A fatal motorcycle accident in San Diego County on Jan. 30, 2011. (CAL FIRE San Diego)

The results were tragic but not surprising last May when Suzanne Randa and her fiance, Thomas Donohoe, crashed while riding Donohoe’s Harley Davidson on Highway 79 near the Southern California city of Loma Linda.

Donohoe, who was wearing a helmet meeting federal safety standards, escaped injury and walked away from the accident. Randa, 49, who wore a so-called novelty helmet that was cheap and stylish but offered no real protection, died at the scene after the  strap broke and her head slammed onto the pavement.

“I just don’t think these helmets should be permitted,” said Randa’s 23-year-old daughter, Kelli Meador, who still has her mother’s scarred turtle-shell headgear.

Even as more than 800,000 novelty helmets are sold in the U.S. every year, and as motorcycle crash deaths mount, federal regulators have never acted with urgency to crack down on the popular but flawed headgear. Proposals to limit sales of the novelty helmets have been delayed over and over again.

It’s not because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets safety standards for helmets, is ignorant of the problem. Six years ago NHTSA hired an independent lab to study seven novelty models, and found they all shared a distinguishing characteristic: they were worthless in a crash.

“All analyses gave a 100-percent probability of brain injuries and skull fracture, indicating that the person wearing the helmet will sustain fatal head injuries,” the evaluation found. It added: “Motorcycle riders who wear novelty helmets and believe that ‘something is better than nothing’ have a false sense of security regarding the protection afforded.”

It remains legal to make and sell novelty helmets as long as they aren’t falsely represented as meeting federal standards. Wearing them is clearly against the law only in a dozen or so states that require motorcyclists to wear helmets meeting the federal standard.

NHTSA says it is studying ways to limit sales and will have a proposal within a few weeks. That, however, would be only one step in an approval process that, even if successful, could take many months or years.

Suzanne Randa, who was killed last May in Southern California in a motorcycle crash while wearing a novelty helmet, with a grandson. (Courtesy of Kelli Meador)

So far the agency has gone no farther than to adopt a rule taking effect next month that it hopes will make it easier for police to spot helmets with fake safety labels. Meanwhile, sales of novelty helmets keep growing — as do the numbers of deaths among riders wearing them.

NHTSA officials declined to be interviewed for this article. A spokesman said the agency does not comment on issues that are the subject of a pending rulemaking.

The lack of resolve by NHTSA to tackle the threat troubles doctors, safety experts and families of crash victims. “It is a huge loophole,” said David Thom, an El Segundo, Calif., engineering consultant and helmet expert.

Numerous tests have shown that certified helmets – those meeting federal standards — save hundreds of lives every year, and cut the risk of a deadly accident by more than a third. They are widely considered the best tool available to prevent fatalities. Novelty helmets, by contrast, account for hundreds of deaths. That is contributing to a troubling trend, as FairWarning has reported, of rising motorcycle fatalities in recent years while traffic deaths generally have declined. The latest federal figures, for 2011, show motorcycle crashes taking 4,612 lives, more than doubling since the mid-1990s and now accounting for one in seven U.S. traffic deaths.

The inaction also spotlights how politics may trump public health considerations in the debate over motorcycle safety. Arguably the most effective strategy in combating substandard helmets has been limited by legislation promoted by rider groups. States including California and Virginia have prohibited state and local police from using motorcycle checkpoints to ticket violators of helmet laws and other rules of the road.

What’s more, even in some states where helmets are required, enforcement is often lax or inconsistent. It typically is left to the discretion of individual officers, many of whom don’t see it as a priority or who have trouble distinguishing the novelty helmets from the certified ones.

Consumer advocates say the situation cries out for changes. “There needs to be more done in eliminating the supply but also in making sure that states with helmet laws are going to crack down,” said Henry Jasny, general counsel of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington-based watchdog group. “People just don’t want to touch it. It is hard to get leadership. It is too political.”

Novelty helmets first became popular as a symbol of resistance in states that required bikers to wear certified helmets. A fight to have California’s helmet law struck down in court was for years led by a man who was repeatedly arrested for violating the helmet law by wearing a baseball cap with a bogus “DOT,” or U.S. Department of Transportation, safety label on the back.

One group, BOLT of California, still takes the position that a state law requiring head protection can be met “so long as you have an object on your head that you claim is a helmet, and it has the letters ‘DOT’ on it.”

Jeff Miller, who suffered multiple skull fractures in a Vermont motorcycle crash last September, with his wife, Dawn.(Courtesy of Dawn Miller)

But other people also buy the helmets, drawn by the low cost and the misconception that they provide a measure of safety. “I am sure there are lots of people out there who do not appreciate the fact it does not provide any protection,” said Thom, the engineering consultant.

NHTSA’s helmet standard for manufacturers, known as Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 218, has been in place since 1974. As with other motor vehicle equipment regulations, it’s enforced through a kind of honor system. Manufacturers determine whether their helmets meet the standard, and attach a “DOT” sticker certifying compliance. The agency conducts spot checks only after the helmets are on the market, with help from independent labs. The numbers of those inspections were halved by NHTSA recently due to budget cuts.

