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When a Crash Is No Accident: Staging roadside collisions to make them more survivable. · Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations

• 0:14
  Bernie Fette (host): Welcome.
• 0:15
  Bernie Fette (host): This is Thinking Transportation-- conversations about how we get ourselves and the things we need from one place to another.
• 0:23
  Bernie Fette (host): I'm Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
• 0:29
  Bernie Fette: Much of the work in roadside safety is all about preventing crashes from happening.
• 0:35
  Bernie Fette: But there's another essential component, too-- one that's focused on making crashes more survivable when they do happen, creating roadsides that are more forgiving for drivers who, despite their best efforts, may go off course.
• 0:52
  Bernie Fette: Lance Bullard, a senior research engineer, leads a team dedicated to that purpose as the head of the roadside safety and physical security division at TTI.
• 1:01
  Bernie Fette: We are grateful to have him here with us today.
• 1:04
  Bernie Fette: Welcome, Lance.
• 1:06
  Lance Bullard (guest): Good morning.
• 1:07
  Bernie Fette: Some of the people listening, but probably not all of them, might know that what we now refer to as the RELLIS campus actually started out as the Bryan Army Airfield during World War II for training military pilots.
• 1:22
  Bernie Fette: But at some point it became a research facility and the researchers who came before you started crashing cars and trucks out there.
• 1:30
  Bernie Fette: Can you give us just a little history lesson on how the testing facility came to be?
• 1:36
  Lance Bullard: The, uh, airfield was constructed during World War II in 1942, and it was known as the Bryan Army Airfield.
• 1:43
  Lance Bullard: It was activated in 1943 for the U.S.
• 1:46
  Lance Bullard: Army Air Forces.
• 1:47
  Lance Bullard: It was a flight instructor school and assigned the task of developing a standardized system of instrument flight training.
• 1:55
  Lance Bullard: The base became known as the Bryan Air Force Base in 1947, when the U.S.
• 2:00
  Lance Bullard: Air Force was established.
• 2:02
  Lance Bullard: It was assigned the air training command and it conducted advanced flight training of the T-33 Shooting Star jet.
• 2:10
  Lance Bullard: Another little interesting quip about our history is Buzz Aldrin and Virgil Grissom, who later became NASA astronauts, were instructors out at the airfield.
• 2:21
  Bernie Fette: Gives you a bit of a tough act to follow, huh?
• 2:24
  Lance Bullard: It does.
• 2:25
  Lance Bullard: So TTI began using the facility in about 1963 and using it as a proving ground, performing vehicle dynamics and crash testing, which then was named the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College Research Annex.
• 2:40
  Lance Bullard: So when I came on and started working out here, this facility was known as The Annex.
• 2:47
  Lance Bullard: Later, it would become, uh, the Riverside Campus in 1988 when Texas A&M took full ownership of the facility.
• 2:55
  Bernie Fette: And you mentioned that TTI, uh, became active in the research work out there.
• 3:01
  Bernie Fette: I think in, you said in 1963?
• 3:03
  Lance Bullard: Yes, sir.
• 3:04
  Bernie Fette: So that roughly coincides with the early days of the Interstate Highway System.
• 3:09
  Bernie Fette: Is there any connection there?
• 3:11
  Lance Bullard: There is.
• 3:12
  Lance Bullard: There's quite a history there with the Interstate Highway System.
• 3:15
  Lance Bullard: Now I'll start with the very beginning, cuz I'm quite a history buff with regard to transportation history and the history of automobiles.
• 3:23
  Lance Bullard: So the very first Federal Highway Act was passed in 1916 and that provided federal subsidies to road building efforts.
• 3:31
  Lance Bullard: And coincidentally, people may or may not know, the Model-T started production in 1908.
• 3:37
  Lance Bullard: And at that particular time, there were about 253 auto manufacturers at the turn of the century in the United States.
• 3:47
  Lance Bullard: So automobiles were really starting to take off and we didn't have the infrastructure.
• 3:52
  Lance Bullard: We still had roads that were primarily wagon trails that were muddy and bridges that were inadequate.
• 3:58
  Lance Bullard: And we had this enormous number of vehicles taking to the roads that didn't exist.
