A Deadly Story We Keep Missing

Can you hear me now? Automobile deaths are the leading cause of death for children, for teenagers and in fact for all people from age 3 to 33. Yet this annual tragedy is not a cause celebre.

Opinion leaders largely ignore the ubiquitous massacre. No marches, walkathons, commemorative stamps or fundraising drives are organized. It is not brought up in the State of the Union address. It is rarely the subject of public affairs shows. Statistics aren't updated daily in major newspapers or broadcasts.

Gruesome crashes are reported just one at a time, each as if it might never happen again. Little attention is paid to the aftermath: safety measures taken or not taken, the workings or non-workings of the justice system. These avoidable deaths, as well as more than 2 million nonfatal dismemberments, disfigurements and other injuries that go along with them, have become part of the fabric of everyday life in the United States.

Elected officeholders naturally take the path of least resistance. They are well aware that significantly reducing deaths on the roads requires radical solutions in the form of regulation, investment and enforcement. Roads need to be made safer, for example, by extending guardrails and medians to every mile of busy highways. Speeding and aggressive driving need to be much more rigorously controlled. Trucks need to be separated from automobiles wherever possible. And cars need to be built slower and stronger.

But every solution is readily opposed by someone: manufacturers, industrial unions, truckers, consumers, taxpayers -- though all are potential victims themselves. The public is not to blame. It is hemmed in on every side by mind-numbing advertising and shouted stories of the moment. Apparently no medium is willing to bludgeon people -- as they need to be -- with statistics and trends on the dangers facing them every time they set out in their automobiles.

Only if there is a public outcry will this situation get the attention due it. Only when people fully realize the absurd and avoidable costs of the dangers that stalk them on the road -- and then demand governmental action in the form of forceful intervention and strict regulation -- will this become the story of the year, as it should be.

The writer is a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of PublicMind, a public opinion research group there.