PART 1 OF 2
Chapter 7: The Traffic Safety Establishment: Damn the Driver and Spare the Car"Roads, laws, and cars are inanimate of themselves. They cannot give-or-take-life. It is people who animate highway transportation; people who use the roads -- obey or do not obey the laws -- drive their cars carefully or carelessly." The speaker was H. E. Humphreys, Jr., chairman of the U. S. Rubber Company. In reiterating the basic creed of the private traffic safety movement, he bore down hard each time he said "people." Mr. Humphreys was addressing the tenth Highway Transportation Congress in Washington, D. C., in his capacity as chairman of the National Highway Users Conference, a lobby group. The date was May 6, 1964, but the words could have been uttered in 1924, the year this country's approach to highway safety was launched -- to become later an ideology guarded and perpetuated by a network of trade associations, tax exempt organizations, and other groups professing an interest in traffic safety.
In 1924, prompted by the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Safety Council, Herbert Hoover -- then Secretary of Commerce -- called the first of two national conferences on street and highway safety. Out of these conferences, sponsored and financed by private funds, came a number of recommendations dealing with statistics, education, public relations, traffic control, and a model uniform vehicle code. Underlying all these efforts was the view that highways and vehicles were built about as well as could be expected under existing technology, and that traffic accidents were therefore traceable to willful, careless, irresponsible, or incompetent drivers. The problems of highway safety were considered essentially to be the result of the driver's behavior.
The 1924 and 1926 conferences were dominated by business leaders concerned about the tragic by-product of a new, fast-growing mode of transportation. "The three E's" -- Enforcement, Education, and Engineering -- became the slogan for a "balanced" traffic safety program. It was not long before the public was given to understand that "Enforcement" and "Education" meant the motorist, while "Engineering" meant the highway. The only reference to the vehicle itself pertained to its maintenance by the owner and the desirability of periodic inspection. In the subsequent decade, vehicle design was not an issue, apart from the insistent pleas and writings of a Detroit physician, Dr. Claire Straith, and a few critical insurance men.
During the 1930's the automobile death toll was the subject of some dramatic journalism, the most noteworthy being J. C. Furnas's article "And Sudden Death," which appeared in the October 1935 issue of the Reader's Digest. Millions of reprints of Furnas's piece were circulated which helped to generate public demands that "something be done." In the same year, the Detroit News called on the manufacturers to participate more actively in encouraging safer driving. The National Safety Council approached the automobile industry for financial support of several traffic accident prevention projects. In June 1936, Congress requested that the Bureau of Public Roads (then a part of the Department of Agriculture) make a survey of motor vehicle traffic conditions. The growing demand for action was not lost upon the alert leaders of the automobile industry. The move of events suggested that it was in order for them to take a forceful role in encouraging safer use of automobiles. A pattern of financing and guiding the major voluntary organizations concerned with the subject was established, and continues to the present day.
In January 1936 the Automobile Manufacturers Association announced with fanfare that It would contribute about $450,000 a year for traffic safety activities. That year, grants were awarded to the American Automobile Association, the American Legion, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the National Safety Council, and the National Grange-all for various projects in education, enforcement, and "public support" activities. Three months later, an Automobile Manufacturers Association committee assured the Secretary of Commerce: "The motor industry recognizes its obligation to produce the safest vehicle human ingenuity can devise, and dedicates every laboratory and engineering resource of the industry to that purpose. In addition, the industry is pledged to cooperate with public officials in their efforts to curb accidents. Further, it has, by direct grants of money, energized the expansion of highway safety activities of nine national organizations." It was not long before the automobile industry decided to associate its traffic safety activities with a less obviously commercially tainted organization, and it established the Automotive Safety Foundation in June 1937.
In 1938 the Bureau of Public Roads submitted a six-part report to Congress. This report was written with the help of a business and academic advisory committee and covered the need for better investigation at the accident scene, the deficiencies of state automobile accident reporting, the importance of vehicle inspection, the lack of uniformity in state laws, and the "accident-prone" driver. Nothing was said about vehicle design and construction. What makes the report noteworthy is that present-day programs display no advance in quality and are applied with an extraordinary emphasis on driver behavior -- which is almost always considered apart from vehicle and highway.
Today almost every program is aimed at the driver -- at educating him, exhorting him, watching him, judging him, punishing him, compiling records about his driving violations, and organizing him in citizen support activities. Resources and energy are directed into programs of enforcement, traffic laws, driver education, driver licensing, traffic courts, and vehicle inspection. The reasoning behind this philosophy of safety can be summarized in this way: Most accidents are in the class of driver fault; driver fault is in the class of violated traffic laws; therefore, observance of traffic laws by drivers would eliminate most accidents.
The prevailing view of traffic safety is much more a political strategy to defend special interests than it is an empirical program to save lives and prevent injuries. For "traffic safety" is not just an abstract value to which lip service is paid. In the automobile industry, safety could represent an investment in research, a priority in production design and manufacturing, and a theme of marketing policy. But under existing business values potential safety advances are subordinated to other investments, priorities, preferences, and themes designed to maximize profit. Industry insists on maintaining the freedom to rank safety anywhere it pleases on its list of commercial considerations. In the protection of these considerations the industry supports and fosters the traffic safety policy focused on driver behavior; through lobbying and other close relations with state and municipal administrators the efforts of the automobile manufacturers have resulted not only in the perpetuation of that policy but also in some side effects which help the industry preserve its exclusive control over vehicle design.