• 4:05
  Bernie Fette: And competing for space with horse carriages too, I would imagine.
• 4:08
  Lance Bullard: Yes, sir.
• 4:09
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 4:10
  Lance Bullard: These roads were deplorable.
• 4:12
  Lance Bullard: They were, uh, muddy as I mentioned.
• 4:15
  Lance Bullard: So one of the things that occurred and it involved, you asked the question about the, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, and that was signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1919.
• 4:30
  Lance Bullard: He was a young man and he was assigned to a convoy that was to take a transcontinental trip across the United States on the Lincoln Highway from Washington DC to San Francisco.
• 4:42
  Lance Bullard: And in that convoy, and it was a military convoy, it took them two months to make that trip on the Lincoln Highway.
• 4:50
  Lance Bullard: And they traveled an average speed of five miles per hour.
• 4:53
  Bernie Fette: My gosh.
• 4:54
  Lance Bullard: So it was just bad.
• 4:55
  Lance Bullard: And this left quite an impression on Dwight Eisenhower as a young man.
• 4:59
  Lance Bullard: Well, we fast forward to President Eisenhower taking office in 1953.
• 5:06
  Lance Bullard: And at that time the states had only completed 6,500 miles of this 40,000 mile Interstate Highway and these, uh, improvements.
• 5:16
  Lance Bullard: And Eisenhower remembering his time in that 1919 convoy across the U.S.
• 5:21
  Lance Bullard: and how long it took and how bad it was, this had become a personal mission of his to create this good system of roadways.
• 5:30
  Lance Bullard: So he addressed it in just about all of his State of the Union addresses that this was going to happen.
• 5:36
  Lance Bullard: And he was a career military man.
• 5:38
  Lance Bullard: And he had served in World War II and he realized the importance of moving people and goods in his time in Germany and, and seeing the Autobahn and how the Germans had used the Autobahn to move people and goods in military advancement and military equipment across their country.
• 5:56
  Lance Bullard: He said, you know, this is just something that we have to do.
• 5:59
  Lance Bullard: We have to make it happen.
• 6:01
  Lance Bullard: So he passed the 1956 Federal Highway Act and that as it was passed, it also expanded those interstate roads or the plan for those interstate roads to 41,000 miles.
• 6:13
  Bernie Fette: And when you describe the contrast between 1919 versus the vision for the Interstate Highway System, achieving that required a lot of new thinking.
• 6:24
  Bernie Fette: And so consequently, keeping those brand new visionary interstate highways safe, required a lot of new thinking too, which is kind of where some of the testing comes into the picture here, right?
• 6:38
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 6:38
  Lance Bullard: You know, they were establishing this brand new Interstate Highway System, uh, fantastic roadways where people could travel coast to coast and have the same expectancy of the roadway.
• 6:49
  Lance Bullard: The lanes were the same width.
• 6:50
  Lance Bullard: The markings were the same.
• 6:52
  Lance Bullard: The signage was the same.
• 6:53
  Lance Bullard: And it permitted people to run at higher speeds than they'd ever run at.
• 6:57
  Lance Bullard: And coincidentally, as this was occurring, the engineering and science of passenger cars was improving also.
• 7:05
  Lance Bullard: So cars, they had developed overhead valve engines, high performance engines, people were traveling very fast speeds.
• 7:12
  Lance Bullard: And consequently, what was happening was we were starting to have these horrific accidents.
• 7:18
  Lance Bullard: You know, high-speed accidents.
• 7:20
  Lance Bullard: And so we had great roadways, but people have not paid attention to the safety.
• 7:26
  Lance Bullard: So we have three kind of things that have to go together, the driver, the roadway and the vehicle.
• 7:33
  Lance Bullard: And they started saying, hey, we've kind of neglected safety in all of this.
• 7:37
  Bernie Fette: Yeah.
• 7:37
  Bernie Fette: You were describing how they were driving coast to coast.
• 7:40
  Bernie Fette: But one thing that they weren't doing is slowing down for traffic lights along the way.
• 7:43
  Bernie Fette: So they were getting up to some pretty high speeds.
• 7:46
  Lance Bullard: Yeah.
