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I take into consideration alot that folks insist on ignoring the "basic rule" of drive for the conditions (essentially speed), I see it all over the place here in Oregon, balls to the wall! It's H in A.
&, how dark , foggy or rainy does it have to get before you turn headlights on, guy?
.......might contridute out in Wyoming to the low population warped statistics covered ealier.
As many of the posters noted, two factors control primarily here. First, when your state has a population significantly less than that of Baltimore, any event is going to skew the stats. Second, the number one factor in lethality in accidents is speed. I could look up the formula I used to teach, but essentially it is speed is twice as important as mass in the kinematics of trauma - squared. Hit anything at 75 and you are going to damage something. Combine the state's long highways with their high speed limits, time to a trauma center and low state population, we are going to rock those stats.
And not in a good way...
Incorrect. Freeways have the highest speeds but the lowest fatality rates. The US automotive fatality rate went down when the 55mph speed limit was abolished.
Part of the reason for higher fatality rates in rural states is the lack of emergency care close to the accident site.
...and the newer, faster, 'safer' (with front, side and rear air-bags + instant accident reporting via on-star) vehicles DO tend to enhance the '10 foot tall and bullet-proof' mindset as well.
"I paid over $50,000 for this vehicle, therefore I am in-VIN-cible ! ! !....now GET thee out of my way, little-person !"
...and the newer, faster, 'safer' (with front, side and rear air-bags + instant accident reporting via on-star) vehicles DO tend to enhance the '10 foot tall and bullet-proof' mindset as well.
"I paid over $50,000 for this vehicle, therefore I am in-VIN-cible ! ! !....now GET thee out of my way, little-person !"
Speed limits were higher 45 years ago when cars were supposedly "unsafe at any speed".
why our cars and trucks don't get cancer like Utah, but we use a larger sand partical that seems to help and the Hwy dept been spraying snow packed roads and spreading the grit here, they are spraying roads too if they can before storms that keeps the ice ansd snow pack down
Okay, I went and looked it up. KE = M x Vsquared / 2.
Kinetic energy (the damaging energy transferred to the soft body tissues) is equal to M (mass, or weight) times V (velocity, or speed) SQUARED, the whole thing divided by two.
Here's the example: A man weighing 175 pounds running into a wall at walking speed (about 3.5 mph) hurts. The same 175 pound man running full tilt (between 5 and 6 mph) into a wall injures. Really - it's an experiment you can try at home.
When the AMA declared trauma was a disease in the 1980s, it engendered a whole bunch of studies. This was the output of one of the studies involving highway fatalities. It grew into the Advanced Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support program, which I taught for years.
I grant you time to surgery over 1 hour is a big factor too, but the studies are pretty conclusive. Speed is the biggest factor in lethality in auto accidents. Google PHTLS and "Kinematics of Trauma" together for more.
Okay, I went and looked it up. KE = M x Vsquared / 2.
Kinetic energy (the damaging energy transferred to the soft body tissues) is equal to M (mass, or weight) times V (velocity, or speed) SQUARED, the whole thing divided by two.
Here's the example: A man weighing 175 pounds running into a wall at walking speed (about 3.5 mph) hurts. The same 175 pound man running full tilt (between 5 and 6 mph) into a wall injures. Really - it's an experiment you can try at home.
When the AMA declared trauma was a disease in the 1980s, it engendered a whole bunch of studies. This was the output of one of the studies involving highway fatalities. It grew into the Advanced Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support program, which I taught for years.
I grant you time to surgery over 1 hour is a big factor too, but the studies are pretty conclusive. Speed is the biggest factor in lethality in auto accidents. Google PHTLS and "Kinematics of Trauma" together for more.
And please drive safely!
You can cite the physics of mass and energy all you want as the be-all and end-all of personal injuries in accidents, but it's an entirely misleading number.
As well, your example of running into a wall is absolutely not indicative of what happens in a typical automobile accident.
Here's why:
What counts is not the total energy that is dissipated in an accident as a vehicle goes from it's road speed to the final stop ... but the amount of energy that is transferred by the vehicle to the occupants.