For one thing, a driver-oriented traffic safety program does not disrupt the traditional state jurisdiction over traffic safety matters. The industry has worked for many years to maintain state control against any "encroachments" or "interventions" by the federal government. Should the federal government become involved, it might upset the time- tested accommodation which the industry has developed with state administrators and legislators. The saying among automobile men is: "We know the state tiger and what it likes to eat." The federal government might want to see for itself whether the vehicle was really as innocent as automobile publicists have vigorously proclaimed.
Another advantage to the industry in seeing traffic safety in terms of driver responsibility is that the law bas developed in conformity with this emphasis. Thus damage or injury in automobiles is attributed, by definition, to some legal violation by the driver. Traffic laws prescribe how people shall behave so as to avoid accidents on streets and highways. These rules are quite specific, such as those about overtaking or passing a school bus. But there are also general provisions prohibiting "reckless driving" or "driving so as to endanger," which cover almost any situation that is not explicitly cited. Therefore the contributing factors stemming from the vehicle's design can be imputed to the driver. The law embodies an invincible rationale: "He had an accident; therefore, he violated the law." No distinction is made between responsibility for the accident and responsibility for the injury due to unsafe vehicle design or construction. Manslaughter charges are med routinely against drivers; there is yet to be recorded any similar charges against the manufacturers for vehicle defects. The statutes make no provision for including the manufacturer in traffic accident criminal penalties, and it is a rare prosecutor who would proceed against an automobile maker on common-law principles.
Laws that do not adequately reflect reality have predictably distorting consequences. It is to be expected that laws exclusively centered on the motorist will profoundly affect the kind of accident investigation, accident reporting, and insurance rating policy that develops. Accidents are investigated principally by police and investigators representing claimants and insurance companies. The primary purpose of police fact-gathering at the accident scene is to enforce the law, so the policeman's common assumption is driver responsibility. A typical police traffic accident report bas a list of "contributing circumstances" which the officer is to check off: "Speed too fast; failed to yield right of way; drove left of center; improper overtaking; passed stop sign; ran traffic signal; improper lights; had been drinking; and other improper driving." All of these are violations of the law by motorists. No distinction is drawn between the behavior of the driver and the behavior of the vehicle. Insofar as the law is violated, they are one. Thus the driver is heir to all the dangers created by the automobile designers, not only in terms of his bodily exposure but also in terms of legal exposure. The result of this drastic imbalance in the law is the very poor quality of accident investigation in this country. There is great pressure on the police officer to cut his investigation short in order to clear away the damaged car or cars and get traffic moving. He finds little incentive to probe beyond the facile explanation of the accident offered by the catchall categories of driver error on the accident report form. The law does not encourage or provide for conscientious investigation. Consequently enforcement of the law brings no pressure on the car makers to increase the safety of vehicles.
The way traffic law is written and enforced also affects automobile insurance and claims investigation. Civil actions are brought in court on the basis of driver-to-driver or driver-to-passenger confrontations, with police reports and sometimes criminal proceedings (which usually are completed before civil actions come to trial) serving as principal tools of conflict. Since insurance company payments for damage claims are predicated on driver responsibility, insurance rates are almost exclusively based on differences in drivers-accident experience, use of the car, sex, age, marital status, place of residence, and the number of drivers in the family. Were manufacturers made more responsible by law for vehicle behavior in accident and injury causation, the entire actuarial and investigatory apparatus would be forced to consider vehicle engineering factors as an integral part of investigation.
Investigation stops with the driver in the vast majority of cases because our statutes ascribe all responsibilities to the driver. It is legal responsibility that forms the basis for compensation payments. Often, when the responsible agent is missing -- in cases where there is no other driver, or the other driver is not financially responsible -- the most thorough engineering investigations of the vehicle are conducted. Claims against the manufacturer for unsafe design or construction are obliged to proceed on the basis of the common law derived from the heritage of court decisions, not on statutes. The only statute law covering the vehicle simply requires certain basic automotive equipment such as brakes, windshield wipers, directional signals, and lighting systems.
Accident reporting and statistics also reflect the law's emphasis. A major purpose of accident reports is to lay the basis for preventive action, as well as to measure the effect of past accident-prevention efforts. Since the law ignores the cause of injury and concentrates on the cause of accident in terms of driver error, accident reports adhere to this outline. The statistics compiled inevitably emphasize the same point, as exemplified by the National Safety Council's annual proclamation that ninety per cent of all accidents are due to improper driving. To the extent that statistics outline problems, guide remedial action, and inspire or deter public authorities, vehicle design in such a statistical climate is not likely to come in for much attention. It is significant that the special Cornell accident-injury reporting forms request information not required by law -- information which is having important consequences in emphasizing the role of vehicle engineering.