• 7:47
  Lance Bullard: And some of these long straightaways, people, they didn't have to pay attention so much to the driving task.
• 7:52
  Lance Bullard: They were getting distracted, they were falling asleep, they were running off the road.
• 7:56
  Lance Bullard: And things were beginning to happen.
• 7:58
  Lance Bullard: So we had to turn our attention to vehicle safety, driver safety, the roadway, the safety of the roadway in terms of friction and hydroplaning and the roadside.
• 8:10
  Lance Bullard: You know, when people run off the roadside, they said, okay, we know it happens.
• 8:15
  Lance Bullard: We can't place all the responsibility on the driver.
• 8:18
  Lance Bullard: When that occurs, people run off the roadside.
• 8:20
  Lance Bullard: We have to do something to try to provide a forgiving and a protective environment for these drivers.
• 8:27
  Bernie Fette: And try to make those crashes as survivable as you can.
• 8:30
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 8:31
  Lance Bullard: We wanted to provide an environment where we could reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries when they left the roadway.
• 8:41
  Bernie Fette: And that required your predecessors to start doing crash testing.
• 8:45
  Bernie Fette: Can you tell us a little about what exactly goes into doing a crash test?
• 8:50
  Bernie Fette: About the planning, the precision, the weather, the waiting game.
• 8:55
  Bernie Fette: For something that culminates in less than half of a minute, there's certainly a lot that comes before, right?
• 9:01
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 9:02
  Lance Bullard: And it depends on at what stage we're starting.
• 9:05
  Lance Bullard: We do crash testing for private industry and we also do developmental testing where we're developing new products and that may be for state DOTs or the federal government, or even for private entities for that matter.
• 9:20
  Lance Bullard: So we perform compliance crash testing, where somebody just brings us a device and we perform a series of high-speed or low-speed or combination of both crash tests with different speeds, impact angles, and weights of vehicles.
• 9:36
  Lance Bullard: And to give you a little background on the vehicles, right now, the current standard is we're looking at two vehicle weights, so 1,100 kilograms and 2,270 kilograms.
• 9:47
  Lance Bullard: So about a 2,400-pound passenger car and about a 5,000-pound pickup truck.
• 9:53
  Lance Bullard: And we're running those typically at highways speeds of about 62 miles per hour or a hundred kilometers per hour and angles up to 25 degrees.
• 10:02
  Lance Bullard: And we're, we're doing that in a bracket type of situation.
• 10:06
  Lance Bullard: We assume that if you test a lower-weight vehicle and a higher-weight vehicle then that population of vehicles that fall in between those two are going to be okay.
• 10:17
  Lance Bullard: We select the speed and the angle.
• 10:20
  Lance Bullard: And we believe that we're encapsulating in terms of severity, basically 93 percent of the run-off-the-road accidents.
• 10:28
  Bernie Fette: What would you list as the major milestones in roadside safety that have resulted from the research that you and your colleagues have done?
• 10:37
  Lance Bullard: Oh, there's so many.
• 10:38
  Lance Bullard: Things as benign as small sign supports like a stop sign.
• 10:43
  Lance Bullard: Engineers are very good at building things that are very strong structurally.
• 10:47
  Lance Bullard: And these run-off-the-road crashes, people were impacting, you know, just simple sign supports, and they were not yielding or forgiving.
• 10:56
  Lance Bullard: And it was causing terrible accidents and, and rollovers.
• 11:00
  Lance Bullard: And so that was one of the first things that they started looking at was we had all these sign supports along this new Interstate Highway System that were causing terrible impacts when people left the roadway.
• 11:11
  Lance Bullard: So breakaway sign supports was one of the first things TTI worked on.
• 11:16
  Lance Bullard: And basically what happens there is, engineers now have a design window where they have to design the support strong enough to hold up and sustain the wind loads against the sign panel itself, but weak enough to yield to a car that impacts.
• 11:30
  Lance Bullard: The next one that was really neat, was crash cushions.
• 11:33
  Lance Bullard: We had these Interstate Highway Systems with exit ramps and they had nice concrete barriers and where these concrete barriers merge, uh, between the main lanes and the exits, they had gore areas.
