Fairfax police Sgt. Pat Wimberly sees it at least once a month: A pedestrian steps into traffic and gets hit, and the outcome is always one-sided. "Whoever designed and implemented the human body never intended that to happen," Wimberly said.
Now the auto industry is debating whether it can change the equation, designing cars and trucks that are less deadly in collisions with pedestrians. At least one major supplier has developed an air bag that deploys on the outside of a car, to cushion the impact on a person's head. Honda Motor Co. has led the industry by redesigning its entire fleet of vehicles to make the hoods more forgiving to pedestrians.
Beginning this fall, the European Union will require manufacturers to meet pedestrian safety standards on all new models of vehicles, with stricter requirements on the way in 2010. Japan is not far behind.
But the rush to act is meeting resistance in the United States, where industry and government regulators alike say making automobiles more pedestrian-friendly is not a priority. Carmakers argue that such changes add cost and alter vehicle appearance in ways consumers might not like -- rounding off hoods and shortening front ends to lessen the danger to the human body. They also contend that driving is different overseas, where pedestrians are more likely to come into contact with automobiles in crowded cities.
"We view it as a longer-term priority," said Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. "We're looking at things we might employ somewhere down the road, but it's a different environment in Europe. [Pedestrian safety technology] will be there sooner than here."
Detroit's manufacturers will incorporate the new technologies and designs on vehicles they sell overseas, but not domestically. Still, some products sold in the United States are likely to be affected as regulations take hold abroad.
"If the changes are structural, in the design of the car, that would come here automatically," said Tom Purves, chairman of BMW North America. BMW is looking into a number of approaches, Purves said, from redesigning vehicle front ends to using "active" hoods that pop up slightly on impact, creating space between the sheet metal and the harder engine block below.
About 5,000 pedestrians die every year in the United States from being struck by automobiles, according to government statistics. That's about 12 percent of the 43,000 total annual highway deaths nationwide. Locally, fast-growing suburbs have struggled with pedestrian safety. Montgomery County, for instance, had the same number of pedestrian fatalities last year -- 17 -- as homicides.
Such incidents are more common in Europe, where roughly 20 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians, and in Japan, at 30 percent.
European safety agencies have begun rating vehicles for pedestrian safety based on crash tests, something the United States does not do. U.S. regulators considered imposing pedestrian safety guidelines on the auto industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but abandoned the effort.
"We could never verify that the standard would actually have any particular benefit because then, as now, it's very difficult to know precisely what injury was inflicted by the vehicle and what injury was inflicted by contact with the pavement," said Rae Tyson, spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Difficult to simulate
Simulating the effects of a crash on a pedestrian is more difficult than testing for vehicle occupants, said Jeff R. Crandall, director of the Center for Applied Biomechanics at the University of Virginia. "If you take a driver, he's in a defined position -- behind the steering wheel, hopefully belted -- so you sort of know where they are. For pedestrians, there's a whole host of sizes, positions, geometries -- so it's a very, very challenging issue from a design standpoint," Crandall said.
Crandall's lab uses cadaver parts to test the effects of stress on human legs, the head and other areas of the body, then takes that information to help create crash dummies and computer simulations to see what happens in different types of vehicle impacts.
When struck by a car, adults tend to suffer leg damage, then fall up onto the hood, with the head hitting around the base of the windshield. Little can be done to help someone who gets hit at speeds over about 30 mph. The safety standards going into effect this fall in Europe are aimed at reducing the damage from striking the hood at speeds under 25 mph.
Honda has already taken steps to address that issue, beginning with a redesign of the Civic in 2001 and spreading to other models in the years since. In each model, engineers repackaged the engine to create three to four inches of space under the hood, so the sheet metal can absorb most of an impact. Honda also redesigned windshield wiper arms so they would break away when struck.
"We're determined to be leaders in safety, and you don't want to just wait around for legislation," said Charles R. Barker, head of research and development for Honda in the United States. The company also is looking at radar systems that could sense a person in the vehicle's path and apply brakes automatically, Barker said.
The company sponsors some of Crandall's research at the University of Virginia, as well as a program at Inova Fairfax Hospital that investigates real-world accidents to look for ways to lessen injury. Honda claims its design changes should result in a 5 percent decrease in pedestrian fatalities per year compared with vehicles without such measures, saving about 20 lives annually -- though it's too soon for hard data to back up those numbers.
Further design changes will be needed to meet stricter standards proposed in Europe in 2010, which involve reducing head and leg injuries. Some of those changes involve creating softer bumpers that would not meet U.S. minimum safety standards, said Tyson, the NHTSA spokesman.
Such trade-offs make the issue complicated, said Adrian Lund, chief operating officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a safety center funded by the insurance industry. "I think there's a good deal of uncertainty as to what the level of benefit will be" from the pedestrian safety design changes, he said.
Greater uncertainty in U.S.
The uncertainty is greater in the United States than in Europe, he said, because the vehicle fleet here has much more variety. In the United States, more than half of all new vehicles sold each year are pickups or sport-utilities with high, flat front ends, while Europe and Japan are more uniformly populated by cars.
Consumers might not be willing to pay more for pedestrian safety, which, after all, is aimed at protecting someone outside the vehicle, Lund said. "We're not sure how much attention even people in Europe are paying to those [pedestrian safety] ratings because what they're most concerned about is protecting their own families inside the vehicle."
Wimberly, the Fairfax police officer, said he thinks U.S. money would be better spent on redesigning roadways to reduce danger to pedestrians -- adding raised crosswalks, for instance, and putting more designated crossing areas in the car-heavy suburbs.
But even within the law enforcement community, he said, there is disagreement over how to improve pedestrian safety. "Everyone has got an opinion," said Wimberly, who oversees the department's crash reconstruction unit. "From the design of hoods and bumpers . . . [to] a combination of air bag deployments for pedestrians and catching devices to keep them from being thrown over the roof -- you name it, and it's out there."
Autoliv Inc., a leading supplier of air bags to carmakers, has developed an air bag that deploys on the outside of a vehicle near the base of the windshield, to lessen pedestrian head injuries. The company said it's working on the device with several auto manufacturers looking to meet Europe's 2010 regulations, though it wouldn't name them.
Autoliv also has signed a contract with one customer for an "active" hood device, which uses a pyrotechnic charge to raise the hood slightly on impact.
Such technology will inevitably find its way to the U.S. market because of the increasingly global nature of the auto industry, U-Va.'s Crandall said. And that's good, he added; one of the groups most at risk for pedestrian injury is the elderly, and the U.S. population is aging rapidly.
"I really think this issue is something that needs to be looked at at this time," Crandall said. "Not just passively make the judgment that we don't have problems, but actively look at it to do something about it."