The automobile makers have played an important role in the development of traffic law beyond their conventional advocacy at state legislatures. The industry's presence on the membership roll of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances (NCUTLO) is an impressive display of how automobile companies and their trade associations and front organizations can saturate an organization. The financial and advisory support given the NCUTLO -- which produces a periodically revised Uniform Motor Vehicle Code as a "Guide for State Motor Vehicle Laws" -- is not without results. The code is a place for implementing the automotive lobby's determination to achieve uniformity in vehicle equipment laws throughout the fifty states, without the supervision of the federal government. While the code embraces sound and well-expressed provisions, the attention given the vehicle is an abuse of the integrity which the drafting of model laws has generally attained in the United States. The code is composed of nineteen chapters totaling 194 pages. It is designed as a comprehensive set of motor vehicle laws covering administration, licensing, financial responsibility, and other subjects. Thirty-nine pages are devoted to equipment, inspection, and the size, weight, and load of vehicles.
The provisions of these pages could not have been more solicitous of the manufacturers. Although the code is described by its authors as offering "a sound legal framework within which effective safety programs can be carried out" to "the ultimate service of highway users," not a single provision deals with any vehicle design features prominently associated with injuries suffered in an accident. Although two pages are devoted to rules governing pedestrian behavior, the code has no reference to protruding ornaments and other pedestrian hazards, as do similar statutes in Switzerland and other European nations. The vehicle equipment provisions cover only lighting equipment, brakes, horns, mufflers, mirrors, windshield wipers, Hares, air conditioning equipment, but the code does not establish standards for the operating and crash safety of the basic vehicle structure. Where applicable, the language provides for adherence to standards established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Performance levels for items such as brakes are written into the code and are well within the limits of existing designs.
The Chapter called "Inspection of Vehicles" recommends the use of the American Standards Association Code D7 On inspection requirements for motor vehicles. Code D7 was written by the automobile industry. The object of D7 is to provide the states with a checklist that will bring the operational adequacy of inspected vehicles somewhere near the level of the vehicles when they left the dealers' showrooms.
The legal structure for traffic safety that exempts motor vehicle design and quality from its purview -- the only transport vehicle so exempted -- has not come about haphazardly. Its evolution has been shaped by a political and propaganda machine directed by the traffic safety establishment. This establishment is not a conspiracy; it does not have to be. As the only organized constituency in traffic safety, one which represents the interests of the automotive and allied industries, it has been more like a great power with no challengers. By championing driver safety and resistance to federal "encroachment," and by providing funds to "sound" recipients, the establishment has enlisted the support or understanding of state and local officials and of volunteer groups and workers.
The dreary quality of traffic safety activities throughout the country year after year can be attributed to the impressive efficiency in the administration of the establishment's ideology. There are no autocratic impositions involved. The practice of going along with industry's way is simply a pleasant way of getting by. There are neither tangible incentives nor countering stimuli to do things in any other way.
An estimated nine million dollars a year is spent by nongovernment organizations and citizen traffic safety councils on national, state, and local levels. Out of this sum, about $4.2 million is expended by state and local safety councils accredited to the National Safety Council and supported chiefly by local business contributors. After subtracting the $2.6 million devoted by the National Safety Council to traffic safety services, the remaining $2.2 million goes for the most part to support the traffic safety activities of the so-called national service organizations. The automotive and insurance industries finance almost all the traffic safety work of these service groups -- chiefly, the Auto Industries Highway Committee, the American Association of Motor Vehicles Administrators, the American Bar Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Commission on Safety Education (of the National Educational Association), and the National Committee on Uniform Laws and Ordinances. Together with the American Automobile Association, which is self-financing; these are the organizations which the National Safety Council describes as "the groups that stimulate public support for traffic safety programs."
The two key sources of funds for these groups are the Automotive Safety Foundation and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, both tax-exempt organizations.
The Automotive Safety Foundation (ASF) was founded in June 1937 by four automobile executives. For five years, the Automobile Manufacturers Association contributed all the funds for ASF, but increasingly the AMA has broadened the financial support to include contributions from companies dealing in petroleum, rubber tires, automobile finance, advertising, magazines, glass, steel, as well as from banks, automobile and tire dealers, and asphalt and cement companies and associations. This has been done through a highly successful fund-matching system that not only helps to commit these groups to ASFs mission but also saves the Automobile Manufacturers Association money while it enlarges the total funds over which the AMA possesses complete policy control. In 1963 the AMA contributed half ($764,086) of ASFs income of $1,528,173, which has been roughly the level of the foundation's income for the past few years.
The Automotive Safety Foundation's accomplishment in promoting the automobile industry's traffic safety objective far exceeds what might be expected of such modest finances. Contrary to what its name might imply, the Automotive Safety Foundation has no concern fur the automobile per se; except that it be driven better, maintained properly, and provided with more highways and off-street parking. A recent ASF publication echoes Mr. Humphreys of the U.S. Rubber Company: "Being inanimate, no car, truck or bus can by itself cause an accident any more than a street or highway can do so. A driver is needed to put it into motion -- after which it becomes an extension of his will."
From its very beginning the ASF has been a policy-oriented organization. One of its first projects was the Standard Highway Safety Program for States, which erected two cornerstones for the private traffic movement -- a "balanced program" for accident prevention, and the necessity for official responsibility by state and local officials backed with organized citizen support groups. With refinement and expansion by ASF and other automobile representatives, this program in 1946 was changed to the Action Program for Traffic Safety, which continues to be the blueprint for concerted activity.
