Transport: Automobiles

The thud of broken skulls continued to be heard on U. S. city streets last week and country highways continued to resound with the crash of battered, torn and twisted metal. Removed during the week from the scene of automobile accidents in the U. S. were approximately 1,000 dead or dying persons. In Chicago, the National Safety Council was once more in convention to take stock of this appalling situation, consider what can be done, tell what is being done.

The council reported 17,200 deaths from motor accidents for the first six months of 1937, an increase of 2,040 (13%) over the corresponding period last year. Since vehicle mileage increased about 10%, however, the death rate per car mile was up only 3%. Deaths in June were down to 2,860 as against 2,905 for June 1936. President Paul Gray Hoffman of Studebaker Corp., head of the Automotive Safety Foundation, honored five States with a statement that last year’s death toll of 37,800 would have been smaller by 13,000 if all States had traffic regulations as intelligent as those in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa,

Minnesota. Director Sidney J. Williams of the Council’s public safety division estimated that if all States had rigid license laws 3,000 lives would have been saved last year. The Council’s chief statistician, Reuben L. Forney, showed that 50,274 persons will die in 1950 if fatalities increase as much in the next 14 years as in the past 14. Hopefully, Florence I. Anderson, curly-haired, emphatic secretary of the East Bay Safety Council (Oakland, Calif.), declared that California’s compulsory driving schools for traffic law violators were proving to be successful accident reducers.

¶ In Indianapolis, Police Captain Lewis Johnson announced the results of municipal research intended to reveal the most efficient speed for expediting traffic. Answer: 23.5 m.p.h. Said Captain Johnson: “At that speed the safe distance between cars is 33 ft. and 2,600 cars can be moved past a given point within an hour.”*

¶ “The public reaction probably will be terrible,” said Undersheriff Ervin Coling of Racine, Wis. Undersheriff Coling is what motorists call a “tough cop.”† Last week he was going ahead with plans to stop passing cars, subject their drivers to quizzes on traffic law. Undersheriff Coling was undismayed by the possibility that motor clubs would route their clients around Racine County. Said he: “I’d be tickled pink if they would.” He was also sure that Wisconsin law would back him up: “If anyone doubts the legal ability of a deputy to stop a car, let him keep on going. He’ll get a bullet in a rear tire.”

¶ The U. S. Bureau of Public Roads announced researches, made in Connecticut, which showed that Connecticut drivers averaged 38.2 m.p.h., New York State drivers averaged 40.3 m.p.h., motorists from four Midwestern States 44.9 m.p.h. The Bureau’s investigators, who parked inconspicuously while clocking the cars over measured distances and noting their license plates, offered several explanations for these differences: either Connecticut people went slow because they knew they would get no preferential treatment if caught speeding, or the Midwesterners, or the outstate people went fast because of the “recklessness of the vacation spirit,” or because “the fastest and most reckless drivers of any community . . . take the longest trips.” The Bureau also found that cars in which the driver is alone travel faster than those with passengers.

* Mathematically, an unbroken procession of cars exactly 33 ft. apart and moving at a constant speed of exactly 23.5 m.p.h. would pass a given point at the rate of 3,760 per hour.

† One of the toughest of “tough cops” in the U. S., according to connoisseurs, is Motorcycle Patrolman John Patrick Connors, whose bailiwick is small, attractive Manchester, Mass. Residents of Cape Ann, among whom the name of Connors is a byword, accuse him of being not only a superfine and arbitrary legalist but a misanthrope who hates automobile drivers. Incorruptible, Policeman Connors has been threatened on at least one occasion by an irate driver with a shotgun, and was once about to be assaulted by a burly victim in the lobby of a motion picture theatre when bystanders intervened. Truck drivers passing through Manchester became so irked at what they considered unwarranted pouncing by Policeman Connors that they threatened to bring him to grief by making sudden stops with their air brakes while he was following behind on his motorcycle. Standing joke in the region: “It’s too bad Connors’ own family don’t drive, or he’d spend all his time arresting them and let the rest of us alone.”