Grade inflation in school makes it difficult to distinguish who is actually achieving in the classroom. The federal government’s vehicle safety rating system suffers the same problem. Today, 98 percent of all vehicles tested receive four or five stars for crashworthiness. Consumer advocates and safety experts say it’s time to raise the bar for the New Car Assessment Program, which hasn’t been updated in nearly 10 years.

Older workers (those ages 55 and older) bring extensive skills, knowledge, and experience built over the course of a lifespan. On the flip side, their driving may be affected by age-related physical and mental changes – many of them perfectly normal changes. Employers cannot avoid the issue of aging drivers because by the year 2020:

In Washington, D.C., a new Trump administration plan to relax safety rules for truck drivers has rekindled old heartaches for families across the country. On a sunny Labor Day morning in Oklahoma, Linda Wilburn’s younger son, 19-year-old Orbie, hopped into his 1994 red Camaro and headed east from Weatherford on Interstate 40. The college freshman, excited about his new rental house, needed to collect more stuff from his parent’s place, 10 miles away.

Driving is a grown-up activity that requires our full attention, yet a lot of people do it while doing…something else. While texting is the most alarming distraction – and the one that garners the most attention these days – it’s not the only activity that endangers motorists. Eating and drinking, talking to people in your vehicle, fiddling with the stereo, entertainment or navigation system and talking on the phone – even hands free – can all divert your attention away from the task of safe driving.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) this week published an updated list of the safety recommendations associated with the agency’s 2019 – 2020 Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements following the recent closure of eight safety recommendations. Of the eight closed safety recommendations; four (P-17-003, H-15-020, A-09-092, and H-09-018) were closed with acceptable action taken, one (P-18-003 ) was closed with acceptable alternate action taken, one (M-16-028) was closed with a status of exceeds recommended action, and safety recommendation H-12-029 was unfortunately closed with unacceptable action taken.

Parents who view off-highway vehicles (OHVs) as suitable for drivers too young to have drivers’ licenses should take note: they can be just as dangerous as street-legal vehicles. OHVs include all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs), and utility task vehicles (UTVs). The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) is alerting parents and all off-highway vehicle (OHV) riders to not allow their children to drive adult-size OHVs and to use caution when allowing them to ride OHVs.

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.