The president of the Automotive Safety Foundation, Joseph Mattson, and his assistants maintain close contact with federal officials. ASF headquarters appear to be in Washington primarily to see that Washington does as little as possible in traffic safety beyond that of supporting the "time-tested" state activities. The ASF has various opportunities for observing, influencing, or deterring action in the executive branch. One is its joint financial sponsorship of research projects and conferences with such agencies as the Public Health Service and the Bureau of Public Roads. Through such cooperation the ASF helps guide federal attention away from vehicle design and its relation to deaths and injuries. This kind of cooperation also ingratiates the ASF with some federal administrators who can stretch department budgets to hold more conferences. The mixing of private and public funds and personnel is a recurrent practice of the traffic safety establishment and assures the participation of industry people directly in official programs. The ASF also has often graduated its employees into positions in the Bureau of Public Roads.
Mattson has found his way onto the advisory committee to the U.S. Public Health Service's Division of Accident Prevention in spite of his lack of scientific qualifications to advise the division on its scientific work. The advisory committee to the division is supposed to represent experts, not interest groups. In the Bureau of Public Roads, Mattson is viewed as the veteran spokesman for the automobile industry on traffic safety and as the figure who dominates the President's Committee for Traffic Safety. For ten years Mattson was head of the executive committee of the advisory council to the President's committee. In this capacity, he selected the executive director of the committee, William Foulis, who had been Mattson's employee at the Automotive Safety Foundation. In 1965 Mattson relinquished his committee post to Howard Pyle of the National Safety Council, but no one interpreted this as any diminution of his influence. Behind his retiring, easygoing manner, he remains a person to be reckoned with by the Bureau of Public Roads and its Office of Highway Safety, even in preliminary consideration of traffic safety policy.
Mattson has long been the chief figure among staffs of the private traffic safety groups that are congregated in one section of Washington. Whatever discomfort his influence bas caused others in the movement has not been made public. His conciliatory skills and his why-stir-things-up type of appeal bas succeeded in maintaining a solid consensus within the establishment on all major issues.
Financial data concerning the Automotive Safety Foundation give some indication of the variety of unofficial missions expected of it by the automobile industry in addition to the processing and awarding of grants. A typical year was 1963, when ASF reported contributions totaling $1,528,173, of which $692,890 was disbursed as grants. The expense of distributing this amount was reported to total $826,148, which included $517,603 for salaries and wages; a lump sum of $259,474 was listed under "miscellaneous expenses." That year, the foundation neglected to report officers' salaries individually to the Internal Revenue Service. But in 1962, when they did provide these figures, Mattson received $45,517, and two vice presidents were paid $27,700 and $26,183, plus full reimbursement for expenses. Thus, the compensation of the three top officers alone amounted to one-eighth of the funds disbursed and one-fifteenth of ASF's annual income. This unique foundation spent almost $1.20 on "administration" for every dollar it disbursed in grants.
A 1947 document put out by the foundation gave an indication of how diverse its interests were even at that early date:
In addition to the studies of existing laws, the technicians on the Foundation staff also reviewed hundreds of bills proposed during the current legislative year, and passed along to interested national organizations the facts about those bills which failed to conform in substance with the [uniform vehicle] code and other accepted standards....
The Inter-Industry Highway Safety Committee is another new development. Throughout the country the vehicle, tire and petroleum retailers are in a position to offer valuable support to public officials and to civic groups in carrying on the highway safety program in their own states and communities. State and local groups are being organized throughout the country and already tangible and encouraging results have been reported...
It is not possible in a report of this kind to illustrate pictorially the cooperative activities which the Foundation is conducting with a large number of national organizations. These groups -- women, farmers, veterans, teachers, service clubs and others -- offer enormous potentials in support of safer highway transportation. In each case, however, to make the activity sound and useful, the organization requires the expert direction and guidance which the staff here is able to provide. Financial assistance also is given.
At the present the Automotive Safety Foundation awards grants, most of them on an annual basis, to about thirty groups, including the American Association of Industrial Editors, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, the American Bar Association, the American Municipal Association, the Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Highway Research Board, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Association of County Engineers, the National Commission on Safety Education, the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances, the National Grange, the National Safety Council, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, the Yale University Bureau of Highway Traffic, and some dozen other universities for small research projects or fellowships. Even those grants under $10,000 are of considerable consequence to the recipients because of the absence of other backing, either from public or private sources. The fellowships cover a number of subjects concerning highway safety, but never the vehicle itself. The foundation also administers the Alfred P. Sloan Radio and Television Awards for Highway Safety, which go to various radio and television stations throughout the country for constructive programming.
One of the ASF's largest annual grants -- about $140,000 -- goes to form almost the entire support of the Auto Industries Highway Safety Committee (AIHSC), another tax-exempt organization. A project of which AIHSC is especially proud was the distribution of over six million "Man-to-Man and Dad-to-Daughter Good Driver Agreements." These were voluntary pledges signed by father and son or father and daughter wherein the children agreed to drive the family car safely.
AIHSC's principal activity is promoting vehicle inspection, high school driver education, safe holiday travel, adequate off- street parking facilities and better highways, and teen-age traffic safety conferences. These objectives are pursued, AIHSC says, "through contacts with officials charged with the responsibility of public safety on the nation's streets and highways, as well as organizations actively engaged in traffic safety work," and by "serving on national policy-setting committees such as the Advisory Council to the President's Committee for Traffic Safety."
