To Protect Pedestrians, Stop Yelling at Drivers

Speaking with a reporter in 1977, William Haddon, the first administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, presented an unorthodox solution to the country’s vehicular-death problem: Don’t preach to drivers. At the time, not unlike today, public service announcements and police patrols blamed road fatalities on drivers’ mistakes.

“I think that’s too high a penalty for being human,” Haddon told the reporter. “We’ve all been miseducated that the way to solve this problem is to have more squads of police chasing Americans so that they wouldn’t drive 120 miles per hour rather than arranging cars so they can’t go that fast.”

Amid a massive rise in pedestrian fatalities , which in the on the road every year. That means mistakes on the road come with more serious consequences. To err is human, but traffic deaths are not inevitable if regulators and automakers protect people from the worst consequences of their mistakes. Congress created the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do exactly that—partly in response to the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose testimony demonstrated that American cars’ built-in dangers were well known to automakers. Under Haddon’s leadership, NHTSA created the first federal safety for car manufacturers in 1967. Among other rules, the government required seat belts, which prevented passengers from being ejected in a crash; collapsible steering columns, which kept drivers from being impaled; and adhesive windshield bonding, which meant that, even if you weren’t wearing a seat belt in a crash, you were less likely to be killed by a sharp piece of glass. None of these regulations prevented errors; each addressed a dangerous condition inside the car to prevent drivers’ mistakes from becoming fatal.