Bill to End Riding in Pickup Beds Would Save Many

This is all coming a little too late for Jose Nunoz.

A few Saturdays ago, the 19-year-old from Orange was riding in the back of a pickup truck with a buddy. The hour was edging toward midnight. Three others were stuffed in the truck’s cab. As they whistled along the twisting asphalt of Santiago Canyon Road toward Irvine Lake, the pickup’s driver got brave and pulled around a slowpoke to pass.

Ablaze with urgency, the headlights of an onrushing car ignited the night.

The truck swerved to avoid a head-on, but veered too much. It hit a guardrail and flipped. Like cannonballs, Nunoz and his companion were catapulted out of the pickup bed.

Jose’s friend was lucky--he was hospitalized with only a broken leg. The three in front suffered miraculously minor injuries.

Nunoz thudded to the ground, all too human and frail. He died, authorities said, near the spot where he landed.

So there it was. Give it a few more weeks, a month or two, and Nunoz might not have been in that truck bed.

The rules of the road, you see, may soon change a bit, all of it to prevent the sort of mishap that claimed Nunoz. A bill now awaiting the signature of Gov. Pete Wilson would make it illegal in California to ride in the back of pickups or flatbed trucks.

We’ve all done it before, some of us more than others. Summertime, the air is warm--and there’s too big a crowd crammed in the cab of Dad’s truck. So the kids jump in back for a ride down to the beach. Or the shopping center. Or the movies.

Never mind that the odds of an accident seem astronomical. People die because they ride in the beds of pickups, the experts tell us.

In 1990 alone, 26 people in truck beds were killed in California. The number was even larger in 1989, as 32 lives were claimed. The injured in each of those years is easily triple the number of deaths, authorities say.

Sure, those figures are just a small portion of the grisly load of people maimed and killed on America’s highways each year. An average year in the United States means somewhere around 50,000 lives lost in car accidents, about the same number of Americans as were felled by bullets and bombs in Vietnam.

But the small percentage killed while riding in truck beds seems particularly tragic. These deaths, after all, seem so easily preventable.

There is research to prove it. Passengers in a pickup bed are more than twice as likely to be killed or injured as those riding inside, according to a 1990 study by the Public Policy Research Organization at UC Irvine.

In other words: Just put Jose Nunoz in the front cab with his buddies and he’d probably still be around to joke about walking away from that bad wreck a few weeks ago.

There are lots of other examples, tragedies all.

There were the eight young victims in two pickups--five of them unrestrained in the back of one vehicle--who died last month in a predawn collision on a rural highway near Byron, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. There were the two teen-age sisters who perished a few days later in San Jose.

All the injuries and deaths, course, are typically associated with collisions, but there are exceptions to the rule.

The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that some deaths involving passengers in pickup beds come when passengers simply fall as the truck swerves, brakes or is jouncing along on rough roads. A third of the deaths not involving collisions are caused by passengers standing up, sitting on the tailgate, changing positions, engaged in horseplay or fighting.

Many California lawmakers have for years felt that pressure from rural constituents would mount if restrictions on riding in the back of trucks were considered.

But the state is getting less rural all the time. So far, opposition to the legislation prohibiting riders in trucks, authored by Assemblyman Curtis Tucker (D-Inglewood), has been minimal.

Tracy St. Julien, Tucker’s chief of staff, said the bill sailed through the Senate and Assembly with a conspicuous lack of dissent from the agriculture industry, its only anticipated foe.

“We view this simply as an extension the state’s seat-belt law,” St. Julien said. “It’s ridiculous to mandate that in closed cars we require people to belt up, but in un-enclosed, open-air truck beds we let them ride with no restraint. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Officials with the Wilson Administration expect the governor to consider the bill during the coming week, but it remains unclear what his stance will be. “We haven’t had a chance to look at that one yet,” said Bill Livingston, a Wilson spokesman.

If the legislation is signed, it would make California only the second state in the nation to put outright prohibitions on riding in truck beds. The other is New Jersey.

It will be a quantum change. Current state law has no restrictions on adults and provides only minimal protection for children--it prohibits children under 12 from riding in a pickup bed unless restrained by a seat belt or accompanied by an adult.

Under the changes proposed by Tucker, anyone ticketed for allowing a passenger to ride in a truck could be fined $100. A second ticket within a year would be worth $200 and subsequent violations would cost $250 a pop.