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In the automobile insurance industry, the counterpart organization to the Automotive Safety Foundation is the tax-exempt Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). It was established in 1959 to bring together under one roof the scattered traffic safety efforts of the Association of Casualty and Surety Companies, the National Association of Automotive Mutual Insurance Companies, and the National Association of Independent Insurers. These three groups represent about five hundred insurance companies.
The traffic safety attitude of IIHS closely parallels that of ASF. For example, in January 1963 IIHS released this explanation of the record traffic accident toll in 1962: "The American public is not supporting the application of the Highway Safety Action Program, the blueprint recognized by traffic experts throughout the country. Officials are not administering the laws and regulations to the extent necessary to reduce traffic accidents. Dangerous confusion exists because of the lack of uniformity of traffic laws and traffic control devices."
IIHS president Russell Brown says that an additional five hundred million dollars of state and local funds are needed annually to support existing programs on a much greater scale and to augment the private budgets of the national service organizations. But neither he nor his organizations literature mentions vehicle design. The issue which appears to motivate the programs financed by IIHS and which makes it so cooperative with automobile industry interests is the threat of federal incursions into state jurisdiction over traffic safety. In almost every address Brown delivers the point is made, sometimes with constitutional embellishments: "In the management of our vast highway transportation system, public policy. must be based on the premise that sovereignty rests with state governments, and that federal and local governments only have those rights that are given to them by sovereign states. Therefore, the focal point for all highway traffic control and safety activities is the state."
The institute's grants are fully consistent with this belief. With a budget totaling $1.7 million in 1964, IIHS provides grants to most of the service organizations funded by ASF, including the National Safety Council, the American Bar Association, and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
It also provides assistance to state traffic safety programs, after soliciting a formal request by the governor. This aid takes the form of working with officials in developing safety programs and familiarizing them with other services available through the private traffic safety organizations. Direct financial support to state citizen traffic safety groups is the third activity of IIHS. In 1964, funds were allotted to ten such bodies, including the California Traffic Safety Foundation, the Missouri Safety Council, the New York State Citizens Council on Traffic Safety, and the Texas Safety Association. It is IIHS policy to encourage formation of these citizen units in all states to "influence personal behavior in traffic and create and express public support for official programs."
Plainly, insurance companies would seem to have every incentive to advocate measures for the prevention of loss in order to increase their underwriting profits. Insurance company engineers and inspectors routinely file reports to their superiors recommending as a condition of policy coverage the elimination of hazards on ships, in factories, and at construction sites. The work of the underwriter's laboratories in testing, inspecting, evaluating, and listing manufacturers' products with respect to their safety (especially electrical and fire-prevention equipment), indicates that companies take loss prevention seriously. In addition, premium rates usually have covered the entire risk situation in man-machine situations. Thus, for example, higher rates for fire coverage on factories with less than desirable conditions add an economic incentive for policy-holders to achieve safer conditions.
In automobile insurance, the roles are different. Loss prevention and rate policy deal with the driver and avoid the automobile. Except for the discount for compact cars -- a puzzling actuarial decision in light of their injury record -- neither rating bureaus nor the large independent casualty underwriters have ever filed for approval by state insurance regulatory agencies any rating system covering various design features of automobiles.
For many years the insurance industry has known about and been disturbed by the role of unsafe vehicle design in producing accidents and injuries. Their files contain a secret horde of detailed accident investigations pin-pointing design and construction hazards on particular models that caused deaths and injuries. There are instances where a company, after paying off a claim, has demanded in turn compensation from the offending automobile manufacturer and has obtained a confidential settlement. None of this vehicle design data has ever been publicly reported either by an individual underwriter or on an industry-wide basis. Contrary to every decent tradition of the casualty insurers (going back as far as their design and construction of lighthouses and lifeboats in the early days of the Lloyds group in England), information of life-saving import, which connects vehicle features with statistically or clinically significant accident and injury experience, is being denied to the public, to the companies' own policy-holders, and to the industry's actuaries who could devise a vehicle-rating policy aimed at loss reduction. The same modem data-processing equipment used increasingly to refine the rating of drivers could be applied to the rating of vehicles.
During the past two years, several insurance company executives have commented in public about rising damage claims and the role of excessively powered vehicles. Articles in the industry trade publication, The National Underwriter, have called for an insurance rating structure for automobiles which reflects the relative safety of their design, as is done for factory and other transportation risks. All these statements are more indicative of the casualty industry's knowledge and concern about unsafe vehicle design than they are of its intention to do anything about that design.
This mixed attitude of worry and inaction is of many years' standing. In 1937 an editor of a monthly journal for casualty underwriters, Safety Engineering, studied some insurance company accident investigations made available to him and over a two-year period wrote a remarkable series of fifteen articles entitled "Make the Automobile Safer." Each article was devoted to a common vehicle design hazard. The editor emphasized the "second collision" and unnecessary dangers to pedestrians. For three years, Safety Engineering even graded the new automobiles by name, rating them on the basis of injury-producing hazards. The editor, Harry Armand, wrote: "A building contractor realizes that tools and brick can fall from great heights, and he guards against possible injury by providing employees with protective headgear to minimize the effects of a possible accident, in addition to protective canopies and scaffolding to safeguard the public. This principle of 'preparing for the inevitable' should be the guiding factor in automobile design. The motor industry must face the fact that accidents occur. It is their duty, therefore, to so design the interior of automobiles that when the passenger is tossed around, he will get an even break and not suffer a preventable injury. It is not beyond the realm of reason to expect that in an interior designed for perfect safety a passenger may experience no more than a shaking up in many kinds of accidents that today are taking a heavy toll in life and limb."
