Open letter to the blind

Well, you ask a simple question, I have to write a treatise back.

First, no accident reports are available, as such. I tabulated the information from the machine-readable data located on the US DOT/NHTSA/FARS website, using SAS (Statistical Analysis System) software. (It's the standard for tasks of this sort.) Looking at the FARS website, it's pretty clear that the original source documents remain with the states, and only the data abstract is transferred to the Feds. (Typical for systems like this). So there's no way to get at a written report, as far as I can tell. All I can do is provide summary data. The FARS is a pretty rich dataset, so I could both tabulate the numbers and maybe provide some more context (a la the cars involved above). For multiple years. You'd be surprised how much impact the numbers can have when nicely tabulated.

I also note that there apparently IS a file summarizing all reportable crashes (not just fatal ones) in 17 states. So, yeah, I could at least see if I can find blind pedestrian injury rates there, per the on-point comment above. When I looked at the issue vis-a-vis bicycles, bike-related deaths were a tiny fraction of (e.g.) ER visits for bike-related injuries. (There are other hospital-based sources from which I could back-solve to get at this, but that relies very heavily on willingness to code up the blindness of the individual involved, which typically would not be medically relevant.)

So, do you want a little white paper on this topic? Summarize blind pedestrian deaths for prior N years, US, find out what I can about blind pedestrian injuries in the 17-state database.

Wait wait wait -- I know what you need. You need a "vignette" as we say in my biz. You need a profile of the "typical" blind pedestrian death. That I can do. How fast, how drunk, how old, what type of car, what time, blah blah blah. Let me work that up off the last (say) 5 years of data, see what I get. But I bet it ain't no 5mph crash, in a parking lot, in broad daylight, no booze no drugs. Give me the scenario where audibility would plausibly play a part, and I can categorize the fraction of deaths where audibility might have been relevant. But if it's all a bunch of drunk-speeding -cellphone-using-little-tiny-ladies-in-SUVs, then ... there's not an issue.

I guess that's rather insensitive, isn't it.

Nice thing about FARS is it's 100% -- no sample, no standard errors, so none of the usual statistical stuff. It'll be a summary of all the blind pedestrian deaths in the US.

Give me a couple of days, I'll see what I can gin up. Appropriately referenced, etc.

 

I want them to legislate a "BIG ASSED FIRE-ENGINE HORN" for my Prius
so I can have some fun in the parking lots! BRAaAcCAKAKAcKCAkCAkCAkC!

Wildkow

 

Wait, I'll be @#$@#, you can view the scanned case data. See this URL:
View Case Data | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA) | U.S. Department of Transportation

Unfortunately, it's clearly just a sample. If I can get that to work, I'll send the case IDs. So far, I can't link what's on the database to the case ID input field there.

 

Won't make any difference as they'll ignore the sound anyway. I installed a 12 vdc beeper in my taillight assembly connected to the back-up light. Today I was backing out of a parking place and this dumb woman just saunters directly behind my moving vehicle! She could SEE the car moving and could HEAR beeper yet deliberately walked behind me. What a maroon.

 

SHE'S NOT BLIND. It wont work on her. Beepers only work on the blind and flashing lights only work on the deaf.

Get with the program.....

 

I do, or pretty close to it. Been doing it for years. Long before I got the Prius. Of course, I am old with plenty of time.

Bob

 

I think the OP was just pointing out that it is a lot safer for cyclists to assume that cars didn't/can't see them when riding. I've cycled in traffic a ton and have had some near misses in situations where drivers had to have seen me, but drove like they didn't. I follow ALL traffic laws when riding (including coming to full stops at arterial stop signs....even if no cars are coming...).

I agree with bobwilson4web, act like you are invisible, because cyclists always lose in a cyclist vs car bout. Cold comfort that you were correctly following the traffic laws and it is the car driver's fault if you are the one being transported to the hospital in an ambulance with broken teeth, bones and road rash.

 

Here's the white paper (attached, Word document). I took far more time than I could afford on this but it's the sort of thing that needs to be done right or not at all. There are almost certainly a few typos left but distribute this as is as you see fit, as I'm not going to fix it up any more. Here's the executive summary:


 From 2002 to 2006, an average of five legally blind pedestrians per year were killed in motor vehicle accidents in the US (Table 1).

 No deaths of legally blind pedestrians involved a Prius (Table 3) or any other hybrid vehicle (Table 4).

 For all US pedestrian deaths (blind and sighted), 11 deaths involved a Prius (Table 3). (The Prius was singled out here because it is the only model with large production volume that was produced solely as a hybrid).

 For all US pedestrian deaths, a Prius was no more likely to be involved in a pedestrian death than the average passenger vehicle (Table 5). The Prius accounted for 0.05 percent of passenger vehicles involved in fatal pedestrian accidents, and accounted for 0.05 percent of US registered motor vehicles, on average, over this period.

