What a good question Mira! There are many hazards that parents still do not appreciate with with the appropriate degree of concern, but the greatest of these is the driveway back-over hazard.
In the U.S. alone, roughly one hundred children are killed in their driveway each year, victims of inadvertent back-overs – often with their parent behind the wheel. Can you imagine anything worse? Since reporting of this hazard has been inconsistent, the true statistics may be considerably higher.
Back-over accidents occur due to the significant blind spots behind vehicles. The prevalence of large sport utility vehicles with even larger blind spots only increases the likelihood of additional tragedies.
The awareness of this hazard has traditionally been limited largely because hospitals have not been required to track injuries and deaths from driveway incidents separately from other motor vehicle related ones. The recently passed Highway Transportation Bill (H.R. 3) should change this by requiring the National Highway and Transportation Safety Association (NHTSA) to collect "non-traffic, non-crash incident data." Additionally, a group of trauma centers, including Stanford Hospital, are piloting an effort to track back-over incidents in an effort to better quantify the frequency of occurrence.
The drive to increase the awareness of back-over hazards has largely been spearheaded by Kids and Cars, a non-profit organization led by Janette Fennell (kidsandcars.org). Her website is an excellent source of information related to keeping children safe in and around cars.
The Highway Transportation Bill referenced above also requires NHTSA to "study methods for reducing back-overs, analyze prevention technology, and provide an estimate of cost savings that would result from widespread use of back-over prevention devices." These back-over prevention devices include wide-angle view mirrors, backup cameras and object sensors. These products vary in cost and effectiveness in alerting a driver to the presence of an object (potentially a child) in her blind spot.
For starters, all parents need to be absolutely vigilant when backing out of their garage or driveway. Additionally, we should consider retrofitting our existing vehicles with one or more of the back-over prevention technologies referenced above. In all likelihood, we will soon know the true scope of this hazard and, hopefully, all new vehicles will have a back-over preventive device included as a standard feature.