A Wall Street Journal article, ‘The Key to Safer Roads‘, discussed the number one cause of accidental death in the United States: car accidents.
Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, is lobbying for a review of safety priorities for the Department of Transportation.
“There’s nothing rational about the way we set highway safety priorities,” Mr. Lund says in the Insurance Institute’s Aug. 21 “Status Report” newsletter.
Mr. Lund’s organization is the safety research and advocacy arm of the insurance industry. The IIHS has been critical of the government’s highway safety policies over the past few years, usually arguing that the government wasn’t moving fast enough to require better crash-prevention technology from auto makers.
Mr. Lund and the Insurance Institute also say recent laws banning motorists from using mobile phones behind the wheel don’t correlate with a significant reduction in accidents.
The Transportation Department responded to Mr. Lund’s comments:
“Safety is the Department of Transportation’s number one priority, which is why we are aggressively and urgently tackling a number of risks to drivers’ safety. We are going to continue taking drunk drivers off the road, getting people to put down their phones and other distractions, making sure cars and trucks are safe to drive, and doing whatever else is necessary to keep Americans safe behind the wheel,” a DOT spokeswoman said in a statement.