The many helmets that, because of poor performance or false labeling, have gotten failing grades – as many as 30 percent to 40 percent every year – do little to inspire confidence that bad products are kept off the market. (Officials say the percentage is high because they focus testing on suspect helmets.) Critics also say the agency is slow to respond when problems are detected; it issued a consumer alert last year about a helmet made by a California manufacturer that was deemed defective more than three years earlier. (The agency has said that a bankruptcy filing by the helmet firm delayed the notice.)

Sales of novelty helmets have climbed even as the number of states requiring riders to wear helmets has declined. That’s partly because more and more riders are hitting the road. Also, the novelty helmets usually are about one-third the cost of a certified helmet. Some riders find comfort in their lighter weight, even though that is also what makes them dangerous.

It has also been relatively easy to pass them off as legal. The simple stickers NHTSA has required on certified helmets are easy to reproduce for anyone with a computer and printer, while other counterfeit versions are widely available over the Internet. For example, riders can buy two for a dollar at www.chopperstickers.com. The website says customers are responsible for how they use the stickers. The site’s operator anonymously goes on to tout the product, saying: “I have had one on my helmet for about a year now and it has held up fine in [sic] through all kinds of weather and abuse.”

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A rule that NHTSA hopes will make the stickers harder to copy by requiring that they be more detailed — first proposed during the Bush Administration — goes into effect in May. Yet people debate the difference the rule will make, and even NHTSA acknowledges it is unlikely to significantly reduce the annual death toll from motorcycle accidents.

NHTSA has estimated that as many as 754 people die each year in states with mandatory helmet laws because they wore novelty helmets instead of safe headgear, which amounts to nearly one in six rider fatalities nationwide. Yet in the 19 states that require riders of all ages to wear some form of protection, the novelty versions account for about one of every five helmets sold.

Cheap imports from Asia have dominated the novelty market in the U.S., even as some Asian governments have started cracking down on the headgear in their own countries. Another big distributor of novelty helmets, Voss Extreme Sports, is based in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Concerned about rising deaths, provincial officials last year banned motorcyclists from wearing novelty helmets.

Jeff Miller, who faces more surgery and therapy to recover from his head injury suffered in a motorcycle crash. (Courtesy of Dawn Miller)

Novelty Helmets are sold over the Internet by companies with names such as “Helmets Gone Wild” and “Iron Horse Helmets.” Iron Horse sells German World War II-styled novelty helmets, available in camouflage, gun metal, leather and chrome finishes; a “Bone Yard” model with skull-and-crossbones design, available in pink, blue and red; and a “Gladiator” helmet with spikes. Prices start at around $30, and top out with a glittery three-quarter shell model for $305.99 that resembles a ’70s disco ball.

Marketers of novelty helmets are unapologetic, dismissing safety concerns and saying they simply are accommodating consumer demand.

Todd Sobel, the founder and president of Birmingham, Ala.,-based Iron Horse, says that people who buy his helmets know what they are getting into. Most of his helmets, he says, are sold to people in states that do not require headgear, and who just want to look good. “They are not bought for safety. They are bought for style,” he said. He also makes the much-disputed assertion that the headgear provides at least some protection for people who otherwise would not wear anything on their head.

Novelty helmets are usually sold with disclaimers that they are not intended for highway use. But NHTSA is skeptical. The agency said in a notice two years ago that novelty helmets are “minimally used” by groups other than motorcycle riders, and are often sold online on the same websites as motorcycle gear. Its authority to regulate novelty helmets appeared bolstered last year by a change in federal law that puts motor vehicle equipment sold “with the apparent purpose” of safeguarding users within its jurisdiction.

The agency seemed to be getting serious about novelty helmets in 2007 when it subjected seven popular brands to testing by an independent lab. Six of the seven models, distributed by such firms as “Helmets R Us” and “Helmets, Etc.,” failed every phase of the three-part evaluation. In some cases the products allowed more than twice the legally permissible energy impact to the head from a hard fall.

Much of the problem was due to the flawed design of the outer shell and flimsy liners inside. But the straps didn’t work, either, separating on impact — meaning that even if the helmets were more substantial, they were unlikely to stay on a rider’s head and provide critical protection during a crash.

A novelty helmet for sale on the Internet.

Since April 2011, NHTSA says, it has considered developing a rule to crack down on the importation and distribution of novelty helmets. The agency has gone so far as to set an internal timetable for issuing a proposed rule and obtaining public comment. But it has twice postponed plans, most recently citing a need for “additional coordination.” The agency now says it intends to submit a proposal for review to the Office of Management and Budget by late this month.

Meanwhile, around the country, people continue to die and suffer grievous injuries. In Vermont, Jeff Miller, a truck driver who taught helmet safety for a local Harley dealer, crashed his bike into the back of an SUV last September, suffering multiple skull fractures; he was wearing a novelty helmet. “It is not like he didn’t know that the helmet he was wearing was not safe,” said his wife, Dawn. “He thought it was cool.” His medical bills already total more than $500,000 with more surgery and therapy to come. The family is looking to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor, to help cover some of the costs.