Since those words were written, over a million Americans have been killed and an estimated eighty-five million injured. Harry Armand, still at his job, noted in 1964 that many of the hazards he described in the thirties still persist in one form or another in today's automobiles. Yet the insurance industry continues to treat the automobile as off-limits and restricts its public service to pamphlets published under such catchy titles as "Maim Street" and "Rushin Roulette," containing cartoons of driver carelessness.
The insurance trade associations are equally reticent. In March 1963 the motor vehicle bulletin of the Association of Casualty and Surety Companies noted that the "parking brake" of many new automobiles might appear firmly set but still allow rolling backwards freely. The association added that this could be especially dangerous if a driver parks his car in the family driveway, many of which slope. It explained that this hazard arises because of recent changes in the design of parking and emergency brake systems in nearly all passenger ears and in many light trucks. If the parking brake is set without the simultaneous application of the hydraulic service (foot) brakes, it noted, the bottom of the brake shoes are brought into contact with the drums on the rear wheels, but the shoes are not folly engaged. With the parking brake in this position, the association said, the car cannot roll forward, but it can move freely to the rear. If, on the other hand, the motorist is pressing his foot on the hydraulic brake while he is setting the parking brake, the shoe and drum engage completely and the car will not move.
What did the association recommend? It urged the reader of this limited-circulation bulletin to get into the habit of applying the foot brake while he set the parking brake. "No problem can occur if a driver trains himself to do this," was the advice. Having told the reader how to adjust to a dangerous design, the association saw its task completed. It did not name the models which possessed such a hazard; it did not demand that the manufacturers change the design on future models and correct existing models; it did not notify appropriate state and federal officials, in spite of its knowledge of casualties proceeding from this hazard.
The deep-rooted reluctance of automobile insurers to take action is clearly demonstrated by the experience of Liberty Mutual Insurance Company-the only insurer to show concrete interest in vehicle design research. Between 1952 and 1961 Liberty Mutual developed and constructed two prototype safety ears called Survival Car I and Survival Car II. Working initially with the late Edward Dye at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Liberty Mutual's chief engineer, Frank Crandell, produced Survival Car I in 1957. This car was a non-operational vehicle featuring sixty safety design innovations, the combined purpose of which was to permit passengers to walk away from head-on collisions that had occurred at speeds up to forty miles per hour. In 1961, four models of Survival Car II were displayed. To show the feasibility of safety improvements within conventional production-line automobiles, Crandell used regular 1960 four-door Chevrolets. Based on his company's accident-injury investigations and forty crash tests, he built twenty-four major design features into these modified Chevrolets. The features included specially constructed "capsule seats" designed to stay moored on impact and protect the passenger from rear-end and side collisions. In addition to a safer steering assembly providing collision protection, improved maneuverability, and greater visibility, there was a fail-safe braking system, an automatic fire control system, a roll-over bar, safer windshields, and a smooth hood to reduce the severity of pedestrian injury.
Liberty Mutual no longer does any work in vehicle design. It considers its ten-year project, which cost $350,000, completed. Company management has no intention of openly criticizing the automobile makers. President Bryan Smith closed the program with the statement: "In sponsoring the reconstruction and design of this completely functional passenger car solely for safety, our hope is that it will stimulate the forces already at work producing safer automobiles." That an insurance company had to produce the first prototype safety car itself constituted a stinging rebuke to the automobile makers. But Smith refused to draw the obvious conclusions and refused to follow through on Crandell's findings and make the project meaningful beyond that of building the company's reputation.
Predictably, the automobile industry's reaction to Liberty Mutual's prototypes was hostile. According to Frank Crandell, he was viewed by the industry as an enemy until 1962 when some communication was established with Ford. He saw some of his designs reflected in eight safety features that graced the experimental Mustang in 1963 and was severely disappointed to see all of them dropped when the car went into actual production.
If the automobile industry's reaction was hostile, the casualty insurance industry's was one of indifference. It did not see any policy-making significance, either private or public, in Liberty's promising engineering work on safer automobile design. Nor did it view the prototypes as stimulants for further research into injury prevention during collisions. There are three major reasons for this fundamental default by the insurance industry. First, the pressure of material self-interest is sharply diminished by the companies' ability to obtain approval from state regulators for higher insurance rates to cover higher loss experiences. Since the ceiling for rates can be raised as the level of claims payments rises, the monetary incentive to reduce the causes of deaths and injuries in automobile accidents by advocating safer vehicles is reduced. Moreover, the profits of the casualty industry now come much more from investment income than from earned premiums. Between 1959 and 1963, for example, the casualty industry had an underwriting profit of $1.38 billion and a net investment income of $4.01 billion. The higher the volume of prepaid insurance premiums, the more funds are available to produce investment income. The second reason for default by the insurance industry is that the automobile manufacturers and their ancillary industries represent important customers for casualty insurers. The third and most important reason is the unwritten law that large business groups never attack one another over a fundamental issue publicly unless they see their survival at stake. A determined and unilateral program by underwriters for safer automobiles would strike the automobile industry at its most sensitive level -- that of marketing strategy and possible exposure to government regulation. The consequences of such an upheaval would be likely to unleash forces for change in more than one direction -- forces beyond the control of both industries. Marketing freedom and minimum government control are very important to the insurance industry as well as to the automobile industry. But government control is not the only inhibition the insurance companies might feel. General Motors keeps a small automobile insurance subsidiary as a reminder that the underwriters are not immune from a possibly devastating competitive program with impressive distribution outlets through automobile dealers.
