Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page A

five, and another quarter are adults over seventy. Kids and Cars estimates that fifty children under the age of fifteen are backed into or over every month, with forty-eight of them requiring emergency care and two dying.
    Backup video cameras for cars that eliminate the blind zones have been available for decades. (Prototypes were first demonstrated in the 1950s.) Safety advocates and parents of children who died in someone’s blind zone have campaigned to make them as ubiquitous as safety belts since the turn of this century, and federal legislation in 2007 mandated backup cameras in all new cars, 30 though implementation has been repeatedly delayed as the deaths and injuries continue. They finally were scheduled to be installed on all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds sold in the U.S. by May 2018. The federal rule calling for this was only finalized in 2014. 31 Some automakers are already voluntarily providing backup cameras in their cars ahead of the requirement.
    Cameras alone can reduce but not cure the backover risk, because drivers are still required to pay attention to the video display. Only an automated system that overrides the driver and prevents collisions by braking the car when an object is behind could do that. That technology exists—several new models ofbig-rig trucks on the road now have similar forward-looking collision avoidance systems in place already—but there is no mandate to put it on passenger cars.
    Meanwhile, Brian Bayers agonizes over what might have been done to save his son from death, and other families from the same devastating loss and guilt. “What if I had a back-up camera on my vehicle? What if I had my window rolled down?” he said during a wrenching television interview he granted in order to warn other parents of the danger he never thought about before. 32 “I think: what if I just picked my child up and carried him with me to my car?”
    F ridays are usually among the worst days for drunken driving. Friday the thirteenth was no exception, marked by a litany of people killed for doing nothing more than being on the same road with a drunk—for doing nothing more than trusting in the choices made by every other driver on the road.
    At 2:00 p.m. outside Pittsburgh, one man was killed and two other people injured when a sport-utility vehicle made a left turn in front of an oncoming car on Pennsylvania Route 56. The crash turned into a police manhunt when the alleged driver of the SUV, thirty-four-year-old Jeremy Jonathan Blystone, ran from the scene. Blystone had a prior conviction for drunk driving and was wanted by police in three states.
    The other driver, Thomas Pater, a sixty-one-year-old Vietnam veteran and local farmer, died in the crash. A passenger in each car was seriously injured. A three-hour police search using bloodhounds and a police helicopter ended in the nearby town of Apollo, where police caught up with Blystone after he stopped in a store, seemingly without a care in the world, to buy a pack of cigarettes.
    A few hours later in Kenneth City, Florida, sixty-five-year-old Mark R. Ehrhardt died while crossing Fifty-Eighth Street a few blocks from home, run down by a Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV. The driver, forty-year-old Troy E. Donnelly, was arrested for driving while intoxicated and manslaughter after sheriff’s deputies reported observing signs of impairment and Donnelly refused to submit to a breath test for alcohol. Donnelly had three previous convictions for drunken driving, the most recent in 2004.
    And at 10:30 p.m., local entertainer Shane “Shaggy” Authement was making the two-mile walk from Marty J’s Bayou Station, a truck stop and bar in Chauvin, Louisiana, to his family’s home in the neighboring town of Montegut. Shaggy enjoyed partying as much as anyone and more than most, but the affable twenty-eight-year-old had one inflexible rule: no drinking and driving. He wouldn’t do it himself. He wouldn’t