California has also seen a rise in accidents involving novelty helmets. “It’s a trend we see quite often up here,” Ariel Gruenthal, deputy coroner in Northern California’s Humboldt County, said of a surge in novelty helmet- related deaths last summer. “We have had straps rip, helmets pop right off.”

“I realize it is a very personal decision, and a lot of people who ride motorcycles don’t want to be wearing a helmet at all, so they wear the bare minimum,” Gruenthal said. “I really encourage people to think about their safety and think about their family and everybody who will be left behind if something happens.”

Randa was a free spirit, who got married as a teenager, divorced, and then lived for a time raising her family on a chicken ranch. She told friends the best job she ever had was working the graveyard shift as a waitress at Denny’s. In a tragic irony, the father of two of her children was killed years ago in a head-on collision on the same road where she perished, just a few miles away.

According to her children, she struggled with alcohol, drug and gambling addictions, but lately seemed to have found happiness with Donohoe, 69, a retired electrician.

Motorcycles were a new adventure, and the experience both exhilarated and terrified her. “My mom was not what you call bike literate,” said Meador, her daughter. “She said it was fun. But then there were a couple of times when she said it was scary because [Donohoe] drove like an idiot. … She loved being on the back of the bike.”

Donohoe was headed to a doctor’s appointment at the VA hospital in Loma Linda when the crash occurred. “He was basically cutting through traffic, misjudged a car … and went down,” said Darren Meyer, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol. “As she tumbled down the road she took more impacts. … He did not even go to the hospital.”

Meyer said the choice of helmets “absolutely” made a difference in their fates.

Randa’s son, Tyler Meador, built a seven-foot cross, which he erected as a memorial near the crash site, with handprints of three of her children, in turquoise, her favorite color. Her children, to cover the cost of her funeral, raised money through an appeal on the Internet.

Donohoe was charged with vehicular manslaughter and with having a provisional motorcycle permit that did not allow him to carry passengers. He said he had purchased the novelty helmet from a roommate. “I tried to get her to get a helmet like mine,” he said, but Randa did not like how she looked in the DOT-certified helmet.

“Of course I feel a sense of responsibility,” he said, adding that he has a new point of view about novelty helmets following the tragedy. “I think they should be regulated. I don’t think they should ever be sold, period.”

(iStockphoto)

Trick quiz: Name the leading source of violent death in America.

If you answered “guns,” you were close. If you said “motor vehicles,” you were also close. But if you answered “motor vehicles and guns,” you get first prize.

Together these two ubiquitous mainstays of the American scene are involved in more than 60,000 fatalities a year. They divide the statistical honors about evenly. In 2011 guns figured in 32,163 deaths; for motor vehicles the fatality toll was 32,367, according to government data (The National Safety Council estimates that crash deaths rose 5 percent in 2012 with the improving economy).

From a public health standpoint, the gun-motor vehicle parallel in violent death involvement is striking as well as instructive. As a starting point it provokes other disturbing questions and answers, such as:

How many guns and motor vehicles are in the hands of American shooters and drivers? (300 million and 250 million, respectively.) How does U.S. gun and motor vehicle ownership compare to the rest of the world? (On both counts this country vastly outpaces all other nations.) How does the U.S. experience with gun deaths and motor vehicle deaths compare with that of other comparable nations? (Very poorly. Of all firearm deaths in the 23 highest-income nations, 80 percent occur in the U.S., even though the combined population of the other 22 is twice that of this country. As for highway crash deaths, the U.S. lags far behind other high-income nations, with about twice as many such deaths per capita.)

Quibblers may challenge the similarities by pointing out that in its data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes a categorical distinction between gun-related injuries and those involving motor vehicles. That’s true, but it’s a distinction without a difference. CDC denominates gun deaths as “intentional injuries” and car crash deaths as “unintentional injuries”. But in physics, both involve the same deadly mechanism – kinetic energy gone amok. Being hit by a speeding car and being hit by a bullet have the same lethal results, intended or otherwise.

Nor is the distinction clear-cut when it comes to intention, which is grounded in human behavior and motive. The Baton Rouge teenager who accidently killed his 2-year-old brother in January when the gun he was playing with went off certainly did not “intend” to cause the child’s death. And what about the car manufacturer who knowingly sells a vehicle with a lethal safety defect; might not its behavior kill people, whether “intentionally” or not?

Yet despite their discouraging parallels, deaths from firearms and deaths from motor vehicle crashes are strikingly different in one critically important way: over time, gun fatalities have crept upward, while road crash fatalities, which topped 43,000 in 2005, have been dropping despite increases in the number of cars and of vehicle miles traveled.

And therein lies a valuable message for injury-prevention advocates. Public health progress depends on implementing lessons learned from large-scale chronic assaults on human life and limb, of which motor vehicle crash injuries and gunshot injuries are leading examples. Efforts to change public policy in favor of reducing injuries caused by harmful products such as guns and cars inevitably confront powerful organized opposition; the auto companies fought tooth and nail against federal vehicle safety regulation before it was finally enacted in the 1960s, just as the gun manufacturers and National Rifle Association are fighting against gun control today. Another case of instructive similarities?