In addition, the view in insurance circles is that any radical change in the country's perspective on traffic safety will inevitably mean a. larger role for the federal government. Insurance companies have learned how to handle state insurance commissioners, and the prospect of any federal attention to their business alarms them greatly. Even a bill by Congressman Kenneth Roberts to establish a national accident prevention research center was attacked in 1964 by insurance people as a move toward monopoly control over the discovery and dissemination of research information and as a costly effort that would duplicate the one now being satisfactorily performed by employers, insurance companies, trade associations, and safety organizations like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Safety Council.
The most candid commentary on the insurance companies' attitude toward the automobile makers came from Leonard McEnnis, Jr., director of public relations for the IIHS, who said, "They don't want us telling them how to build autos and we don't want them telling us how to sell insurance."
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Another instance of surprising default is the inaction of the American Automobile Association (AAA). With clubs in every state and a total membership of nine million motorists, AAA is by far the largest representative of automobile drivers. But however vigorous it may be in fighting highway tolls, unfair motor vehicle taxes, and other pocketbook threats to its membership, its position on automobile design has until recently been altogether one of curtsying whenever the automobile industry nodded. AAA has produced the usual brochures and reflected the accepted traffic safety views. Since the thirties it has singled out pedestrian protection as a special AAA program, but it has carefully excluded from its concern external vehicle design hazards such as protruding ornaments and sharp edges and points.
Closely tied to AAA's Washington headquarters is the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety whose major activity is supporting safety film productions. It also grants $35,000 a year to serious research on driver behavior by Dr. James Malfetti at Columbia University.
AAA is a state-oriented organization. Member clubs finance national headquarters and establish the policies of the national organization. Traditionally, AAA and member clubs have strongly backed exclusive state jurisdiction over traffic safety, placing AAA in full accord with other private safety groups. Until 1961, AAA had not taken a determined position on vehicle design and safety beyond occasional denunciations of braking performance and tire failure. In that year, AAA passed a weak resolution urging the manufacturers to build more safety into their vehicles so as to reduce "the severity of injury to operators and passengers involved in auto accidents." The following year for the first time in AAA history a state club got serious. Led by Robert Kretsch mar and Richard Hoover, the Massachusetts AAA was instrumental in having introduced in the legislature a state bill that would establish a special commission to draft a code of minimum safety standards for the construction of motor vehicles. The bill listed forty-five design features for the proposed commission's consideration. Mark Bauer, the mobile eastern field representative for the Automobile Manufacturers Association, paraded his lobbying skills before his old legislative committee friends who had the bill before them. In 1963, shortly before the hearing on the bill, a special trip to Detroit for the committee was arranged, with all expenses paid. The hill has never gotten out of committee.
Kretschmar and Hoover pressed further. With the support of the New York AAA, they persuaded the Eastern Conference of AAA Motor Clubs to adopt their position for safer vehicles at the annual meeting in the fall of 1963. It was also decided that the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety would finance a project to investigate vehicle hazards and develop standards that could be embodied into law.
On January 22, 1964, Kretschmar delivered an address in New York City accusing the automobile industry of "putting up organized resistance against making cars safer." He pointed out that in the past the manufacturers opposed putting on all cars such equipment as stop lights, directional signals, and windshield wipers until, after years of delay, legislation compelled them to do so. "Safety glass was legislated into cars literally window by window, starting in Massachusetts," he declared. In urging complete safety standards, he cited the results of a Massachusetts state investigation that showed that "the 1963 models of two brands of cars develop steering weakness after about 20,000 miles of use."
In June 1964, the New York AAA's safety director, Charles Murphy, told the Pennsylvania AAA club: "We must try to change the image carefully cultivated over the years of the motorist as the fellow responsible for eighty-five to ninety per cent of the accidents. I look forward to the results of the massive research job being undertaken by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety on this entire question. And I am sure it will be revealing and will lead to constructive public consideration to which manufacturers must eventually respond."
This was the small progressive wing of the AAA speaking. The old guard, especially those in Washington, opposed such a research job but not because of insufficient funds. The AAA Foundation, which receives about $165,000 yearly from AAA clubs, has a substantial financial surplus each year. As of mid-1965, no action had been initiated concerning this projected study.
The national AM, along with most AAA state clubs, has long maintained close relationships with automobile industry personnel. In the thirties and forties AAA received safety grants from the industry. Commanding positions in AAA club membership are held by employees of automobile companies, suppliers, and automobile dealers. When in early 1964 the Michigan Automobile Club released a fifteen-point plan that included a statement urging the manufacturers to "give increasing attention to design and production of features which make cars safer to drive," automobile industry publicists were angered at not being sent a draft for advance clearance. Out-of-state AAA observers conceded that the Michigan club's unilateral move was a bit bold, considering the state in which it is lodged. These observers add that it is quite understandable why the club has maintained a complete silence since its "indiscretion."
