Have you ever asked yourself what you fear in life$%: Ask any parent and they will come up with 10 answers generally involving their children in a matter of minutes. But in reality many of these fears are simply not so relevant. In a recent online study of fear we found a few people actually did have real fears, which were quite relevant.
One participant in the online study of what Americans feared most might surprise you. It was not Global Warming, Bird Flu or International Terrorism. The male participant simply stated; I fear driving because 45,000 people or so die every year on the road.
Indeed he is quite correct and the deaths on American Highways are outrageous and the number of people injured is unbelievable. The Death tolls average from 40,000 to 45,000 per year and although the death tolls per mile driven have come down a bit on both 4-wheelers and over the road trucks the total number is slightly up.
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Living in mechanized countries
One would sure hope that we get some more transfer technologies from things like the DARPA Grand Challenges and that auto makers can put more devices such as Pedestrian Radars, sonar sensors for backing up, side lane-change vision warnings and fog penetrating systems into cars.
Of course the other issue is cost and when you raise the cost of the cars fewer people can buy them. The free-markets and economies of scale will eventually take care of this; remember as far as deaths, Air Bags are in nearly all cars and at first it was only a luxury option on expensive cars.
In fact, I too am so worried about the tremendous deaths in cars. It is like having a Vietnam War every year in the US, yet we do not talk about it like that. Today some are talking about the Soldier Deaths in Iraq and yet we kill over 15 times that many EVERY YEAR in our cars, imagine if we did something about that, just think all those people die in vain every year, and we did not even liberate a country or take out an evil dictator, what a pure travesty at home.
It would be smart to focus on technology, net-centric systems for transportation in the future, I truly believe that, the number of lives we save will be significant and could even save the life of a family member too. I sincerely hope this article helps propel thought in 2007.
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