• 11:46
  Lance Bullard: So they had concrete walls right there.
• 11:49
  Lance Bullard: And people were, you know, being indecisive or inattentive or whatever the reason, uh, maybe they were running into'em because somebody was changing lanes and not paying attention.
• 11:58
  Lance Bullard: So they were running into these, uh, concrete walls and crash cushions were developed and placed in front of those abutment areas.
• 12:07
  Lance Bullard: And TTI was on the cutting edge of developing some of the very first crash cushions ever developed.
• 12:14
  Lance Bullard: So those crash cushions were developed with Texas Department of Transportation, TxDOT, and those early crash cushions, TxDOT had all of these paint striping drums.
• 12:25
  Lance Bullard: So paint came in these 55-gallon drums and they were just trash.
• 12:29
  Lance Bullard: What did they do with'em?
• 12:30
  Lance Bullard: And they were looking for a way to develop a crash cushion and TTI researchers organized these drums in an array in front of these gore areas and developed a crash cushion that would safely decelerate an impacting vehicle and prevent fatalities and serious injuries.
• 12:49
  Bernie Fette: And it sounds like it also had the distinction of being one of the earlier applications of recycling.
• 12:55
  Lance Bullard: It was very much, very much so.
• 12:58
  Lance Bullard: Yeah.
• 12:59
  Lance Bullard: So yeah, this was in the sixties when this was all occurring.
• 13:02
  Lance Bullard: The sixties and seventies was very much an era of safety.
• 13:07
  Lance Bullard: The federal motor vehicle safety standards came out of the Federal Highway Safety Act of 1966.
• 13:13
  Lance Bullard: So we were going hand in hand as they were developing safety features and vehicles.
• 13:18
  Lance Bullard: And we were developing safety features for the roadside.
• 13:21
  Bernie Fette: And you also did a lot of work with guardrails.
• 13:24
  Bernie Fette: And I think that the idea then with the guardrail work specifically was to develop something that a car could crash into and that the driver could literally walk away from the crash, and that's actually happened, hasn't it?
• 13:38
  Lance Bullard: It has.
• 13:39
  Lance Bullard: So going back with safety philosophy, uh, when a vehicle leaves the roadway, there's several things that can happen.
• 13:46
  Lance Bullard: Of course, the first thing we'd like to do is just remove the hazard from the roadway environment or roadside.
• 13:51
  Lance Bullard: The next thing is to, if we can't remove it, relocate it.
• 13:56
  Lance Bullard: If we can't do that, then we want to try to make it break away or yielding.
• 14:00
  Lance Bullard: Like we talked about on the sign supports, you know, allow that support of that hazard, just get outta the way when it's impacted easily.
• 14:07
  Lance Bullard: And then finally the last resort is to shield it.
• 14:11
  Lance Bullard: And the reason I say last resort is when we install a barrier or guardrail on the roadside, that in and of itself is a hazard.
• 14:19
  Lance Bullard: And we wanna make sure that that hazard that's being installed is certainly less severe than what it is we're protecting.
• 14:25
  Lance Bullard: So the development of guardrails has come a long way and we've worked on that.
• 14:29
  Lance Bullard: And the theory behind that is when a vehicle leaves the roadway, that rail is hopefully there to contain and redirect that vehicle and keep it away from that hazard that it is shielding.
• 14:40
  Lance Bullard: So, uh, a lot of work went into developing safe guardrails.
• 14:45
  Lance Bullard: And one of the things is every guardrail is terminated on each end and we have to shield those ends because what they found out is when they just stuck a guardrail out there, people were impacting the end of the guardrail and those guardrails were piercing or penetrating the occupant compartment of the vehicle and causing injuries.
• 15:05
  Lance Bullard: So that led to the development of terminals or crash cushions.
• 15:10
  Lance Bullard: And TTI has a, a rich history in that, out here in front of our facility, we had an incident where a gentleman impacted one and it brought his pickup truck to a safe stop.
• 15:21
  Lance Bullard: He was able to get out and walk away from that.
• 15:24
  Lance Bullard: And, uh, he's certainly been one of our biggest advocates of that safety device since then.
