Safety crusade
NEW YORK — Sometimes common sense is all one needs to reduce a child’s risk of getting hurt. Sometimes it requires technology.
A coalition of parents and safety groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, are counting on both those things — and a boost from bipartisan teams of congressional politicians — to drastically curb the number of kids injured in noncrash auto accidents.
Janette Fennell is the founder and president of Kids and Cars, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to assure no child dies or is injured in a non-traffic, non-crash motor vehicle event. About a year ago, she teamed with Jamie Schaefer-Wilson, a former TV producer-turned-safety advocate, to tackle a handful of specific issues: backovers, power windows and vehicles inadvertently knocked into motion.
The result is the Cameron Gulbransen Kids And Cars Safety Act, a bill sponsored by Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John Sununu (R-N.H.) in the Senate and Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) in the House. It’s named for a 2-year-old Long Island boy who died when his father, a pediatrician, accidentally ran him over with the family SUV when backing into his driveway.
If the bill is passed, the Department of Transportation would be required to set a standard for what drivers should be able to see behind them when backing their vehicle. Automakers would decide how best to meet that standard with technologies such as rear sensors, better rearview or side mirrors, and rearview cameras which are already available on some higher-end vehicles. Also, it mandates automatic reversal of power windows if an obstruction is detected and a service brake that works in all key positions to prevent vehicles from rolling away if kicked into gear when the car is off.
According to Clinton, the window sensor is $12, the gear brake $5 and the backover system $300 — or “cheaper than a DVD system.”
“The cost is really insignificant compared to what we’re trying to do to save children’s lives,” Clinton says. “The technology is inexpensive and easily installed.”
Clinton has high hopes for the bill’s passage, noting that it does indeed have bipartisan support. “It’s a parent and family issue, not a partisan issue. It’s a problem with a practical solution.”
Kids and Cars’ Fennell is no stranger to a safety crusade. Back in 1995, Fennell, her husband and her then 9-month-old baby were kidnapped. She and her husband were locked in the trunk of a car. Her baby was left, thankfully strapped into his car seat, in the front yard of their San Francisco home.
Fennell, who now lives in Kansas, knows she and her loved ones are the rare survivors in this kind of incident. “I said, ‘This is crazy.’ You shouldn’t be able to lock people in their own trunks. I did a four-year campaign and was able to get federal regulation passed. Any vehicle in the U.S. will have trunk release now,” she says during a phone interview.
She took on backovers and windows because accidents were happening and the government wasn’t dealing with them. The government might not even have known they were happening because, until last year, the database of fatal motor vehicle incidents only covered crashes, incidents on public roads or highways, and if victims die within 30 days of the incident, Fennell explains.
Backovers, for example, are most common in someone’s own driveway — and the majority of victims are children, she says.
“Carmakers don’t think about kids. If you look at the seat-belt system, it was built for 170-pound male,” Fennell says. “This started out as a hot-car campaign and kicking cars into gear, but over the past three years I saw huge spike of kids being backed over. Backovers represent almost 50 percent of the fatalities we gather information on. We know of more than 100 kids who were backed over and killed last year, and 70 percent of the time a parent or close relative was behind the wheel.”
She adds: “The worst thing that could happen to a parent is to have their child killed. The only thing worse is if it happens at the parent’s hands.”
Fennell started her campaign by working with Consumer Reports magazine and then getting letters of support from affected families to pass along to Congress. She eventually linked with Schaefer-Wilson, author of “The Baby Rules: The Insider’s Guide to Raising Your Parents,” a safety guide written from a child’s perspective.
Schaefer-Wilson says she and Fennell do their lobbying on their own time and on their own dime. “Fifty children are backed over a week. Two of them will die and 48 will be injured. If you hear a figure like that, how can you not make it a priority?”