In the past four decades auto safety regulation, while too often putting the interests of manufacturers over those of consumers, still has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented millions of severe injuries. Car crash trauma remains a pressing public health problem, but it would be far worse if federal and state government mandates – driver testing and licensing, vehicle registration, and vehicle safety standards – weren’t in place. Adopting similar controls for guns would result, slowly but surely, in a downward path for firearm trauma.

The painful but unavoidable fact is that even when opposition is overcome and countermeasures are adopted, results come gradually at best; the less aggressive the countermeasures, the slower the payoff. For gun control advocates, like auto safety proponents before them, the road to results will be a long, hard – but ultimately worthwhile – slog. It takes incredible levels of persistence in the face of tsunami-level lobbying and PR efforts funded by seemingly bottomless corporate war chests, a willingness to constantly badger public policymakers for mandated solutions, and a constant reminder to the media that this public health problem won’t go away without meaningful government action. What it shouldn’t take is another Newtown.

Ben Kelley, a former Department of Transportation official, is on the board of the Center for Auto Safety, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Electronic billboard used in Swedish study.(Scenic America)

A Swedish study has found that drivers take long gazes at electronic billboards, possibly raising the risk of highway crashes.

The new research has put the U.S. billboard industry into a defensive mode. In an effort to dismiss the findings, the industry’s top trade group quickly cited an unpublished U.S. government study to argue that the electronic displays pose no traffic safety hazard.

But as FairWarning reported last February, publication of the federal study has been delayed indefinitely because expert reviewers concluded that its key findings were not believable.

Even so, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, in a statement issued last week, cited the botched research by the Federal Highway Administration as evidence the new Swedish study “has little relevance to billboards in the United States.” The statement adds: “In February 2012, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) made information about its research available….These documents indicated that drivers’ attention is drawn to digital billboards for periods of time ‘well below’ safety thresholds.”

The Swedish study, published online by the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, will be presented this week in Washington D.C. at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, part of the National Academy of Sciences. Jerry Wachtel, a traffic safety expert who chairs a panel that will hear the presentation, criticized the industry for citing the flawed FHWA research to debunk the Swedish findings.

“I think it is not only dishonest, but I think it is intentionally dishonest,” Wachtel said.

Nicole Hayes, spokeswoman for the Outdoor Advertising Association, declined comment on Wachtel’s remarks, but defended her group’s statement about the government research. In the past, Wachtel has been critical of some industry-sponsored studies, and the Outdoor Advertising Association has accused him of holding an anti-billboard bias.

With billions of dollars potentially at stake, billboard companies have been making an aggressive push to install more of the lucrative, eye-grabbing electronic signs, which typically flash a new message every six to eight seconds. Of more than 400,000 billboards in the U.S., estimates of digital displays range from about 2,000 to as many as 3,200. Billboard opponents, who long have attacked traditional billboards as unsightly, have seized on the issue of driver distraction to fight the spread of electronic signs.

The Swedish billboard study used sophisticated eye-tracking equipment to measure the time drivers gazed at electronic billboards and at conventional highway signs. The 41 participants drove a route in Stockholm that included four electronic billboards and seven other signs. The researchers found that glance times at digital billboards were “significantly longer” than at other signs. In some cases, drivers stared at the electronic displays for more than two seconds—a length of time that some research has linked to a higher crash risk.

The study reached no conclusion on whether digital signs are actually dangerous. “Our data show that the electronic billboards, in fact, attract more glances than the other signs,” it says. “This clearly indicates that they do what they are built for. Whether they attract too much attention and constitute a bona fide traffic safety hazard cannot be answered conclusively based on the present data.”

“This study validates what is common sense when it comes to digital billboards,” said Mary Tracy, president of Scenic America, an anti-billboard group. “Bright, constantly changing signs on the side of the road are meant to attract and keep the attention of drivers, and this study confirms that is exactly what they do.”

The U.S. research cited by the industry was announced five years ago, and had been eagerly awaited by state and local officials and other players involved in the debate over the impact on traffic safety. Like the Swedish study, it involved measuring the eye movements of drivers along prescribed routes in Reading, Pa., and Richmond, Va., featuring both electronic and static signs.

Electronic billboard used in Swedish study.(Scenic America)

Originally scheduled to be completed in 2009, the draft study was submitted by an FHWA contractor in September, 2010, and circulated for internal review, according to documents obtained by FairWarning under the Freedom of information Act.

Twice in 2011, FHWA officials were scheduled to present the findings at transportation conferences but begged off without explanation.

According to agency documents, the eye-glance times recorded in the study were so brief that the experts — identified only as “REVIEWER 1″ and “REVIEWER 2″ — said they were unbelievable.

“The reported glances to billboards here are on the order of 10-times shorter than values reported elsewhere,” one reviewer wrote. “The pattern of results certainly raises questions over the quality and legitimacy of the underlying data.”

Said the other: “The data reported as average glance durations are not possible.”

In defending the industry statements about the FHWA research, Hayes of the Outdoor Advertising Association cited internal agency memos that FairWarning posted on its website last February. The memos summarized measurements showing that glances of drivers away from the road were extremely brief, and therefore below levels deemed unsafe. However, those were the glances that the expert reviewers said were too short to be accurate.