With the advent of current crush-zone construction, safety belts and air bags, the typical vehicle on the road today ... most of the vehicle fleet today averages 11 years old, well past your 1980's criteria standard pre-dating the safety developments ... the energy transferred to the occupants is greatly reduced to significantly less than the amounts that cause serious trauma.
As a first responder to some accidents, not as a pro, but as someone passing by ... I have seen vehicles in the past decade in off-road excursions (one of the biggest types of accidents here in Wyoming) roll, toss about, turn, strike trees/fences/highway dividers ... and the occupants were out of the vehicle, looking at the totall'ed vehicle. One of those "oh, sh*t" moments ....
I've driven past hundreds of folks who have had these types of incidents, at highway speeds and lower speeds on our county roads, and stopped to inquire if they were OK. I've yet to encounter anybody who received injuries requiring immediate medical attention; most just wave me on and they're already on their cell phones seeking vehicle assistance, tow, vehicle recovery, etc.
As well, I have first-hand knowledge of what it's like to be in a T-bone by a 80,000lb loaded semi-rig collision at 55 mph, both vehicles ... (reported previously on C-D threads) ... where a drunk semi driver took a left turn to nowhere in a stretch of Hwy 52 just West of I-25, hitting the oncoming 1982 M-B 300Dt (ah, that's me). My car didn't go from 55 mph to zero in a millisecond, it went from 55 mph to bouncing off the front bumper of the truck, sliding off the roadway, and then doing a couple of 360's before coming to a rest. The extent of my injuries were a broken rib, bruising on the left side of my body, some superficial cuts on my left forearm from the breaking glass of the driver's window, and soft tissue damage from the whiplash. If I'd made the false assumption as your physics formula dictates that all of the energy of the 80,000 lb semi rig was instantly dissipated at the point of impact ... his front bumper onto the left side of my car, centered on the driver's side door post ... I'd have been toast. But it didn't happen that way, the initial impact energy was absorbed and dissipated by the crush zone construction of the car and a slight bending of the big front bumper of the truck. The rest of the impact and car's energy was dissipated over the travel of a couple hundred feet excursion off the roadway. Granted, the 1980's 123 series M-B cars were of superior crush zone construction compared to most of the vehicle fleet at the time, but the car did it's job in accordance with it's design parameters; the car was destroyed but saved my life.
Additionally, I had a customer fall asleep driving his 1972 M-B 280SEL 4.5 in the Idaho Springs area of Eastbound I-70 ... if you know the road at all, there's an almost vertical rock face by the side of the road. His 'benz climbed that rock a bit at 75 mph before rolling over, then bounced back into the traffic lanes and rolled once more before sliding around to a rest. He was uninjured, having used his seat/shoulder belt. The driver's door fell off in his hands, and he walked away. That was some of the earliest crush-zone construction in a car and it did it's job admirably.
I'd mention, too, that I had a son fall asleep in his 1972 2002 BMW, another early crush zone construction car. I'd given it to him as his college car and he was pushing his capabilities to come home for a Thanksgiving visit; drove straight through 1,200 miles. At C-470 and Santa Fe, SW of Denver, he went off the road at approx 70 mph and rolled the car. For him, it was one of those "oh sh*t, Dad's gonna' be pissed" moments. The extent of his injuries? a bruise on his left forearm and a small cut above his left eyebrow. He'd gotten out of the car by crawling over to the right side door and opening it when the left door wouldn't open. Again, crush zone construction saved his life. PS ... I put him into a 1974 240D MB after that; with the automatic transmission it defined slow car, a real step-down from his tuned and built up 2002.
I've got a neighbor here in SE Wyoming who has totalled out 3 Chevy vans in the last decade. All off-road excursions, one in clear dry conditions where she was just way too close to the pavement edge and overcorrected to bring the vehicle back onto the road. A very typical scenario, according to my neighbor who is a WHP sergeant. Anyway, she's not sustained any more serious injury than a bruised ego and some higher insurance rates.
The real problem that presents in highway injury/death rates here in rural Wyoming is the significant time delay in receiving medical evacuation and assistance. A one-car accident in a rural area with injuries can wait a long time before anybody else knows about it, and one can bleed to death in that time frame.