• 15:29
  Bernie Fette: So you were actually able to speak with somebody who benefited from some of the design and creative work that you and your colleagues have done.
• 15:39
  Lance Bullard: Yes, sir.
• 15:40
  Bernie Fette: So how did that feel to talk to somebody that survived a crash because of the work that you and your colleagues did?
• 15:47
  Lance Bullard: You know, it's very fulfilling to know that it's more than just a research report getting dusty on a shelf when you meet an end user.
• 15:55
  Lance Bullard: And nobody wants to set out to leave and go to work and try out one of our devices.
• 16:00
  Lance Bullard: But it's, it's very fulfilling to know that we've been successful in saving somebody's life and allowing them to return home to their family.
• 16:09
  Bernie Fette: Sounds like a classic example of you guys creating something that you hope that no one will ever have to use.
• 16:16
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 16:18
  Bernie Fette: And then at some point specifically after the terrorist attacks in 2001, your portfolio expanded.
• 16:26
  Bernie Fette: Did you just answer the phone one day and someone said, hello, I'm calling from the U.S.
• 16:30
  Bernie Fette: Department of State and we need your help?
• 16:33
  Bernie Fette: Is that how it worked, or tell, tell, tell us how that got started.
• 16:37
  Lance Bullard: Not quite, but that's pretty close.
• 16:39
  Lance Bullard: You know, after 9-11, we just had a different audience.
• 16:42
  Lance Bullard: We went from saving the good guys and, and keeping them on the road or when they left the roadway to, uh, saving the good guys within a protected perimeter.
• 16:54
  Lance Bullard: So there are a lot of facilities where they're trying to keep bad guys out, nuclear power plants, government facilities, airports, there's all kinds of things where they want to keep bad guys or terrorists from getting into.
• 17:07
  Bernie Fette: Including embassies, right?
• 17:09
  Bernie Fette: Isn't that what, embassies the focus of some of your work too?
• 17:12
  Lance Bullard: We did a lot of work with the embassies.
• 17:14
  Lance Bullard: We already had a rich history in designing and developing ways to decelerate vehicles.
• 17:21
  Lance Bullard: The difference when we, we switched to these devices.
• 17:23
  Lance Bullard: So gates, bollards, fences, rigid things that, uh, we were not so concerned with saving the occupant of the vehicle, cuz we're talking about bad guys here.
• 17:33
  Lance Bullard: We were interested in saving the people on the other side of the device.
• 17:37
  Bernie Fette: And, and so you literally had to, uh, design crash tests to simulate a truck, trying to get inside a secured area, an embassy or other secured area with a whole lot of explosives.
• 17:52
  Bernie Fette: You literally had to simulate that circumstance.
• 17:56
  Lance Bullard: Yes, sir.
• 17:56
  Lance Bullard: And, and we not only simulated it in a computational environment like we were accustomed to doing in the highway environment, but we ran full-scale crash tests as well.
• 18:06
  Lance Bullard: So trucks up to 80,000 pounds.
• 18:09
  Lance Bullard: So trucks, semi tractor trailers.
• 18:11
  Bernie Fette: With several of those barrels, like the ones you mentioned earlier, loaded onto the back of the truck to simulate explosives.
• 18:19
  Lance Bullard: Uh, it was laden with a simulated, they're homemade bombs basically.
• 18:24
  Lance Bullard: And, uh, everything we could do to replicate that particular environment that was provided.
• 18:30
  Bernie Fette: Probably one of the most often viewed videos on your website, too.
• 18:35
  Lance Bullard: Probably.
• 18:35
  Lance Bullard: So because people like to see a, a bad crash when they come watch one.
• 18:39
  Lance Bullard: Unfortunately on the highway side of things, an entertaining crash test that looks bad is not good, but on the, uh, embassy protection side of things, it's spectacular.
• 18:51
  Bernie Fette: Yeah.
• 18:51
  Bernie Fette: Yeah.
• 18:52
  Bernie Fette: Crash testing, as dramatic and fascinating as it is, is not the only thing that you do at the proving ground.
• 18:59
  Bernie Fette: What else is going on out there?
• 19:01
  Lance Bullard: Well, there's a lot of facets to leading up to an actual crash test.