FHWA officials last year told FairWarning that their study remained under internal review, and that they still hoped to publish it. In an email last week to FairWarning, agency spokesman Doug Hecox said “a publication date has not yet been set.”

(iStockphoto)

The nation’s red and blue states often are miles apart in social attitudes and, of course, political outlook.

It turns out that they also divide into distinct camps when it comes to a grimmer measure — fatal traffic accidents.

To an extent that mystifies safety experts and other observers, federal statistics show that people in red states are more likely to die in road crashes. The least deadly states – those with the fewest crash deaths per 100,000 people – overwhelmingly are blue.

The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest-fatality states were blue. What’s more, the place with the nation’s lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia.

Massachusetts was lowest among the states, with 4.79 road deaths per 100,000 people. By contrast, red Wyoming had a fatality rate of 27.46 per 100,000.

When shown the pattern, author Thomas Frank — who has examined the nation’s political culture in such books as “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” – called it “amazing.”

“This is someplace where you would not expect to see a partisan divide,” Frank said.

Even the former federal auto safety researcher who brought the numbers to FairWarning’s attention, Louis V. Lombardo, couldn’t explain them. “It may be something we don’t have a definitive answer for,” he said.

Some observers offered the possible explanation that blue states tend to adopt stronger safety laws, while red states opt for looser regulation, presumably leading to more fatalities. For example, red Texas last month opened a toll road with a speed limit of 85 mph, the nation’s highest.

But the sweeping generalization doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

For one thing, federal pressure in many cases has prodded states to enforce similar safety rules, such as seat belt requirements. And states don’t always act along predictable liberal-versus-conservative lines. As FairWarning has reported, blue Michigan in April repealed its requirement that all motorcyclists wear helmets, while some states with the toughest helmet laws are in the Deep South.

Traffic safety experts generally suggest that a mix of factors accounts for the varying rates. Possible variables include access to top-level trauma centers, weather conditions and how much of a state is rural, because rural residents may drive longer distances on narrow, winding roads. Lower income and education levels may also contribute to higher death rates.

Complicating things further is the possibility that deaths per 100,000 residents isn’t the best yardstick for comparisons. Fatalities per total miles traveled, some experts say, is better.

For his part, Lombardo says he’s less interested in the causes of the state differences than in reducing the toll of U.S. traffic deaths, estimated at 32,885 in 2010.

For instance, he advocates getting crash victims medical treatment more quickly by expanding air ambulance services.

The key question, Lombardo added, is “how do we move the people, and [have] the people then move their politicians, to do the right thing?”

If he needs evidence that at least some parts of the country can do better, Lombardo can point to the striking red-blue divide in the accompanying chart.

(iStockphoto)

The political rhetoric over health care this election season may leave voters confused, but they can be sure of at least this much: One of America’s more egregious public health afflictions, deaths and injuries in car crashes, is being massively ignored.

This should be a warning sign to the American people, since political leaders and their families, like the rest of us, are not immune from firsthand encounters with highway tragedies. President Clinton’s biological father died after being ejected in a car crash in the 1940s. As a teenage driver in the 1960s, Laura Bush struck and killed a family neighbor in a crash.  President Obama’s father died in a car wreck in 1982. In 1972, Vice President (then U.S. Senator) Joseph Biden’s wife and infant child were killed in a car-truck collision. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, as a young Mormon missionary, was severely injured in a collision in France that killed another passenger. These experiences mirror those of millions of ordinary Americans, yet they have failed to prod the nation’s policy leaders into aggressive action to stem the carnage.

Despite more than 30,000 deaths and more than 2.2 million crash injuries per year, highway safety has largely fallen off the political radar screen.  Since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson publicly confronted a hostile auto industry by demanding, and getting, new laws governing the safety of automobiles, more than two million Americans have died of crash injuries. Since then no president has taken a forceful public stand in favor of strong government action to counter the death toll.

The laws promoted by Johnson and subsequent regulations and policies have helped,  leading to safer auto designs, better roads, and drunk driving and seat belt laws – proving that good government can save lives and livelihoods. But crash injuries are still the leading cause of death to children, teenagers and young adults, and a major cause of violent death for all age groups.

Since 1981 — when the Reagan administration put coal industry lobbyist Ray Peck in charge of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, attempted to revoke air bag regulations, and cut the agency staff by one-third — the agency has been increasingly captive to the industry it was formed to regulate.

In place of decisive action, the government’s severely underfunded, industry- influenced highway safety efforts are routinely reactive, accomplishing too little, too late, for too many Americans.  When the auto industry began marketing unstable, top-heavy SUVs in the 1980s, NHTSA, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, refused to adopt vehicle regulations limiting the rollover risk of such vehicles – which ended up contributing to some 10,000 deaths a year in rollover crashes. When Toyota drivers experienced  sudden unintended acceleration episodes, NHTSA lacked the resources and expertise to address the complex but foreseeable risks of sudden acceleration from sophisticated electronic controls now standard in new vehicles.

