Modern Day Crash - Deer inside vehicle, an incident similar to what my family experienced.

My interest in automobile safety isn't driven by personal profit or political gain. It's driven by the simple desire to travel safely. Far too many times in my life, it's been made clear to me just how unsafe our nation's most common mode of transportation really is.

As a child, I recall the horrific scene that ensued when, while riding through the rolling hills of northeast Pennsylvania, a deer jumped from an embankment through the windshield of my father's 1956 Hudson automobile. Though the car itself was a tank, the glass shattered like thin ice around the doe, which suffered pitifully and spewed blood all over the car and us until a local game warden put her out of her misery.

A few years later, I remember screaming when my father, soaked in blood, returned to our car after pulling to the side of the road to help victims at the scene of a crash he kept hidden from our small eyes. As terrifying as that incident was for me, my father was in fact accustomed to helping victims of car crashes. Our house was situated on a mountain in rural Pennsylvania beside a dangerous road that was the scene of many automobile wrecks. People frequently knocked on our door to use the phone in the middle of the night, waking me and leaving me to wonder what had happened out there on the road.

How ironic it was, then, that after having helped so many victims of car crashes, my father himself would perish in one. I never was able to learn the details of his crash, but the gut-wrenching pain of losing him in such a sudden and senseless tragedy is something I'll never forget.

Those experiences might have been enough to move me from being merely curious about highway and vehicle safety toward being obsessed, but the incident that actually drove me to begin serious research came years later. It was a muggy June afternoon in 1992, and I was driving a Mazda van through Laurinburg, a small town in eastern North Carolina, heading to the world famous Spoletto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly, an anxious high school student ran a stop sign and crashed his car into the right side of my vehicle. The collision pushed my van into the opposing traffic lane where it was then sideswiped on the left side by a hit-and-run driver in a small truck. Nearly all the windows in my vehicle shattered, and the van was totaled in fewer than ten seconds. The shaved ice of their Sno-Cones chilled the four young children buckled in the back seats of my van, but thankfully, no one was injured in the crash. Any one of us could have been, though. It was, for me, a dramatic realization of how just one false move, one split second in time has the potential to put a family's life into an utter tailspin.

The fact that our society accepts the reality of frequent and devastating car crashes without much question is a reflection of just how desensitized and fatalistic we've become. The numbers alone are staggering:

• In the year 2003, 24 million people were involved in 6,267,000 crashes in the United States.
• In the last decade, 400,000 people died on America's highways, while 32 million people were injured.
• The overall economic cost of these crashes in the United States was one and a half trillion dollars.
• In the decade of the 1990s, we killed on our nation's highways more than 90,000 young people - from infant to 20 years old; 33 children under the age of ten died in car crashes every week over that time span; more than 110 teenagers died every week during those years.
• 42,643 died last year in the United States alone in motor vehicle crashes, or 118 people each day.
• During the past two decades, motor vehicles have accounted for over 94 percent of all transportation fatalities in the United States.
• World Health Organization (WHO) lists road crashes as the single leading cause of death due to injury in the world.

Unless we or someone we love happens to be one of those thousands of people involved in a car crash, we blithely go through our daily routines, driving from place to place without a thought toward what a gamble it is that we take with our lives each time we put the key in the ignition. We don't think about the truly tragic nature of car crashes, usually calling them "accidents" instead.

An "accident" is taken to mean an unpreventable tragedy, one where culpability is difficult if not impossible to discern or attribute. We don't ignore the grim reality of what happens when tragedy strikes other modes of transportation: planes crash, trains de-rail, and boats sink. But we insist that motor vehicles are involved in "accidents." Misnaming the event minimizes the true nature of what we're dealing with. An editorial in the June 2001 edition of the British Medical Journal, in which the editors make clear their reasoning for banning the use of the word "accident" from their articles, notes that, "For many years, safety officials and public health authorities have discouraged use of the word 'accident' when it refers to injuries or the events that produce them. An accident is often understood to be unpredictable - a chance occurrence or an 'act of God' - and therefore unavoidable. However, most injuries and their precipitating events are predictable and preventable."

Words are powerful, and if the word "accident" continues to convey the sense that we are powerless to do anything to stem the tide of increasing death and destruction on our roadways, then we remain passively resigned to the misconception that there is nothing we can do about it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.