Considering that I've traveled I-80 and not passed or been passed by another vehicle for much of a 80-100 mile trip, say Rawlins to Laramie ... it's likely for many travelers that even an interstate highway can have a delay before any assistance can be had. I just drove the Casper to Riverton road a few days ago, and there was no traffic on it at 10 PM. Coming home a day later, I drove Lander to Rawlins and didn't see another vehicle until I'd joined the highway north of Rawlins at the Junction.
One needs also to consider the differences in highway safety construction of recent years to decades ago. The design of traffic barriers, for example, has been pushed to provide slow stoppages, not sudden stoppages. Barriers are frangible, concrete dividers aren't solid walls, but designed to trap a steering tire into the divider and dissipate energy as a driver slows a vehicle down. Cables and metal barriers are frangible structures, too, by design. What hasn't changed in roadway design, of course, is the density of trees when they are hit ... but the clearance from the roadway to such objects has been changed through the years; it's a wider roadway in many locations than used to be the standard.
I spend a fair amount of time in automotive boneyards, seeking parts for my project cars. It's interesting to see how many wrecked vehicles have had the airbags deployed and there's no blood in the car. It's the rare car where you see such signs of trauma, and I've looked at a number of vehicles where you'd say "oh my, that must have been a fatal accident" because there's so much damage ... and the tow truck driver at the yard tells me that the folks had only minor injuries and refused to go to a hospital for further examination/treatment.
I appreciate your experiences and understand your point of view. Really, I do. I've been on accident scenes lately where we couldn't identify the brand of car but everybody walked away. Hard to comprehend - didn't used to see that. Better engineering is saving lives. We like that.
However, I know from many, many years of experience both as a trauma practitioner, researcher and teacher that velocity is the most variable factor in the trauma equation because it is squared. Simple fact is, you can't tear an aortic branch at 20 mph, but you sure as heck will at 70 mph. And an aortic branch tear is ALWAYS fatal. Think of it this way - accidental back-over events aside, how many people die in traffic accidents when the closure rate is 30 mph versus how many die when the closure rate is between 75 (think: car versus bridge abutment) and 150? (read: head-on collision.)
Your post also made me think - if better engineering is saving more lives, why is the fatality rate still so abnormally high here? I agree again that time to surgery is very, very important, and the per capita statistical skewing that occurs because Wyoming has a smaller population than just about everyone else also impacts the stats. But the studies are really conclusive: when we are talking about lethality in accidents, speed controls. It just does.
It will be interesting to see if West Texas fatalities go up. For years their speed limit has been 80 mph. Recently, they passed a law making the speed limit 85. Much like Wyoming, West Texas is a lot of mile of lots of miles. I have driven it numerous times and going an hour or so before you see another car. Must like here, the towns are very few and far between also.
Was just thinking about I-80. From Laramie to Cheyenne there are trees to stop off roading at high speeds. However, the rest of I-80, I could count the trees on the fingers I am not using for typing.
Not too long ago there was a nasty pileup on I-80 where the only thing that cars hit, was other cars. Out in the middle of nowhere, a sudden white out condition hits, one person stops and it because a wrecking yard.
I haven't traveled it lately, maybe Sunsprit can enlighten me, but the highway from Muddy Gap over to Rawlins had several fatalities over a short period of time. As such they put in a "HEADLIGHTS REQUIRED 24/7" stretch of road. I never heard of any results and I have not been over that road in years, so I don't know if they have changed lane markings, shoulders, highway markers, signs, etc...
Several years ago, there was a Wyoming girl, (didn't happen in Wyoming) that was headed back to college. For one reason or another, she swerved and left the highway. They found her some time later and she was dead. The injuries had not killed her. Exposure and the fact that she wasn't found for a couple weeks is what killed her. And she had run off the Interstate, where you'd think there would be enough traffic to see something like that. It happened during the day.
Several times while I traveled, I have been the last one through the gate. When I went by, the highway patrol was standing out there getting ready to lower the gate. Due to conditions, I had to run 30 mph and I'll tell you, it's a lonely feeling when you know there is nobody coming up behind you that could render assistance.
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