Safer

The high-pressure campaigns for traffic safety tend to obscure a fact that the campaigns help to create: for 25 years, U.S. motoring has been getting safer year by year. Last year there were 36,300 traffic deaths, not far below 1941's record 39,969. But Americans are also driving more cars more miles. Deaths per 100 million car-miles have dwindled from 16 in 1930 to 11.4 in 1940 to 7.6 in 1950. Last year they marked a new low: 6.5.

Black Is for Death. Sidney J. Williams, 68, the National Safety Council's "dean of traffic experts," says that the progress can be explained under three headings: the car, the road and the driver. "Generally speaking," says he, "the car is safer than the road, and the road is safer than the driver. The car is easier to make safe because there is a new model every year. The highway is more of a permanent investment. But the driver is hardest to get at. It is extremely difficult to change his attitude."

To get at him, a tough policy seems to work best. Last year Los Angeles courts punished as traffic offenders twice as big a proportion of motorists as they did in 1940. Many of the offenders were sentenced to a course in a driver improvement school. Los Angeles has put teeth in the principle that "the pedestrian has the right of way." In most of the U.S., this slogan merely encourages the walker without inhibiting the driver; in Los Angeles, motorists know that the courts will almost always hold the motorist at fault.

Detroit says over radio and TV, "Drunk Drivers Go to Jail." It means just that; last year 827 of them did, for a twelve-day average visit. The city's drunk-driver accidents have dropped some 90% in twelve years. As part of its driver-education campaign, black flags flutter on Detroit's police motorcycles on days when a Detroiter has died in traffic.

Traffic engineers have learned much about easing congestion by lubricating traffic flow with such devices as one-way streets and timed stop lights, but road building helps too. Freeways carry three times as much traffic as ordinary streets, with one-fifth the accident rate. When San Francisco recently opened a 1.3-mile portion of a new freeway, the accident rate on crosshatching streets for two miles on either side dropped 36%.

Sense Is for Horses. Says Los Angeles Safety Council President J. T. Blalock, "There are those who say that we've got to figure on an irreducible minimum [of accidents]. I disagree. The irreducible minimum is zero." Washington's Safety Director Anthony Ellison counts on the citizen's cooperation. Without it, he says, "You've got nothing." Los Angeles and Washington had fewest deaths per vehicle last year among cities in their population groups, with past leaders Detroit and San Francisco close runners-up. Last year's booby prizes in the large city groups go to New York and Boston. Boston's Chief Traffic Engineer Timothy J. O'Conner last week termed his tangle of jackknifed streets "a nightmare." And a New York safety official observed that his city's traffic is like the weather: nobody does anything about it. Cracked he: "We had just as many careless drivers 40 years ago as we do today. The only thing is, the horses had more sense."

Nevertheless, Traffic Dean Williams credits the East with "more respect for law and order." The reason why Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey have consistently run up mileage death rates less than two-thirds the national average, says Williams, is that they "have done the best job for the longest time on accident prevention." They, and Vermont, were the first states to require licenses for drivers, and among the first to have a system of car inspection.

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