• 19:05
  Lance Bullard: We do crash testing with regard to low-speed bollards.
• 19:08
  Lance Bullard: So protecting farmers' markets, uh, sidewalk cafes.
• 19:12
  Bernie Fette: Convenience stores.
• 19:13
  Lance Bullard: Convenience stores, these smash-and-grab type of events.
• 19:17
  Lance Bullard: We're getting into material handling testing.
• 19:20
  Lance Bullard: So providing protective devices for these distribution centers, they have a forklift run in to a, a pallet rack that goes to the ceiling and comes crashing down on somebody.
• 19:30
  Lance Bullard: Uh, we're getting into that.
• 19:32
  Lance Bullard: But we were talking about the crash test itself, the design aspect, you know, actually sitting down and designing it, doing it in a computational environment.
• 19:41
  Lance Bullard: We have a scanning facility where we're reverse engineering and scanning vehicles to use as models in those simulations.
• 19:49
  Lance Bullard: We have a lot of component testing that we perform using a falling-weight pendulum.
• 19:54
  Lance Bullard: We have bogie vehicles to try to reduce the cost of developmental testing.
• 19:59
  Lance Bullard: These vehicles have varying crush characteristics depending on what we're trying to accomplish.
• 20:04
  Lance Bullard: So we have lots of tools at our disposal before we get actually out in the field and perform a full-scale crash test.
• 20:12
  Bernie Fette: A 50-year or 50-plus-year record is pretty impressive.
• 20:17
  Bernie Fette: But I'm wondering how you look at the next several years.
• 20:20
  Bernie Fette: If you could get a really big measure of research funding tomorrow to explore or test one thing that you haven't done yet, what would you do?
• 20:31
  Lance Bullard: You know right now the, uh, I think the emphasis for everybody is on EV-- electric vehicles and automated, uh, you know, driverless vehicles.
• 20:42
  Lance Bullard: And those vehicles have a lot of different characteristics than our current passenger car fleet.
• 20:50
  Lance Bullard: We are always changing and updating our crash testing standards to reflect the more recent passenger car fleet on the roadway.
• 20:59
  Lance Bullard: And right now that's the movement.
• 21:01
  Lance Bullard: We're going to these EV vehicles.
• 21:03
  Lance Bullard: And we're gonna have to update our standards and look at what happens when these vehicles with lithium batteries impact guardrails, because they do have different stiffness characteristics.
• 21:15
  Lance Bullard: So when they crash, they're going to crunch up in layman's terms.
• 21:18
  Lance Bullard: They're gonna crunch up differently than current passenger cars.
• 21:22
  Lance Bullard: You know, is there a fire hazard with the lithium batteries?
• 21:24
  Lance Bullard: I know that's a big topic right now is how do emergency response crews handle these vehicles in crash scenarios?
• 21:32
  Lance Bullard: So there's a lot of research and work to be performed there, uh, with the new vehicle fleet that's coming.
• 21:39
  Bernie Fette: So you're having to do exactly what your predecessors did back in the sixties-- adapt to the new transportation world that we were developing and building and build safety standards to accommodate.
• 21:52
  Lance Bullard: Absolutely.
• 21:53
  Lance Bullard: And it's still just being able to see these devices.
• 21:56
  Lance Bullard: When I say see these new automated vehicles, how they're seeing the devices on the side of the road and interacting with the vehicles.
• 22:04
  Lance Bullard: You know, what do we do to communicate with them?
• 22:06
  Lance Bullard: And is there going to be in the future, when you impact one of these devices because accidents happen, whether it's human error or the software or, uh, hardware errors.
• 22:19
  Lance Bullard: I'd like to think that we're going to get down to zero fatalities and we're not going to have crashes anymore, but in the interim, are these devices going to contact the emergency response crews and say, hey, there's been an accident.
• 22:31
  Lance Bullard: I've been run into, and this is my location.
• 22:34
  Lance Bullard: Please come help the driver and the passengers.
• 22:39
  Bernie Fette: Watching a crash test in person is a unique experience, for sure.
• 22:44
  Bernie Fette: It's dramatic.
• 22:45
  Bernie Fette: It's powerful.
