Advanced Drivers of North America
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It is effectively inevitable that road safety advocates will use air crash data to try to get people to understand the staggering seriousness of road crashes when compared to commercial plane crashes, but even then the true scale is rarely stated.
If your corporation or small business employs drivers, Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA] can take them farther towards maximum safety than any other training supplier in the USA, and this article outlines how.
Continue reading “Advanced Drivers of North America’s Role in the USA’s “Vision Zero” Goals”
Despite the fact that data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Oct. 3 indicates highway fatalities declined overall in 2017 after two consecutive years of large increases, the agency added that highway fatalities in 2017 jumped significantly in the sport utility vehicle or SUV category and commercial trucking sector. Fatalities among SUV occupants climbed 3 percent, and deaths in crashes involving tractor-trailers jumped 5.8 percent.
Clearly, the reduction in overall deaths is very much to be welcomed, however it still needs to be viewed relative to the USA, in the long-term, still being the poorest-performing of 30 developed nations.
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See the AASHTO article about the NHTSA figures.
Excerpt: “…Pedestrian deaths have jumped 46 percent since reaching their lowest point in 2009, as pedestrian crashes have become both deadlier and more frequent. The increase has been mostly in urban or suburban areas, at non-intersections, on arterials — busy roads designed mainly to funnel vehicle traffic toward freeways — and in the dark, a new IIHS study shows. Crashes were increasingly likely to involve SUVs and high-horsepower vehicles…
Continue reading “A Catastrophic Increase in Deaths of Pedestrians in the USA”
In developed countries around the world, it has long been known that rural roads are the location for far more deaths, measured against the total miles driven, than any other type of road or highway. And this is equally true in the U.S.A.
There are several contributory reasons for this very serious situation:
Continue reading “24 Things You Didn’t Know (or Forgot) About Safe Driving on Rural Roads!”
According to the National Safety Council [NSC], the number of people killed in the USA during 2017 in road accidents once again exceeded 40,000, following major increases in such deaths during the years since the end of the financial recession.
A year ago, the NSC estimated that the 2016 death toll was about 3,000 fatalities more than the eventual official figure of 37,461 which was subsequently issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], however the NSC explain this apparent discrepancy with the fact that ‘the government counts only deaths on public roads, while the council includes parking lots, driveways and private roads.’
In other words, about 3,000 “additional” people — an average of eight per day — are killed each year in vehicular crashes but do not qualify for inclusion in the official statistics, yet this is an additional eight percent and a lot of those killed in such circumstances are children. The fact that these incidents involve deaths on parking lots and private driveways serves to illustrate the true level of dangers in places than many people unthinkingly tend to dismiss as being low-risk locations, but that is clearly not the case.
As always, our ADoNA defensive and advanced safe driving courses include research-based, best-practise methods to help your corporate drivers or chauffeurs stay safe and protect other people in relevant locations.
You can read the full article, from USA Today, regarding the NSC estimate for 2017 road deaths.
One of the most inflammatory and divisive topics in road or highway safety is that of speed in relation to safety.
The first question that has to be addressed is what exactly do we mean in this context by the word “speed”? It is very important not to fall into the trap of thinking it only relates to breaking the posted speed limits, even though that is still a serious issue (see below).
Continue reading “Speed… Is it Really a Major Safety Issue or Do the ‘Experts’ Exaggerate?”
According to Bloomberg News: “Roadway accidents are the leading cause of on-the-job deaths in the USA, but the safety issue remains outside the jurisdiction of the nation’s primary workplace safety agency — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA].”
A particularly worrying aspect of this situation is that between 2011-2015 the number of work-related highway deaths in America increased by 15%, which was five times more than the upturn in the overall number of occupational fatalities (3%), according to Bureau of Labor [BLS] statistics.
During 2015 (i.e. the latest available statistics), according to federal figures, 1,264 workers died in highway crashes. That represents 26 percent of the year’s total work-related deaths of 4,836, and it is therefore the most common cause of worker fatalities.
One thing which is not made clear in the official figures is whether they include or exclude highway deaths which occur while the people concerned are actually commuting to or from work, which — although a very secondary concern to the tragic bereavements — still has financially very damaging overtones for the employers concerned. However, judging the above figures against those from other developed nations, it is our opinion at Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA] that commuting deaths are definitely not included in the current U.S. data and that in this context the “real” number of deaths is very significantly higher than stated.
In our work for Fortune 500 client-companies, Advanced Drivers of North America training has produced multi-year reductions of 50 percent in fleet crashes and over 80 percent in injuries (based on National Safety Council collision type-analysis), even after other training suppliers have been working with the clients concerned, annually, for many previous years! If you would like us to work with your team, with the objective of creating very significant collision reductions, please Contact Us.
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Read: Rise in on-the-Job Motor Vehicle Deaths Spurs Safety Concerns, from Bloomberg News.
A lost life — any lost life — is a tragedy, and road accidents* are a massive killer, so my title for this post is by no means meant to be annoying or offensive to anybody.
This topic comes from my former home city of Buffalo, NY, so in more ways than one it is a subject dear to my heart.
The original article is “Groups opposed to traffic safety checkpoints to sue Buffalo police,” from the Buffalo News.
Continue reading “Road Safety: In what way do “Black Lives Matter” the most?”
When I first attended the United Nations in Geneva, about 11 years ago, to listen to the plans for significantly curtailing road deaths globally, I came away not only impressed but also with the distinct impression that given what was, by then, a huge growth in the numbers of motor vehicles in poorer countries, the aim would be to prevent the annual number of deaths rising as global motorization grew. The yearly death toll was then stated as 1.3 million but this figure was projected to rise to 2 million by 2020, thus holding it steady at 1.25 to 1.3 million instead of seeing such a horrendous increase would be a good thing.