 For both blind and sighted individuals, only about 10 percent of pedestrian deaths occurred as the result of being struck while walking in a crosswalk. The rest occurred in other locations. More than two-thirds of both blind and sighted pedestrians were listed as contributing in some way to the accident. Of those tested, slightly more than one-third of both blind and sighted pedestrian decedents tested positive for alcohol.

 Data on hospitalization rates for pedestrian accidents confirm the death rate data (Table 6). In a typical year, roughly 40 legally blind pedestrians are hospitalized as the result of a motor vehicle accident.

 Based on population estimates, the average a legally blind person is less likely to be killed or hospitalized as a result of being hit by a car than the average sighted individual. Legally blind individuals accounted for 0.11 percent of deaths and 0.15 percent of hospitalizations. But they account for 0.43 percent of the US population, or 0.23 percent of the US population under age 80.

 

Great piece of research C Hogan, nice work indeed ! So in summary a blind pedestrian death has nothing at all to do with the sound, or lack of it that a vehicle makes and they have statistically the same chance of being zapped (sorry) by a Prius as by any other vehicle in USA... has your Congress got nothing better to do than invent solutions to problems that don't exist ?

 

That's stated a little more strongly that I would have done it, but that's the gist of it. The reason I waffle is that there are so few blind pedestrian deaths and so few pedestrian deaths from hybrids that it's hard to make any definitive statement.

Mostly, I just wanted to get the facts on the table, on the off chance any Congressional staffer was interested in the facts in this case. I wanted to make it a matter of record that there have been no blind pedestrian deaths by hybrid. That needs to get said despite the fact that we shouldn't have expected to see any, given how rare blind pedestrian deaths are and hybrids are. So, documenting that was a matter of shooting fish in a barrel, yet that fish needed shooting, I think. The rest of it -- all pedestrian deaths, hospitalizations, and circumstances around the accidents -- was possibly more informative.

But in so far as you can read the tea leaves from the data, I agree with what you said. Looks to me like blind pedestrians die from the same causes as sighted ones, and hybrids kill pedestrians at the same rate as other vehicles. That could turn out to be wrong, on closer inspection -- for example, I did not attempt to adjust for the weight of a Prius relative to the average weight of a US passenger vehicle -- but I doubt a more refined analysis would turn the conclusion around.

Here's an example of why that's true. Only about a third of the deaths had vehicle speed at impact reported in the data. So I didn't include that in the analysis. But, where reported, the median speed at impact, for pedestrians who died, was about 40 mph for both blind and sighted pedestrians. The hybrid issue is moot at that point, and I'd say there's limited scope for evasive action whether you can see or not. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there's not much observed difference between the two sets of pedestrian deaths.

I could only track deaths and hospitalizations, so I still worry that there might conceivable be more minor injuries (from very slow-speed impacts). As far as I can tell, there is no data source that can address that specifically for the blind. I checked one year of the "GES" data -- a 1-in-100 sample of all reportable accidents -- and found that Prii were under-represented in all pedestrian accidents. But that's an odd sample of just a few states and given the null result (no higher rate for hybrids) did not seem worth pursuing.

So, I'm done. As far as I'm concerned, unless somebody suggests another data source, I say there's no empirical support for the notion that hybrids are more dangerous because they are quieter.

I would also like to see any data on average exterior noise of moving vehicles. There must be ICE vehicles out there that are nearly as quiet as the Prius at low speeds. I have yet to see any available. (Oh, I should note that all cars would have to make an adequate amount of noise under the proposed bill, so at first glance it's not clear that only hybrids would require noisemakers here in the US.)

 

My in-laws live in Ocala, Florida, which, as it turns out, is in the district of Rep. Cliff Stearns, one of the cosponsors of the bill to add noisemakers to Prii. I'm going to ask my in-laws to send a copy of the white paper to Rep. Stearns.

 

My in-laws live in Ocala, Florida, which, as it turns out, is in the district of Rep. Cliff Stearns, one of the cosponsors of the bill to add noisemakers to Prii. I'm going to ask my in-laws to send a copy of the white paper to Rep. Stearns.

 

Thanks for your comments and you really should make sure your research ends up under someones nose in Congress one way or another. On the quote above, we have Gov sponsored ads on our tv that also say this is true, they run to the effect of showing the aftermath of a little girl hit by a car at 40mph (dead) and then a caption where the same little girl says that if you only hit her at 30mph she has an 80% chance of survival... the punch line is that the speed limits in towns are 30mph for a reason.... certainly makes me think about not exceeding the limit in built up areas.

 

Bob,

My in-laws were not up to the task so I emailed my analysis to Rep. Stearns' legislative assistant for transportation. It was a respectful email asking that they consider changing the bill to direct the DOT first to study whether noisemakers on hybrids are warranted, then to mandate them if necessary, not just to direct DOT to mandate them. Seems reasonable to me. I don't expect to hear back but I'll post here if I do.