Although current Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and NHTSA Administrator David Strickland have highlighted the perils of driver distraction, car companies still are racing to add infotainment features to new models – some of them featuring video display screens on their instrument consoles – that are bound to further divert drivers’ eyes and attention from the road. The mounting safety risk from infotainment systems seems to be widely viewed as inevitable and beyond society’s ability to control. Meanwhile, Texas has adopted an 85 mph speed limit for a soon-to-open toll road, a move likely to be copied by other states, but that would be off the table if safety was a prime concern.

What underlies the widespread toleration of highway mayhem by politicians, regulators, and the public?  Political indifference has a high cost in lost  lives, livelihoods and wellness. If the commitment were there, we believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of lives could be saved by a single measure: making electronic automatic crash notification systems standard, thus reducing delays in treating seriously injured crash victims.

But for whatever reasons, this country lags far behind other advanced nations in coming to grips with the problem. According to World Health Organization estimates, per capita road deaths in many countries are well below the U.S. Yet there is no demand to draw lessons from other countries to take tough steps that would protect American motorists.

From 2008 until early this year, U.S. road deaths fell substantially – in part due to the great recession — setting the stage for further complacency. But in the first quarter of this year the deaths turned upward, doubtless signaling an increase in driving as the economy began to modestly improve. If the upward trend continues, it will be a further signal to policymakers that the U.S. needs to be doing much more to curb lethal violence on its highways.

(Ben Kelley, a former Department of Transportation official, is on the board of the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Auto Safety. Louis Lombardo is an auto safety researcher who retired from NHTSA after 27 years and now writes on the subject at www.CareForCrashVictims.com)

Anti-helmet law demonstrators in recent rally at state capitol in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein / Albany Times Union)

WASHINGTON – In a highly touted safety achievement, deaths on the nation’s roads and highways have fallen sharply in recent years, to the lowest total in more than a half-century. But motorcyclists have missed out on that dramatic improvement, and the news for them has been increasingly grim.

So it might be no surprise that biker groups are upset with Washington. The twist is what they are asking lawmakers and regulators to do: Back away from promoting or enforcing requirements for safe helmets, the most effective way known to save bikers’ lives.

Fatalities from motorcycle crashes have more than doubled since the mid-1990s. The latest figures show these accidents taking about 4,500 lives a year, or one in seven U.S. traffic deaths.

Yet if the biker groups’ lobbyists and congressional allies have their way, the nation’s chief traffic cop — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA — will be thwarted in its efforts to reduce the body count. The agency would be blocked from providing any more grants to states to conduct highway stops of motorcyclists to check for safety violations such as wearing helmets that don’t meet federal standards.

Beyond that, the rider groups are seeking to preserve what essentially is a gag rule that since 1998 has prevented NHTSA from advocating safety measures at the state and local levels, including promoting life-saving helmet laws. And the bikers’ lobbyists, backed by grassroots activists and an organization whose members include a “Who’s Who” of motorcycle manufacturers, already have derailed a measure lawmakers envisioned to reinstate financial penalties for states lacking helmet laws.

Those moves partly are intended to maintain the bikers’ clout in state legislatures, which have kept rolling back motorcycle helmet regulations for three decades. With Michigan’s repeal in April of its nearly 50-year-old helmet requirement covering all riders, only 19 states have such helmet laws, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In the late 1970s, by contrast, 47 states had requirements covering all riders.

“This is…an interesting and dangerous road they are going down,” said Jackie Gillan, president of the Washington-based nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “They are so emboldened now, not only do they try to repeal laws and stop them from being enacted, they try to stop the hands of law enforcement, saying you cannot use grant money to have motorcycle checkpoints. Can you imagine if they said the same thing about sobriety checkpoints?”

Biker groups, contending that helmet laws curtail personal freedom, say the federal government instead should emphasize rider training to prevent crashes from happening in the first place. They urge NHTSA, which has spent upwards of $30 million on training through an industry-endorsed grant program that Congress established in 2005, to step up that effort.

But it is far from clear that training does anything to reduce crashes or deaths. A 2007 Indiana study, for instance, found that riders who completed a basic training course were 44 percent more likely to be involved in an accident than untrained riders. Researchers speculated that the courses gave riders unwarranted confidence, and that they ended up taking more risks.

Emily Chow for FairWarning

Mandatory helmet laws are widely considered the closest thing to a silver bullet that regulators have to thwart deadly accidents. NHTSA estimates that helmets saved 1,483 lives in 2009, and that another 732 deaths could have been avoided if all riders had worn them. The social costs of the carnage are also huge: a 2008 agency estimate concluded that $1.3 billion in medical bills and lost productivity would have been saved if all bikers had worn helmets.

The paradox between what biker groups are lobbying for versus what most safety experts say really works riles regulators and other public health advocates.

“You cannot be in this battle and not be frustrated by this senselessness,” said Michael Dabbs, president of the Brain Injury Association of Michigan.

