You might want to write a story about crosswalk safety near your school. Here are excerpts from "Al's Morning Meeting", a daily story idea column by Poynter faculty member Al Tompkins.
Here are some questions to consider:
There may even be a way to reduce pedestrian fatalities by redesigning cars.
BusinessWeek reports:
Every year an estimated 780,000 pedestrians die worldwide in automobile accidents -- that's 65% of total automobile related fatalities. This tragic level of pedestrian injuries affects the GDP of countries by 1-3% and exceeds malnutrition, war, and stomach cancer as an international cause of death. With a forecast of 60 million further injuries and six million deaths over the next decade in developing countries, car manufacturers like Nissan are investing in ways to curb this trend such as the "pop-up hood" -- a safety measure to be introduced for the first time in the the Skyline coupe scheduled for release in Japan this year.
Eighty percent of serious pedestrian injuries caused by automobile collisions are head injuries. Of these head injuries, almost all are caused by the pedestrian's initial impact with the hood of the car. The concept of the pop-up hood is to create a buffer space between the hood and the engine, thereby decreasing the impact of the most drastic, and most common, cause of pedestrian injury and death. The British Medical Journal found that a 10cm gap greatly decelerates the pedestrian -- and predicts that when combined with other safety measures and restrictions, this could help to decrease the fatality rate by 20%.
