On April 3, I represented the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) at an event kicking off Distracted Driving Awareness Month and California Teen Driver Safety Week, in Sacramento. I challenged California to lead the nation in acting on NTSB’s 2011 recommendation to ban the non-emergency driver use of portable electronic devices that do not support the driving task.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) are hoping that a $5.6 million public safety awareness campaign will make Americans take railroad crossing safety more seriously. The numbers suggest that that is not currently the case. Every four hours in America, a person or vehicle is struck by a train at a rail crossing.

The federal government’s 1995 decision to allow states to set speed limits higher than 65 mph caused almost 14,000 additional deaths over 25 years on interstates and freeways, according to a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That average of 560 deaths a year ”is really a big deal,” said Charles Farmer, the author of the study and a vice president of the Insurance Institute.

Since the early 1980s, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has conducted a grim census, tracking reports of deaths from crashes of all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs. Now the body count has risen above 15,250, according to the agency’s latest annual report, with more than one in five of the deaths suffered by children under 16.

The federal government is pondering how best to accommodate automated vehicles under standards that were developed when all cars were driven solely by humans and self-driving vehicles were not even a glimmer on the horizon. As a part of the process, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is inviting the public to comment on a pair of petitions from Nuro and General Motors (GM) about exemptions to those standards.

The new kid on the block – Tesla – is tops when it comes to equipping its vehicles with automatic emergency braking (AEB), although several other manufacturers aren’t far behind, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

“With the oil field traffic, everybody is in a hurry,” said Heather Lopez about the roads in Eddy County and neighboring Lea County. “Everybody runs like it is the end of days. Drivers get impatient. Trucks pull out in front of cars. They figure they are bigger and you are going to stop.” Figures compiled by Eddy County show there were 17 roadway fatalities in the county in both 2018 and 2017 and seven in 2016. In Lea County, according to the New Mexico State Police, there were 24 traffic fatalities in 2018, 12 in 2017 and 10 in 2016.

The effect of plastic on workers in the plastic industry, Apple’s efforts to resist curbs on distracted driving and amateur video helps a state OSH agency crack down on asbestos violators. These were among the top safety stories featured this week on ISHN.com.

Motorcyclists and pedestrians were the focus of two recent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports which used analyses from accident investigations to form recommendations to enhance safety for the two groups going forward. Motorcyclists—motorcycle riders and their passengers—have the highest risk of fatal injury among all motor vehicle users.

Garrett Wilhelm was chatting with the Facetime app on his Apple iPhone, police say, as he sped along an interstate highway northwest of Dallas on the day before Christmas in 2014. He crashed his SUV into a sedan carrying a young family, killing five-year-old Moriah Modisette and injuring her parents and sister.