He added that the personal freedom that riders seek would have socially unacceptable consequences if carried to its logical extreme. “Maybe we ought to save some of the costs when police or emergency responders go to the scene of a crash and the person is not wearing a helmet,” Dabbs said. “Perhaps they ought to be left there like roadkill.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent investigative and advisory agency, includes motorcycle helmets among its “most wanted” transportation safety improvements and has urged states to make them mandatory. Likewise, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland has said of helmets: “No other single countermeasure offers a comparable body of supporting scientific evidence confirming its potential for saving lives of motorcyclists.”

Libertarian Message

That motorcyclists have evaded the kind of regulation that has made seat belts and car seats standard equipment in other motor vehicles shows the influence of a vocal minority of riders whose libertarian message seems to resonate more than ever with lawmakers inside and outside the Beltway. And their efforts receive support from the leading motorcycle manufacturers. Manufacturers generally endorse the use of helmets but, loath to offend their customers, they also are an important dues-paying membership bloc in the American Motorcyclist Association, an ardent opponent of helmet laws.

For example, Harley-Davidson Inc. said through a spokeswoman that it “supports and encourages safety for all motorcycle riders, but believes in the personal freedom of people making the choices that are right for them regarding helmet use.”

The rider lobby’s powerful friends include U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., whose state is home to Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson. He has led efforts in the House to block NHTSA from promoting state and local safety measures and using federal funds for motorcycle checkpoints.

The repeal of Michigan’s long-standing helmet law had been opposed by a coalition of more than two dozen medical and public health groups led by the Brain Injury Association of Michigan. Public opinion, too, weighed against the move — a poll indicated that 80 percent wanted to keep the helmet law. State safety officials predicted the repeal would lead to at least 30 more deaths a year.

Motorcycle activists, led by the local chapter of a group calling itself American Bikers Aiming Toward Education, or ABATE, framed the issue as a matter of personal liberty. They also argued that the repeal would draw more riders to the state and increase tourism.

In Michigan, riders 20 and younger still must wear helmets, and the new law requires motorcyclists to have at least $20,000 in medical insurance. But those who advocated keeping the helmet requirement for all riders said the $20,000 in insurance would not come close to covering the cost of a catastrophic injury.

Compelling Evidence

Nationally, the evidence that helmets prevent head injuries and deaths has long been compelling. Two decades ago, a Government Accountability Office analysis identified 46 academic studies that showed helmets saving lives and reducing the social burden of caring for injured riders.

Even the American Motorcyclist Association readily acknowledges that helmets that meet Transportation Department standards can prevent serious injury or even death in the event of a crash, and encourages their use, although the group still says riders should have the option of not wearing one.

Recent studies also have rebutted a long-standing assertion by rider groups that helmets can increase the chances of cervical spine injuries because of the greater torque they place on the neck. Johns Hopkins University researchers, in a study published last year that reviewed 40,000 motorcycle collisions, found the opposite to be true: the helmeted riders were 22 percent less likely to suffer cervical spine injury than those without helmets.

“We are debunking a popular myth,” said Adil H. Haider, the leader of the study and an assistant professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins.

Motorcycle groups have also become better organized and funded, roaring to life with Washington lobbyists and thousands of grassroots volunteers to fight helmet requirements on the federal and state levels.

The American Motorcyclist Association – whose corporate members include Harley-Davidson and North American divisions of Yamaha, Kawasaki, Honda and Suzuki – has spent $3.8 million lobbying Congress on helmet laws and other issues over the last decade, while doling out more than $200,000 in campaign contributions to members, according to OpenSecrets.org, a database run by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The Motorcycle Riders Foundation spent $2.1 million in lobbying during the same period.

Emily Chow for FairWarning

That is the force that Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., a long-time supporter of mandatory helmet laws, ran into last December. He was poised to introduce a proposal to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee that would have forced states to pass helmet laws or else lose millions in federal highway funds. It would have reinstated a similar requirement that, after a lobbying campaign by motorcyclist groups, was repealed in 1995.

In a preemptive strike, the rider groups alerted their members and encouraged them to connect with their lawmakers on the issue. They had defeated a similar helmet proposal two-to-one in 2005. Lautenberg ditched his pro-helmet idea without even offering it up for formal consideration. A Lautenberg spokesman said that the senator “remains committed to strengthening helmet laws and is pursuing several strategies to increase helmet use across the country.”

Death Toll Climbing

As more riders have gotten on the road and the number of states with mandatory helmet laws has declined, biker deaths have soared.

The death toll climbed from 2,116 in 1997 to 4,502 in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available. Motorcycle-related fatalities accounted for 14 percent of the 32,885 deaths overall from motor vehicle crashes in 2010, which officially is the lowest total since 1949.

The victims last year included 17- year-old Caroline Found of Iowa City, Iowa, who died after she lost control of her moped and struck a tree. They also included Philip Contos, 55, who was killed while participating in a rally to protest New York’s mandatory helmet law. Police say Contos, who resided near Syracuse, N.Y., would have survived had he been obeying the law.

The irony of Contos’s death attracted widespread media attention, although friends say he would have been repulsed by the idea that he had become a poster boy for helmet laws.

