The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has long toyed with the idea of considering what damage cars do to pedestrians, but it took until last month for the agency to finally propose new rules: Testing for new cars, to see exactly how much head trauma those massive squared-off grilles cause.
Of course, this isn’t yet a new rule — it’s a proposal, and we all know what happens to proposed rules when they’re liable to cost the rich and powerful a few of their precious dollars. Money is speech, and folks with a lot of money will do all the talking they can to bend the rules in their favor. Luckily for us, then, that the NHTSA has opened public comment on the proposed rule for testing pedestrian head impact. Let’s drown out some of that corporate speech with words of our own.
The comment site includes plenty of information about the proposed rule, from the needs that begat it to the actual proposed standards and their mathematical formulae. We may have our differences of opinion as to whether the beleaguered Head Injury Criterion metric is worth keeping around, but I think we can all agree that some rule here is better than nothing. Pedestrians deserve consideration when designers start making cars ever bigger and angrier.
If you’ve got a spare few minutes, head over to regulations.gov and throw a supportive commend in on the proposed rule. Maybe, with enough regular people clamoring for protection, this rule won’t die on the vine like so many before it.
