"After His Son’s Tragic Death, This Doctor Fought to Put Backup Cameras In Every Car"[1]
"He had gone under the vehicle, I had gone right over his head and killed him. I jumped out of the car, tried to do CPR.” Gulbransen can still taste his blood in his mouth, remembers the way Cameron bled from his nose, his ears. “I knew at that moment he was dead.”"
You're really more upset at him for quoting a doctor who accidentally killed his own kid then fought to make backup cameras mandatory, than at the auto industry and regulators who fought against backup cameras for 15 years?
Just whose sensitive feelings are you trying to protect with such censorship, and why?
Did reading that upsetting quote ruin your day as much as backing over and killing your own kid would?
Some times you just have to upset people to affect change.
Do you also oppose quoting grieving parents to pass gun control laws too?
If you feel so strongly about it, then instead of just telling people to shut up, why not spend 15 years of your own life trying to pass a bill and enforce government regulations to prohibit quoting grieving parents -- maybe they'll name it after you.
>But while King and then-Senator Hillary Clinton got on board early, automobile maker resistance made sure that results came slow. King and Clinton introduced backover safety legislation in Congress and the Senate in 2005 and Congress enacted the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act in 2008 requiring federal transportation officials to write a regulation to correct vehicle rear visibility problems. President George Bush signed the bill into law. But the the bill languished, thanks to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
>The Advocacy Battle Behind Rearview Cameras in Cars
Tragic "backover" accidents involving young children gave advocacy groups a reason to push for a law requiring the use of rearview cameras. This week, federal regulations will require the devices in every new car on the road—a decade after the law was passed.
>[...] “I’m a pediatrician, I baby-proof my house, I go out of my way to make sure children are safe and healthy,” Gulbransen said in a recent interview with WABC. “And it happened to me? OK, guess what? It can happen to anybody. So use my example. I own it, I took responsibility, here it is. Let’s channel our grief and get something productive done out of it.”
>[...] “It took a long time, and sadly, along that journey, we had more families joining us in our fight because they had lost their children while knowing there is this preventable technology,” Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Yes. I am. That guy (and everyone else involved) probably has ten times blood on his hands as a result of "wE doN't need TO CarE aBOUT REaR vIsIBILITY BeCaUsE we have a BACKup CaMERa" engineering and touch screen distractions than he's saved by getting backup cameras put in things.
Backup cameras are the unholy trinity of upper middle class moral panic and shirking of responsibility, government Doing Something (TM) and people's inability to accept small but concentrated bad things versus large diffuse and hard to measure bad things.
You can put duct tape over your federally mandated backup camera display if you really believe they're so distracting that they cause you to run over more people in reverse.
But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.
He's clearly talking about the second-order effects of backup camera-centric design (worse visibility through the windows and touchscreen controls). Try reading a little more closely.
>You can put duct tape over your federally mandated backup camera display if you really believe they're so distracting that they cause you to run over more people in reverse.
>But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.
Tape won't undo all the other changes to cars that OEMs engaged in once they were required to have a screen.
Congratulations. Your pet regulatory change has reduced back over deaths by under a hundred a year. In a vacuum with spherical cow that's great but reality isn't a vacuum with spherical cows. And now that you've put this hardware in cars and engineers have taken advantage of it you've increased back out accidents and merging accidents (both are inversely correlated with rear visibility) and you've made many of the critical 2nd order functions of operating a car less intuitive and more distracting to use. You've but you don't care about that because the metric you were gaming (back over deaths) is marginally improved. And when called out by people who want to look at the big picture you respond with insults. Screw you and the safety vest you rode in on.
There's still too many involving normal sedans, at least in Australia. And modern sedans are sacrificing visibility for aerodynamics / fuel efficiency. So having them being blanket mandatory is the only sane thing.
They are still not a guarantee against these incidents, I personally added backup sensors to my previous car - a Subaru Outback. They saved me from reversing into another car that had kind of snuck up on me once.
The Tesla Model 3 (Ryzen '22 w/radar edition) is far, far superior in all aspects of safety when reversing now. Both a huge responsive massive FOV screen with side displays and the ultrasonic sensors beeping.
It's not always about lives saved. In the scenario that backup cameras help prevent, the vehicle isn't going very fast. And kids are small. That doesn't mean kids don't get seriously injured as a result. I've known three people that have been backed over, myself included (and that's just the ones I know; I don't survey everyone I meet). Minor injuries for two of them, very-much-not-minor injuries to myself that I deal with decades later.
No, it faced a huge amount of resistance, took about 5 years to pass a law, then about 10 years for the regulators to actually enforce it.
Exactly like sane and popular gun control laws to prevent thousands of childrens' tragic deaths per year from guns face fanatical well funded resistance from insane and corrupt institutions like the NRA and GOP.
Childhood’s Greatest Danger:
The Data on Kids and Gun Violence:
Few that wouldn't have been saved by Suburbans and Excursions going out of vogue with the upper middle class in favor of 4Runner, Pilots and a myriad of crossovers.
