Photograph of the scene of a fatal road crash in the USA. — A fatal road traffic crash (not “accident”) which I came across by chance on my travels in the USA. The tragic purpose of the yellow sheet on the ground is self-evident. Copyright image.

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Two Critical USDOT / NHTSA Statistics Identify a Very Bad Situation in American Highway Safety

Perhaps 6-8 years ago, the US DOT and NHTSA published a statistic online that identified a thoroughly horrifying situation. Put simply, it said that the chances for every young person in the USA being involved in a serious-injury or fatal road crash at some point in their life is an astonishingly-high “fifty-fifty.” At that time, I looked at my four American step-daughters and wondered which two — statistically speaking — it might be. That statistic, however, very swiftly disappeared off the Internet.

Now, however, I also have six American grandchildren, and just today — August 11, 2017 — another statistic has been published on Facebook by NHTSA which very effectively renews my concerns. It said exactly this:

NHTSA 1 hrThe chance of being in an alcohol-impaired crash is one in three over the course of a lifetime. #BuzzedDriving

The Forgotten Aspect: Motorcycle Helmets Save Huge Amounts of Money, not ‘Just’ Lives!

Whenever people argue that it is the right of a motorcyclist to accept additional risk of serious injuries or death, if they wish to do so, a key part of the argument is casually forgotten, and that is the often huge extra expense to everybody else if the worst happens. It is now many years since the average cost, per body, of fatal road-crashes in the USA went above $1 million. Indeed it is a well above a million dollars now.

Photo of two people on a motor scooter in Florida, quite legally but very inadvisably without crash helmets. — Two people on a motor scooter in Florida, quite legally but very inadvisably without crash helmets.