Friday, April 29, 2005

Vehicle back-over deaths concern safety advocates

Groups want government to regulate rear blind spots, which contributed to deaths of nearly 100 kids last year.

By Greg Schneider / Washington Post

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WASHINGTON -- Nearly 100 children younger than 4 were hit and killed while walking or riding bikes on U.S. roadways last year. Almost the same number died in parking lots and driveways when relatives or family friends accidentally backed over them, but those deaths went uncounted by federal regulators, safety advocates said.

The government agency that ensures traffic safety doesn't track victims of back-over accidents, usually small children run over by family members who don't see them behind minivans and SUVs with limited rear visibility.

The number of such deaths nationwide has averaged at least two a week for a couple of years, according to a children's safety group that compiles numbers from media coverage.

A spike in the incidents this month is unexplained, said Janette Fennell, founder of the advocacy group Kids and Cars. Fennell has registered 14 back-over deaths in the past three weeks, most involving very young children who died from their injuries.

Safety advocates say there are relatively simple and inexpensive ways to solve the problem, including placing cameras on rear bumpers. Legislation before Congress would require the government to study the issue and the auto industry to take steps to address it.

"This is fixable," said Sally Greenberg of Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine. "Every year, year in and year out, we're going to see many, many children backed over and killed unless we do something."

Adrianna Clemens, a 2-year-old Texas girl, was run over in October by her father as he backed his SUV out of the garage. "It's the worst nightmare a parent can ever experience. Nobody wants to be walking in my shoes," said her mother, Rachel Clemens, who has begun a campaign to push for legislation requiring rear visibility standards in the auto industry. "We have got to save the lives of these children. It has become an epidemic, and it has to be stopped."

A Consumer Reports study last year found that some vehicles have rear blind spots as deep as 50 feet, with larger trucks and vans generally worse than cars. Automakers say they are working to minimize blind spots and introducing technology such as sensors and rear-viewing cameras, but they oppose legislation to make such steps mandatory.

"What's going to drive the increase of these safety technologies in the marketplace is consumer demand," said Eron Shosteck, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. "The technology will become more and more prevalent as more consumers see the utility of it and demand it, and are willing to pay for it."

Nearly 900,000 new vehicles sold in the United States last year -- out of almost 17 million total -- included some kind of "parking sensor" that beeps to warn of obstacles to the rear, according to Ward's Communications, an automotive statistics clearinghouse.

That technology is considered a convenience and not a safety feature because it cannot reliably detect a small child, Shosteck said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which compiles statistics about traffic fatalities and oversees auto safety, has had difficulty pinning down the scope of the back-over problem because there is no central repository of information about the incidents, agency spokeswoman Liz Neblett said.

An NHTSA study of 1998 death certificates from selected states estimated that 120 people die annually from accidental back-overs, mostly young children or the very elderly.

NHTSA is preparing a regulation that would set backup safety standards for large commercial-size trucks, Neblett said, but it is not prepared to require changes from the auto industry.

"The technology for the smaller vehicles is extremely expensive and not foolproof, and to mandate it at this point might give drivers a false sense of security," she said. "So we're going to continue to look at the problems and at the systems."

Safety advocate Fennell said too many lives are at stake for further delay. While a bipartisan Senate bill introduced by Ohio Republican Mike DeWine would require NHTSA to study the problem, Fennell is lobbying members of Congress to force the agency to set safety standards.