Citation

Smith L. Proc. Am. Assoc. Automot. Med. Annu. Conf. 1980; 24: 340-348.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1980, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Two of the major components of the highway transportation system--the highway and the vehicle--are not designed to be systematically compatible with each other. The problem of design incompatibilities can no longer be avoided because the variations is vehicle sizes, weights and configurations are rapidly increasing. Both the small car and the heavy truck, once the exception in the vehicle mix, now account for a substantial proportion of the mix; within ten years, the small car (minicompact, subcompact and compact) will be dominant among cars, and 25 percent of the total fleet will be trucks and buses. Design incompatibilities have persisted because auto and highway designers are not required to correlate their designs; changes to increase compatibility have traditionally only been made to the highway, a slow and costly process; highway designers do not, for the most part, design to performance standards; highway design elements are not required to be crash tested for performance; the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration do not work together to resolve vehicle/highway design incompatibilities through research and rule making; and accident data to identify incompatibilities are not systematically collected and analyzed. Current design incompatibilities can be defined and future incompatibilities prevented or reduced through a committed partnership of the auto industry and the Federal agencies responsible for highway transportation safety.