#295 ‒ Roadway death and injury: why everyone should care and what you can do to reduce risk | Mark Rosekind, Ph.D.

Mark Rosekind is an expert on road safety and a policy leader with more than 30 years of experience enacting strategic, practical, and effective data-based solutions that enhance driver and pedestrian safety and health in complex environments. In this episode, Mark delves into the persistent issue of accidental deaths resulting from roadway accidents, a concern for those focused on longevity given its consistent risk throughout life. From exploring statistics on car crashes to identifying the demographics most at risk and the key locations of incidents, he uncovers various risk factors including distractions like smartphone usage, the influence of alcohol and cannabis, the dangers of sleep deprivation, and speeding. Mark also provides practical advice for both drivers and pedestrians to enhance safety, while delving into the potential and challenges of emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles. Additionally, Mark provides valuable resources for listeners, particularly parents navigating the road safety landscape with teenage drivers.

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We discuss:

• Mark’s background and education, and the profound impact of transportation accidents on human lives [4:15];
• From sleep science to safety leadership: Mark’s journey in transportation innovation [14:15];
• Stats on transportation accidents and fatalities [18:00];
• Historical trends in road fatalities and the key contributors—impairment, distraction, and more [28:00];
• The demographics of drivers involved in crashes, and the life-saving potential of better driver education programs [34:30];
• The most critical areas where drivers need to be hyper-aware to protect themselves [41:00];
• The role of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in accident investigations, and the importance of data sources like event data recorders (EDRs) in accident reconstruction and investigations [47:00];
• The dangers of phone use while driving [53:45];
• How drunk driving was addressed through advocacy and legal changes [1:01:30];
• The need to address distracted driving and the psychological impact of distracted driving accidents on both victims and perpetrators [1:07:15];
• Navigating the roads and lowering your risk of accidents: weather, human error, and defensive driving [1:15:45];
• The impact of impaired driving: alcohol, cannabis, prescription drugs, and more [1:26:15];
• Mitigating the effects of vehicle speed [1:38:15];
• The promise and challenges of autonomous vehicles for road safety [1:44:15];
• Automatic emergency braking (AEB): the effectiveness and challenges of implementing AEB as a standard feature in new vehicles [1:53:00];
• Sleep deprivation: the impact of poor sleep, drowsiness, and disrupted circadian rhythm on driving [1:58:15];
• Protecting pedestrians: strategies for reducing the risk of fatal accidents with pedestrians on foot or bicycle [2:02:30];
• Empowering safe driving: essential resources and tips for parents and teenage drivers [2:14:00];
• Promoting a culture of proactive safety: parting thoughts from Mark [2:19:15]; and
• More.

Mark’s background and education, and the profound impact of transportation accidents on human lives [4:15]

• This is a topic that given the consequences doesn’t get enough enough attention
• People may not appreciate the frequency of such interactions, and Peter is hoping to understand how much of what we are going to discuss today is under our control
  • In particular the role of fatigue in accidental deaths

“We’re all in vehicles moving around, and yet we have come to accept the carnage in ways that should just be unacceptable in our society.”‒ Mark Rosekind 

• This is prevalent in everybody’s life
  • Just being on the road
  • Everyone is a pedestrian at some point
• Mark will discuss what you can control, what you should be doing to be safer, and what you can’t control 

Mark’s background and the loss of his father at a young age 

• Mark lost his father a long time ago, but it is still challenging to talk about

• It was not until his Senate confirmation hearing to be administrator of NHTSA that he talked publicly about this very much
• His father was a San Francisco motorcycle policeman
• He was chasing a traffic violator and somebody ran a red light, hit him, and he was killed in the line of duty
• Behind Mark is a shadow box with his badge and Purple Heart
• His father was 30 years old
• Mark was 3 and his brother was 2
  • They were raised by a single parent
• This just points out, this is personal for Mark, but he doesn’t wear that as a badge on his shoulder every time we have the conversation

His father’s death was clearly foundational to what put him on a lifelong path of pursuing safety and how to make people’s lives safer 

The human part of statistics 

• One of the things he often talks about is how many lives were lost
  • The exact number is important because every one of those is a father or sister or brother or some relative or one of your neighbors, etc.
  • Those are real people and we cannot bring them back
• Too often when we start talking about all the statistics, we walk right by the human part of this and that gets lost
• Peter agrees, and there is a quote he is not remembering exactly, but it speaks to the idea that a million people is a statistic, but a small number of people is a story
• We can get numb to what those numbers mean
• There’s a series on Netflix right now that takes old footage from World War II and does some remarkable technology application where it puts it back into color ‒ it’s stunning
  • What’s hard to fathom as you go through this is the loss of life (60-80 million)
    • Peter realized as he came to the end of this that he doesn’t even know what that means
    • He has never seen 1 million people
  • What this series does very well is what Mark has done ‒ get a few stories that are very representative of the horrific nature of what happened
    • Then imagine multiplying that by a thousand or a million 
• Mark agrees, “The numbers numb you.”
• Often in talks he starts with what we call “the business of bent metal”
  • Having been at the NTSB, he’ll literally take photos from investigations (minus the humans)
  • It’s like: this was Dawn at 20 years old, she not only lost her life, but the people in this minivan you see (4 out of 5 died, and the only one who didn’t was a child in a car)
    • That makes it real for people
• What you hope is people translate that to understand that it could be you or a partner or your kids or your neighbor (people that matter)

