New highway safety chief to focus on families, auto safety

Growing up on Long Island, N.Y., Nicole Nason was taught how to drive by the man in charge of the local highway safety patrol: Her dad. Neighborhood friends knew wearing a seat belt was mandatory and the speed limit would be strictly enforced.

Now the mother of two young daughters in a busy commuter household, the government’s new highway safety chief wants auto safety to start with the family.

“This is a family issue, and vehicle safety needs to be the priority,” Nason said in an interview. A former aide to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, she began serving as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in May.

With about 43,000 people killed and 2.7 million injured on the road annually, many parents get “statistic fatigue” over the impact that vehicle crashes can have on families, Nason said. She wants parents to feel empowered to set strict rules for driving and prioritize safety.

“The statistic I think parents need to remember over anything else is that their children are more likely to die in a motor vehicle crash than anything else,” she said.

Automakers and safety advocates pay close attention to NHTSA, which promotes traffic safety, sets performance standards for vehicles, investigates safety defects and researches vehicle safety. The agency is often charged with making controversial decisions that affect millions of motorists, which Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., noted during Nason’s confirmation hearing.

“I just hate to throw you to the wolves,” Lott said.

Nason, 35, has wasted no time. She said the agency will announce rulemaking later this summer requiring electronic stability control, or ESC, the anti-rollover technology that automatically applies brakes to individual wheels when a vehicle veers off course. About 40 percent of 2006 passenger vehicles have the technology as standard equipment.

“ESC, I think, is going to be as big as seat belts when it’s finally deployed in the fleet in terms of new life-savings technologies,” Nason said.

She said the next decade will be key to implementing other technologies that could improve safety — lane departure warning, brake assist and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Some of the technologies are already available in luxury models.

Mindful of high gasoline prices, the Bush administration has asked Congress for the authority to change fuel economy standards for passenger cars. A bill was approved in a House committee but has not moved forward.

Nason, who served as Mineta’s chief legislative aide, said she could not predict whether the proposal on the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, will gain traction. Automakers have long resisted increases to fuel economy standards, while environmentalists and some lawmakers accuse NHTSA of failing to demand enough from the industry.

If given the right to make changes, “we are going to balance it based on the science and based on the numbers and not based on what is the current status of any particular auto manufacturer. That’s not our responsibility,” she said.

In the fight against drunken driving, Nason said she supports “ignition interlock” systems on vehicles, which include a breathalyzer wired into a vehicle’s ignition system requiring drivers to pass the test to start the car.

Auto safety is personal for Nason. In her office is a small photograph of her parents’ Pontiac sedan after they were struck by a drunken driver in 1979. They escaped serious injuries, but her father still has the police report, which cited the teen driver for “failure to yield.”

Her father, Phil Robilotto, a retired Suffolk County, N.Y., police chief, was always strict about safety. Trips to and from “the chief’s house” forced her friends to follow the rules of the road. And his teachings have influenced Nason’s rules for driving with her daughters, something she hopes to pass along to others.

“You should not take for granted the trip to and from work, or the trip to and from school, or the trip to and from the grocery store or dry cleaners. Parents are rushing all the time,” she said. “But vehicle safety affects every family and it needs to be at the top of the family’s list.”

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