Four teenage friends of Found, motivated by her death, launched a campaign to persuade the Iowa legislature to enact a helmet law. (Along with Illinois and New Hampshire, Iowa allows riders of all ages to go helmet-less.) Their bid fell short. “It is getting to the point where we’re going to have to bubble wrap everyone just to protect them from everything,” a state legislator told the young activists, explaining his opposition to a ban. “I think there’s got to be some common sense here.”

Helmet advocates say it is the public that ends up getting ripped off when it has to pick up the tab for health costs associated with catastrophic accidents.

“If you don’t wear a helmet, and you sustain a moderate to severe injury that doesn’t kill you, you are going to be a drain on society for the rest of your life,” said Thomas J. Esposito, chief of the Division of Trauma, Surgical Critical Care and Burns at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago.

NHTSA once tried to take a lead role in providing information to states considering helmet laws. It set aside $330,000 in 1995 and 1996 for the cause, including a $149,000 contract for a video and white paper for state legislators.

The video – titled “Without Motorcycle Helmets, We All Pay the Price” – featured testimonials from helmet-wearing crash survivors and a trauma-room physician who compared helmets to “a vaccine” because of the compelling evidence they reduced brain injuries.

Controversy revved up when the Motorcycle Riders Foundation obtained an early copy of the pro-helmet video and began distributing it to friends in Congress. Rider groups portrayed the situation as an example of NHTSA using federal tax money to lobby against the interests of taxpaying bikers.

Helmet law protest. (Skip Dickstein / Albany Times Union)

They found a champion in Sensenbrenner, and in 1998 Congress enacted a sweeping measure that barred NHTSA from attempting to influence state and local legislators on any pending legislation. NHTSA representatives could appear as witnesses, but only in response to an official invitation.

With NHTSA more recently signaling stepped-up interest in promoting helmet use, Sensenbrenner has emerged as a lead opponent again, sponsoring a resolution, now in the hands of a House subcommittee, that would reaffirm the agency’s lobbying ban.

Novelty Helmets

NHTSA is facing opposition to motorcycle checkpoints, too. The agency in 2010 earmarked $350,000 to help state police set up stops to check motorcyclists for safety violations. One intent is to crack down on so-called novelty helmets, which do not meet federal standards but account for an estimated one in five of the helmets riders wear. The helmets have become popular because they are lightweight and come in various styles — and because they can keep police away in states that mandate helmet use.

But they are also dangerous. “They are just plastic toys, essentially,” says Tim McMahon, a San Jose, Calif., personal-injury lawyer, who won a $1.7 million injury award for a Fresno man who suffered brain damage from a 2005 crash while wearing a novelty helmet that he thought was safe.

Despite the risks, motorcyclists have gone to court to block regulation. In a test case, four bikers who were ticketed in 2008 at a checkpoint in New York for lacking approved helmets filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that inspections singling out motorcyclists were illegal discrimination. A judge dismissed the suit last year.

The American Motorcyclist Association, taking another tack, fired off a letter in late 2010 urging NHTSA administrator Strickland to suspend the federal checkpoint grant program, saying there were unanswered questions about the program’s implementation, legality and efficacy. Strickland declined.

Biker groups were further incensed when the agency subsequently made a grant to the state of Georgia, which used the money in March, 2011 to monitor bikers headed south to the legendary Daytona Beach Bike Week.

Motorcycle activists again found a sympathetic ear in Sensenbrenner, who introduced legislation to end federal funding of motorcycle-only roadside checkpoints. The anti-checkpoint measure may be considered by a House-Senate conference committee currently working on a long-term surface transportation bill.

“These checkpoints are not an effective use of taxpayer money,” Sensenbrenner said, in a prepared statement in response to questions. “Motorcycle-only checkpoints force law enforcement officials to play ‘nanny state’ to all riders rather than focusing on those who are endangering themselves and others on the road, and do not address the factors that contribute to motorcycle crashes.”

Biker groups raise similar points.

“The federal government says all day long: ‘You guys are a huge problem. You are killing yourselves out there. You need to start wearing helmets.’ But then they do not want to put resources” toward training and accident prevention, said Jeff Hennie, a Washington-based lobbyist for the Motorcycle Riders Foundation.

American Motorcyclist Association spokesman Pete terHorst added that helmet mandates create “unintended consequences,” drawing scarce resources away from alternatives like training.

But the advantages of training are questionable. A 2009 study for the federal Transportation Research Board found that the evidence was inconclusive about whether educating riders through formal programs made them any safer.

Other studies have shown that, while training helps riders pass basic skills tests, their chances of getting in a crash after six months of driving are about the same as untrained riders. That raised questions even for Tim Buche, president of the industry-sponsored Motorcycle Safety Foundation, which has developed the training materials most widely used in the U.S. “Maybe the training does not change someone’s true behavior for the long term,” he speculated.

Even if training pays off, public health advocates argue that relying on it exclusively would be equivalent to, in the automotive world, exempting people who take a driver’s education course from requirements to use seat belts or to put children in car seats.

Doctors such as Esposito who provide care for the people hurt in those crashes, though, sometimes are mystified about why riders don’t take it upon themselves to wear safe helmets for their own protection.

Asked whether he often thinks about how a patient with a head injury could have avoided his plight simply by wearing a helmet, Esposito replied: “All the time.”