Automobile men cultivate the AAA since the clubs make good impressions before state legislative committees. The industry and AAA find that they share common interests. Among these are their opposition to federal "intervention," their desire for more highways, their coolness toward rapid transit, and their encouragement of improved motoring conditions and services. The whole administrative apparatus of AAA is geared to dealing with state officials, and a reorientation to federal activity would be a difficult adjustment, one that would weaken the state clubs at the expense of the national association.
Considerations such as these have kept the AAA, the largest car user group in the nation, from advancing forcefully the safety interests of its members on the issue of vehicle design. The attempt by the Massachusetts and New York clubs to breathe new life into AAA on this issue has not made much headway. The few courageous men who are trying find that regeneration from within is a difficult task. By not backing a determined policy that demands safer automotive engineering, the dominant leaders continue to allow the nine million members of the AAA to suffer the consequences of unsafe vehicles.
While the AAA may occasionally raise a voice that is displeasing to the automobile industry, that "hub of the safety movement," the National Safety Council, remains the unswerving keeper of the traditional faith. Almost everyone in America has heard the council's repeated injunction that to be safe one simply has to be careful. Before every holiday weekend, the council makes its highly publicized prediction of the number of highway deaths. Should the prediction be exceeded, it shows how important are the council's warnings against carelessness; if the prediction exceeded the actual toll, then the council concludes that its warnings made people drive more carefully. Either outcome serves to nourish the council's image of always being on the side of the angels. The council gets enormous publicity as the nation's caretaker of traffic safety. Since its founding in 1915, the council has saturated the country with slogans, printed material, and broadcasted exhortations for safer driving. It has helped to form state and local safety councils, accrediting seventy-two of them as council affiliates, all devoted to persuading the public to drive carefully. This may be a generally useless endeavor but it is not a harmless one. What seems to fill a need in form succeeds very well in excluding alternative methods that could fill it in fact. Every National Safety Council message disseminates a view of highway safety that lulls even the alert segment of the public into thinking that the council knows how to reduce casualties. Stripped to its fundamentals, the council view is that man must be the element adapted to the accident and injury risks of automobile driving, not that the automobile must be designed for maximum possible adaptation to man's requirements. This prejudiced view of the highway safety problem quite expectedly has led to prejudiced solutions. To administer these biased solutions, biased organizations arise. Of these, the National Safety Council is the most prominent example.
The powerful support enjoyed by the council goes far to explain why it refuses to pursue any policies that might imply criticism of the automobile industry's safety performance. Industry and commerce animate the council, provide the major source of its dues (6000 of its 10,000 members are business firms which pay dues according to size, dues that far exceed the individual dues of $7.50), and dominate its board of directors. The automobile manufacturers and their safety organizations are heavily represented on the board. Further, the Automotive Safety Foundation annually grants nearly $150,000 for the council's yearly inventory of how closely communities are adhering to the "Action Program." About the same amount is granted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The Automobile Manufacturers Association provides the council with funds for special projects.
Overt pressure by the automobile industry, however, rarely has to be exerted; the council has always attracted the kind of men who reflect the industry's viewpoint. As late as 1965 council president Howard Pyle had this reaction to industry critics who are pressing for a crashworthy car: ''The question is, does this nation want a packaged car or a free car?" Once, in the late fifties, a high council executive found the council's taboo on discussion of car design so demeaning that he attempted to effect a modest change in policy. A weekend meeting between the council's board of directors and automobile executives aboard a yacht on Lake Michigan squashed that attempt.
The difference between the National Safety Council's avowed missions and its actual performance shows the extent to which it has subordinated the promotion of safety to the interests of industry. During its quest to win a federal charter (a prestige imprimatur with little legal significance) from Congress in 1953, the council supplied the following description of its work in a report to the House judiciary committee: "The National Safety Council is presently engaged in a continuous and unified program of accident prevention which includes research into the causes of accident occurrence, devising measures for accident prevention, determination of engineering requirements for safe design, construction and use of machines and equipment, formulation of modern safety legislation by providing needed technical information and advice, participation in educational safety projects, dissemination of material on accident cause and prevention, and cooperation with national, state and local agencies in accident prevention. One of its major functions is to act as a national coordinating agency for all private and public bodies interested in matters of safety."
Weighed against such intentions, what is the Council's actual achievement in traffic safety, apart from its publicity campaigns aimed at the driver? First, measured against even a minimal standard, the council conducts no research. No one is more painfully aware of this fact than its research director, Dr. Murray Blumenthal, whose duties are primarily administrative and whose hope of any improvement in this condition is dwindling. Second, the council has not devised any accident prevention measures or determined any engineering requirements for safe design of automobiles. It has sedulously avoided providing to the public, directly or indirectly, any technical information or advice concerning the formulation of safety legislation which concerns vehicle design. Nor has it cooperated in the slightest with any national, state, or local agencies interested in safer vehicle construction.
Avoidance is not the only path followed by the council in order to continue its unblemished record of never differing with the automobile industry. In a detailed chart included in the distribution literature and presented before legislative committees, entitled "Quantitative Analysis of Traffic Safety Services of National Organizations," the council categorically asserts that present research, standards, and recommendations of the automobile manufacturers pertaining to the operational and crashworthy qualities of vehicles are adequate. The council's basis for such an unequivocal evaluation is a letter from the Automobile Manufacturers Association saying so!