By Royal Ford | August 21, 2005

It's time to empty the bed of the 1950 Willys Overland pickup truck -- the mythical staff car here in the Globe garage -- and sweep it clean of detritus picked up roaming the Internet highway, leafing through trade journals, and generally yakking with folks in the business of building cars:

At last, some good news:
It's from the folks at Kids and Cars, advocates looking to protect our children. The omnibus transportation bill just signed by President Bush says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will finally begin to collect data on nontraffic and noncrash tragedies. This means a child who is run over in a driveway, suffocates in a trunk, or gets trapped in a power window becomes an official statistic that could help fix dangerous equipment or manufacturing methods.

Furthermore, NHTSA will look for ways to reduce back-over accidents, which kill or injure hundreds of children every year -- not to mention all the bumpers that get bent in nonlethal run-ins.

And finally, by 2007, all vehicles must have power window switches that can only be pulled up or out -- reducing the risk that a child, leaning out of the window, will accidentally activate a push-down or toggle switch and crush his head, neck, or extremities.