Al's Morning Meeting

Are rescue workers in your town trained to deal with car crashes that involve hybrid cars? These new "green" cars could endanger untrained rescue workers if they unknowingly cut through electrical lines that could still be hot.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported:

The battery in some hybrids, which run on a combination of electricity and gas, carries a charge of up to 500 volts. A typical car battery is 12 volts. As new hybrids are introduced, first responders must learn where the battery is stored and how to cut the cables so they don't risk electrocution when using such metal-crushing machinery as the Jaws of Life.

"With the increased popularity of hybrid vehicles, first responders are obviously dealing with some new challenges when they get to the scene of a crash," said Rae Tyson, spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The paper reported:

Everything on hybrid cars is color-coded to let first responders know where electricity flows, he said.

On Honda vehicles, for example, the high-voltage power line is bright orange and situated in such a way that "it's highly, highly unlikely that any emergency personnel would even be under that part of the car while trying to extricate somebody," said Sage Marie, a spokesman for the company. "Risk is very minimal, if any."

According to manufacturers, hybrids also pose no additional risk if submerged in water, a common occurrence in canal-laden South Florida. Emergency workers just need to make sure that once the car is pulled out, the ignition is off.

To ensure safety, Honda and Toyota created specific guides for first responders.

Toyota sent its guide to every fire department in the nation when its first hybrid was introduced a few years ago, said Sam Butto, a company spokesman. New guides are available for the company's latest hybrid Lexus and Highlander models. All the guides can be found free online.

State Farm insurance spokesman Mark Spenser tells me:

Not only are there issues of high-voltage areas of the car to avoid, there are also concerns about whether the car is actually off. Today, most rescue workers can easily tell if a car is off by simply feeling the hood. But a hybrid can be in the silent electric mode, appearing to be off, but poised to run over an unsuspecting rescue worker if the injured driver moves his/her foot to the accelerator. Putting chocks under the wheels is one of the safety tips offered to firefighters by ... extrication trainer Ron Moore of the McKinney (Texas) Fire Department in a training broadcast last Friday sponsored by State Farm. Video of the training broadcast is now available online at www.statefarm.com/sftv/sftv.htm.

Those high-occupancy vehicle lanes that are meant to encourage folks to carpool have a hidden dangerous side.

They seem to contribute to traffic accidents.

The main issue, according to a Wall Street Journal article this week, is that the HOV lane moves faster -- sometimes much faster -- than the lane right next to it and there is no barrier between the two. So some drivers illegally weave in and out of the HOV lane and bang -- there it is.

The Journal story said:

High-occupancy vehicle lanes -- generally open to vehicles with at least two passengers -- have become a fixture on many urban freeways. The number of HOV miles in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1990, to 2,500 miles nationwide. The federal government promotes them as a way to improve air quality. Transportation officials favor them as a way to get more people moving on crowded highways. Even free-market economists like them because they are a solution to gridlock based on incentives.

There is just one problem: There is increasing evidence that adding an HOV lane can lead to more accidents...

The rate of accidents involving injuries increased as much as 56 percent for stretches of Dallas freeway that have HOV lanes adjacent to regular lanes without a concrete barrier separating them, according to a Texas Transportation Institute study released in April. The Texas study relied on before-and-after crash data from highways where HOV lanes were added in the 1990s. On I-635, a hulking freeway that slices across northern Dallas, there was an average of more than one injury accident a day after an HOV lane was added in each direction.

Researchers at the Midwest Research Institute a year earlier had found accidents rates rose 11 percent in several Southern California locations where HOV lanes were added, lanes narrowed or both.

Federal transportation officials, who are pushing cities to build more HOV lanes, cite a 1992 study that found no increase in accidents after high-occupancy lanes were added. But even one of the authors of that report, Edward Sullivan, a professor at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, says the work "probably should be considered stale" by now.

One reason HOV safety hasn't received a lot of attention is that the accidents tend to be side-swipes and fender benders, not life-threatening crashes. Nonetheless, serious accidents do happen. In 2002, a driver near Seattle veered into an HOV lane on Interstate 405, cutting off a bus carrying members of a high school band. The bus swerved, beginning a chain of accidents. By the time it was all over, eight cars were smashed up and a dozen people injured, according to a police report.

