This morning, my wife was calling my attention to a piece in the paper. I can come to tears any time I hear about an innocent child losing its life for whatever reason, so I honestly feel that the little ones deserve to be as safe as possible, but how can anyone really decide what's "safer", when traffic accidents come in all shapes and sizes?
She also mentioned the extensive new road construction in the Austin area (I stay away from that place nowadays, whenever possible, but it still has an impact on our lives).
When will they ever learn that they can build cars a lot faster than they can build roads, and that they can never eliminate traffic and its resulting consequences by building roads? It seems so very difficult, bordering on impossible, for them to get the new commuter rail going, yet our lives have been plagued with road construction continuously for as long as I can remember. As they build, widen, and "improve" the roads, the cars just keep coming.
Safety gadgets are constantly being mandated, or voluntarily added to promote sales, but I know that by far the most effective safety device on an automobile is a driver that uses good judgment! No one can ever be completely "safe" in a motor vehicle crash!
A Rambling Rembrance:
AIR YOU GOING TO LOVE THIS?
6/20/98
Yesterday on the radio they were doing a piece on air bag testing. It seems that up to
now, all the crash dummies have been made in the image of men. They will now have by the end of the year a whole family of dummies. There will be a Mama dummy, a Papa dummy, a six year old kid dummy, and a little baby dummy.
It has been disturbing to many that a number of recent deaths of small women and children under twelve have actually been caused by the air bags that the government says we must have to save our lives.
At the end of the program, we were assured that after new research, a future generation of air bags will be able to sense the size and weight of the person in its care, and make a decision whether or not to inflate.
Well this is great, isn’t it? If the inflation of this air bag is so essential to saving lives, then if, when we have the wonderful new technology of sentient air bags, my small wife and I are going to Alice and crash into one of those jack knifed 18 wheelers in Austin, what is going to happen?
It would seem that the bag would probably decide to save me, but since there would be the possibility that my wife may be killed by the bag itself, the bag would no doubt determine that she should be left to her fate.
Has anyone in Washington thought about the possibility of maybe making air bags an option, so that people who want them can pay a little extra (or a lot extra in the case of the future smart air bags), and those of us who trust seat belts could say “no thanks, I love my wife”.
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