Ohio senator makes his mark on highway safety

By Jayne O'Donnell, USA TODAY

One of his eight children died in a car crash and he watched with dismay when some of the others went through driver's education.

 By Tim Dillon, USA TODAY

The experiences have combined to help make highway and auto safety top priorities of low-key but influential Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, whose clout can be seen in the $300 billion highway bill that President Bush is expected to sign into law today. DeWine was the sponsor of measures that require:

•Dealers to put crash-test star ratings on all new cars.

•Federal regulators to track and try to prevent auto incidents that happen on private property.

•States to publicize their worst roads and intersections.

	What DeWine contributed to new act
	Measures sponsored or co-sponsored by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and included in the impending highway law: Crash scores. Requires that new-car window stickers include National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) star ratings for front, side and rollover crash tests. It takes effect by September 2007 for 2008 models. Non-crash incidents. Requires NHTSA to regularly collect data tracking deaths and injuries that result from incidents — such as back-over and heat-related injuries and deaths — on private property and assess technologies to prevent them. Driver education. Mandates a NHTSA research program focusing on ways to improve driver ed and teen licensing. NHTSA, which already has such a program, must continue to work on developing a prototype for driver's education curriculum and instructor certification and training and to seek ways to combine driver's ed with graduated licensing. Power window switches. Allows only power-window switches that are pulled up or out. NHTSA finalized a rule last year that required power-window switches to reduce the risk that kids or pets could press on a switch and strangle themselves. The new law will likely alter the NHTSA rule, which allows automakers to recess the switches and not change the design. Safe intersections. Prohibits the unauthorized sale and use of electronic devices that allow drivers to change traffic lights from red to green and penalizes violators with a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to one year, or both. Safe streets and highways. Requires states that get federal transportation safety funding to identify, rank and publicize their more dangerous roads and intersections. Traffic-safety enforcement. Provides $29 million a year for ads and for drunken-driving checkpoints where they are allowed — 40 states and Washington, D.C. — and "saturation" police patrols in the other 10 states.

DeWine also took on driver training and drunken driving in the legislation.

"There are very few highway-safety champions in Congress, and he is definitely one of them," says Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association.

DeWine's highway-safety issues may not be congressional headline grabbers, but he says they let legislators truly make a difference. Indeed, DeWine has shown how much life-saving influence one member of Congress can have.

He's a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful in Congress, and the Transportation subcommittee that decides which of his colleagues' highway and bridge projects get funded. The position has no doubt helped his arm twisting; so has the spiel, honed after several decades in politics, that he gives colleagues. DeWine has been a prosecutor, U.S. House member, Ohio state senator and Ohio's lieutenant governor.

"There are very few times you can go to the Senate floor and save lives," DeWine says he reminds senators. "We have it within our power to spare the loss of a child. It is something we ought to do."

DeWine's daughter Becky died in 1993 at age 22 when the car she was driving hit a pickup head-on. "Obviously, Becky's death certainly affects how I approach this," he says. "I want to spare anyone the agony that my wife, Fran, and I went through."

DeWine says his interest in highway safety dates back to his days as an Ohio state legislator. He says he can still remember the words of a man who lost his 7-year-old grandson in a drunken-driving crash 25 years ago. "He told me, 'That little boy was more important to me than my own life,' " DeWine recalls.

Blood-alcohol limit

The experience helped make drunken driving a central focus of DeWine's highway-safety attention. He was behind the move to make 0.08% the national maximum blood-alcohol limit, which it became this month when Minnesota was the final state to adopt it. To those who suggested DeWine and other 0.08 supporters were trying to criminalize social drinking, DeWine says, "They were dead wrong."

DeWine's measure to withhold funding from states that don't mandate higher penalties for drivers convicted with blood-alcohol levels of 0.15% or higher failed to make it in the highway bill. He did, however, manage to secure $29 million in funding for more stringent drunken-driving enforcement.

"He has a tendency to want to prescribe what he wants states to do and to penalize them when they don't do it," says Harsha, whose members are the top highway-safety officials in their states. "We work very closely with him on strategies that will improve safety but are acceptable to the states."

Janette Fennell, president of the non-profit safety group Kids and Cars, says her group proposed and helped write the provisions related to data collection about non-crash deaths and injuries, which include trunk entrapment, being backed over by vehicles and accidents involving power windows.

Fennell says at least 65 children have been killed already this year when they were backed over and that at least two have been strangled by power windows. Last year at a point when seven children had been killed by power windows, Fennell remembers DeWine telling her, "We just can't let this continue. We've got to make this happen."

Attacking driver's ed

DeWine says his years in politics helped persuade him to do something about the injuries and deaths that don't occur on public property, which is what regulators previously focused on. He wanted data about incidents in parking lots and driveways to be routinely collected, too.

"That's the way life is. If you don't measure it, it is easier for it to be forgotten," DeWine says.

DeWine also was concerned that driver's education has been de-emphasized in recent years.

"What I saw with my kids was consistent with what I had been hearing," says DeWine, whose children now range in age from 13 to 37. "I looked around at local (Washington, D.C., driving) schools ... and could not find one that anyone would tell me was a great school."

DeWine originally proposed giving states grants to improve their driver's education curriculum, but Harsha says her group was in the unusual position of lobbying against getting the money. State highway-safety representatives believed more research needed to be done into what constitutes good driver's education before they were paying for new programs.

In the end, the provision DeWine sponsored in the highway bill simply directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do more research into driver's education, something it had already begun. DeWine wants to be sure NHTSA will continue to do the research no matter who is running the agency, because he thinks the issue of teen highway deaths is too important to get sidelined again.

"He's very strategic, has a lot of compassion for children, and we just love him," Fennell says.