Why might HOV lanes cause accidents? When the lanes are not separated by concrete barriers, drivers often illegally weave between the regular and HOV lanes, says Scott Cooner, a program manager for the Texas Transportation Institute, part of the Texas A&M University system. What is more, drivers stuck in gridlock tend to be resentful of the fast-moving HOV traffic and won't let drivers merge from the high-speed lanes back onto the regular freeway, causing accidents.

So what's the answer? The Journal says putting barriers between the HOV lane and the regular lanes seems to make a big difference.

The Texas institute's study found accident rates didn't rise on a stretch of Dallas highway where HOV drivers are separated by a concrete barrier. Nationwide, only about 10 percent of HOV lanes have such concrete barriers, according to research by engineering firm URS Corp. Only white lines and a few feet separate the HOV and regular lanes for nearly all of the rest.

When Per Diems Are Not Enough

Anybody like me who has traveled much lately knows that hotel room rates are rising. But government per diem reimbursements to employees are not rising as quickly. Under the current rates, a traveler on government business is allotted $91 a day for domestic travel -- $60 for a hotel room and $31 for meals and incidentals, according to the General Services Administration. As a result, government workers often find themselves scouring cities for rooms that fall within the government guidelines for expenses. What are your city/state per diem rates? How often do employees spend more than that amount and how do they justify it? From whom do they have to get approval to go above the per diem amount?

The New York Times said:

Government workers are finding that the General Services Administration's travel per diems are not keeping pace with rising hotel room rates. The government typically sets such rates annually -- it adjusted rates in 17 locations in May by an average of $6 but did not increase rates for any large cities except Seattle, according to Kevin Maher, vice president for government affairs at the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

The Times story points out:

About 420 designated cities have allowances that are higher than the standard per diem. For example, the per diem for Manhattan in the summer is $200 for a hotel room and $51 for meals and incidentals; in the fall, the rate drops to $177 a night for lodging and $51 for meals and incidentals. In Buffalo, the per diem is $81 for a hotel room and $43 for meals and incidentals. "When these rates were set, the lodging industry wasn't doing as well as it is now," Mr. Maher said.

While government workers historically have had difficulty sticking to the per diems in some cities, it had been less of a problem in the recent years, when hotel room rates decreased in major cities, according to Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality consultant and analyst for PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York.

But that is all changing quickly. This year, PricewaterhouseCoopers is forecasting a 4.3 percent increase in hotel room rates nationwide. But that number is even larger in the biggest cities like New York, where room rates may increase before year's end by 9 percent to 10 percent, according to Mr. Hanson.

Los Angeles, Boston, Orlando and San Francisco are among the other cities experiencing increases in room rates that are larger than average, Mr. Hanson said. A result is that "government workers who had become accustomed to staying in Hiltons or Marriotts during the past few years are back at the lower-tier hotels," he said.

Is There A "Quiet Factor" in Men's Health Stories?

Al's Morning Meeting reader Lisa Soule does marketing on behalf of a hospital in Temple, Texas. She tells me that since last week she has been trying to get the word out about what she says is a groundbreaking procedure that involves reconstructing the male genitalia after cancer surgery. In some cases, men actually lose their private parts in preventative surgery. It is, as you might imagine, life-changing.

Lisa said she has had very few takers on the story and wonders if the real issue is that journalists are comfortable talking about women's health issues, but when it come to men's private parts, that is still a topic that we avoid. Lisa linked me to a well-told version of the story from ABC.com, but she said many other new organizations passed on the story. She writes in her note to me:

My question is this: If this were a new procedure for breast reconstruction, would we be hitting the same roadblocks?

Interestingly enough, the only local TV station with the nerve to touch it, first showed it to a focus group. The result? It was fine with the women, but the men were uncomfortable.

Women have come a long way by overcoming the quiet factor where their health is concerned. How long will it take for men to come around?

We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of websites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed, and a link will be provided, whenever possible.