The mission of this yet-to-be-named nonprofit organization is to:
- empower the driving public to take up their own cause for reducing their crash risk, with a person-by-person intervention that involves the submission of an online report for each near miss they experience.
- rally as many individuals around the world as possible to this cause, while also resulting in a database that is recognized as a promising new resource for traffic safety research.
Problem Statement
The number of traffic deaths in the United States is equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing, killing all aboard, every single day of every year. If that in fact happened, it would take no more than three days before all passenger jets would be grounded until they figured out the problem. Even if planes were not grounded, most people would stop flying after, say, a week of jumbo jet crashes.
In contrast, most people don't let an actually greater risk of dying in a car crash stop them from driving. There is no national uproar over safety. No shutting down of the interstate system until the problem is figured out.
The reason that 40,000 people die (and 3 million are nonfatally injured) each year in our country DOES need to be figured out, and the answer must first focus on the individual. Over 90% of crashes are at least in part caused by driver error, for which I believe the root problem is a failure to fully attend to the task of driving. This is actually good news, because behavior IS something anyone can change. First, though, we all need to gain a new respect for all the little (and big) things we do while driving that take our full attention away from the road.
The bottom line!
This is how near-miss reports may save your life, by alerting individuals to the non-driving behaviors that you tend to do behind the wheel (that almost caused a crash)... and the resulting conscious minimization of those behaviors!