• 22:47
  Bernie Fette: And it's really loud.
• 22:50
  Bernie Fette: And even though you see the impact coming, it's hard to not flinch a little bit when it happens.
• 22:55
  Bernie Fette: You've been crashing cars and trucks and motorcycles for quite a few years.
• 23:00
  Bernie Fette: Does it ever feel like, oh, it's just another day at the office?
• 23:06
  Lance Bullard: No, it's always exciting.
• 23:08
  Lance Bullard: It's amazing to have a long career like I've had and every day be excited to get up and, and do it again.
• 23:15
  Lance Bullard: One of the things that I think when you actually come and watch a crash test, that people don't realize when we're going down the highway, we're in this little box and we feel safe and sound and driving high speed doesn't feel bad.
• 23:28
  Lance Bullard: But when you're standing there watching a vehicle come down the test track-- and you've done that, Bernie-- doesn't it seem like, wow, that vehicle's really going fast?
• 23:37
  Lance Bullard: But when you're driving home, you just don't get that same sensation.
• 23:40
  Lance Bullard: And I think everybody needs to see how fast you're really going to appreciate, man, if something goes wrong or I have to stop, or, you know, I lose control, there's a lot of energy involved and I'm not w rapped in much.
• 23:53
  Lance Bullard: There's, you know, it's just t hen sheet metal protecting us.
• 23:57
  Lance Bullard: Particularly for young drivers, they take for granted t heir safety.
• 24:01
  Lance Bullard: They've never been uncomfortable before.
• 24:03
  Lance Bullard: And seeing that, i t drives home that, wow, this is bad.
• 24:07
  Lance Bullard: It could be bad because a crash is a crash.
• 24:10
  Lance Bullard: It always looks bad.
• 24:11
  Lance Bullard: It always looks violent.
• 24:13
  Lance Bullard: Even though we save somebody's life, at the end of the day, the potential for injuries is there.
• 24:20
  Lance Bullard: And we hope to mitigate those injuries.
• 24:22
  Lance Bullard: And we hope that people can get o utta the car, but it's still a crash.
• 24:25
  Lance Bullard: I t's still a life-threatening event.
• 24:28
  Bernie Fette: Yeah.
• 24:28
  Bernie Fette: You mentioned getting up every day.
• 24:30
  Bernie Fette: So that makes me wonder, what is it that still motivates you after all these years to come to work every day?
• 24:37
  Lance Bullard: I think the bottom line is just the ability to potentially save lives.
• 24:42
  Lance Bullard: You know, uh, I get to take my education and my experience and do something that hopefully will do good and save somebody's life and allow them to go home at the end of the day and be with their family.
• 24:57
  Bernie Fette: Lance Bullard, senior research engineer at TTI.
• 25:00
  Bernie Fette: You and your team have some pretty fascinating jobs, Lance.
• 25:04
  Bernie Fette: Thanks for telling us about the work that you do.
• 25:07
  Lance Bullard: Thanks for letting me share it with you.
• 25:11
  Bernie Fette: Despite myriad transportation safety improvements in the past century, vehicle crashes remain one of the leading causes of death worldwide.
• 25:21
  Bernie Fette: As Lance Bullard tells us, we all hope to one day reach a point where we have zero deaths on our roadways.
• 25:29
  Bernie Fette: But until that day, we need ways to make crashes more survivable.
• 25:35
  Bernie Fette: That requires constant effort in developing new safety technologies, whether those innovations are inside the car or outside of it.
• 25:44
  Bernie Fette: Thanks for listening.
• 25:47
  Bernie Fette: Please join us for our next episode and a conversation with Darlene Goehl an expert in pavement engineering at TTI.
• 25:56
  Bernie Fette: What Darlene has to share is likely to inspire greater appreciation for the humble roadways that many of us take for granted each day.
• 26:04
  Bernie Fette: Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of the Texas A&M University System.
• 26:14
  Bernie Fette: The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau.
• 26:18
  Bernie Fette: I'm your writer and host, Bernie Fette.
• 26:21
  Bernie Fette: Thanks again for listening.
• 26:22
  Bernie Fette: We'll see you next time.