There’s this huge gap between those numbers (which most people have no concept), and when somebody actually in your circle loses their life in some kind of crash 

Before we get into those statistics, explain your training: what brought you to Yale, what you studied, and how that led to what you are doing now 

• The arc of this is more of a zigzag 
• Mark is trained as a scientist
• He was a pre-med at Stanford and had the incredibly good fortune to take a course called Sleep and Dreams when he was a sophomore
• It was taught by William Dement, MD, PhD, a professor in the medical school
  • Dr. Dement was part of the team that discovered REM sleep, and some believed he was actually the guy who coined the term REM sleep
    • We’ve only known about non-REM and REM sleep since the mid-50s
  • Dr. Dement came to Stanford and started one of the first sleep centers and was teaching this undergraduate course and it was just fascinating
  • He was this passionate charismatic professor who was engaging 
  • Here’s this medical school professor teaching an undergraduate course
• At the time, the 2 most popular courses were Sleep and Dreams and Human Sex (taught by another medical school professor)
• What was really brilliant about what Bill did is he actually offered a couple courses
  • You could take a course and become a TA for Sleep and Dreams, or you could take another course and learn where to put electrodes and how to score sleep and actually get involved in research
• The summer after Mark’s sophomore year, he signed up to be a research assistant staying up all night in a laboratory
  • As an undergraduate, that was an incredible experience
  • Everything got canceled that summer except 1 project which was studying the effects of the water bed surface on sleep
    • This was the ’70s, and Mark met his wife during that study
• You don’t usually get the opportunity to be involved in research as an undergraduate and that changed everything 

When he graduated, Dr. Dement made an offer for him to stay and run research projects 

• If you knew where the electrodes went, and this is a K complex, a sleep spindle, here’s how you score sleep, you could run projects
• Mark did that for a few years and he tells people, “That was like doing a postdoc before going to graduate school.”
• Mark applied to med school but changed because at the time, there was no sleep speciality, no sleep medicine fellowship
  • Dr. Dement was pushing to make that real
• So if he wanted to spend a career looking at sleep, he had to get a Ph.D.
• Yale had a great academic research program and Mark could also get clinical training
  • He could get clinical training in clinical psychology but still do research
• The interesting spin is that after he finished his Ph.D., someone he knew from Stanford asked him to do a postdoc ‒ Mary Carskadon
  • She had been at Stanford with Bill and they created what is now the gold standard for objectively measuring sleepiness called the “Multiple Sleep Latency Test”
  • She moved Brown Medical school as an assistant professor and had 1 technician
• The plan was for Mark to stay at Brown, get on the faculty, etc. 
• Instead, he ended up going back and working for Bill, running a human research program for a while

From sleep science to safety leadership: Mark’s journey in transportation innovation [14:15]

Mark was a hardcore sleep academic, but part of his job was to get new projects going 

• He got engaged with NASA Ames Group, which is one of the NASA facilities in Mountain View, California, and they were doing fatigue jet lag research 
  • NASA didn’t have many actual sleep people helping them do that, some chronobiology circadian people
  • It was fascinating because they were doing a study that required recording EEG in a cockpit and they weren’t really sure how to do that
  • Part of Mark’s job was to help them problem solve that so they could record pilot’s brain and eye movement activity in an ongoing way during flights

That was a transition really out of the very specific academic environment to NASA 

Mark’s time at NASA 

• Mark was recruited to work with the NASA Ames Group and directed the program at the NASA Ames Fatigue Countermeasures program for 7 years
  • It was fantastic

This illustrates what has become a clear focus of his career: the application of the science into real world application 

• That has really been a force for him throughout my career
  • Hence the safety emphasis, great sleep science
  • How do you use that to help people every day, whether that’s driving a car or flying a space shuttle? What do you do to make that better?
• He worked with commercial and military pilots, astronauts, controllers at Johnson Space Center, etc.  
  • Fantastic, incredible work

Then he started his own company 

• Which broadened it from aerospace to basically everybody
• When he had his own company, they worked with folks in all modes of transportation, all over the world in healthcare, energy, military operations, you name it
  • It was fantastic

The next part that was so interesting, part of the zag was Mark had the opportunity to become a board member at the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] 

{end of show notes preview}