Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.
—Through the Looking-Glass
Like Alice, U.S. motorists, whose lot it is to dodge potholes, fight traffic jams and search for nonexistent parking spaces, last week.won a privileged peek through their rearview mirrors into a magic world of wheels where things obviously go the other way. Home again in Madras, India (pop. 1,500.000) after a 50-day tour of Washington. D.C., New York City, Los Angeles and eleven other U.S. cities. Captain Dinakar Gnanaolivu. chairman of the Madras City Improvement Trust, summed up his impressions of U.S. traffic in Madras’ daily Hindu.
“Most road surfaces are of highest quality, and all are dustless,” said the captain. “Thousands of cars in every American town keep rushing past, one behind another, in two or three or four rows, all maintaining good speed in rhythmic, graceful waves of disciplined traffic. Traffic policemen are never seen on roads normally. They rush in from police stations only if there is an accident or anything untoward happens. All public buses invariably run on time, and are rarely overcrowded. The minimum sounding of the horn, by all motor vehicles, is amazing.
“No stray goats or cattle can be seen wandering on any of the roads to slow up vehicles or to nibble at young seedlings. I did not set my eyes on any horse-drawn or bullock-drawn vehicle.”
Pondering the orderly flow of U.S. motor cars (“commonly called ‘automobiles”). Captain Gnanaolivu found that it was due partly to an unusual practice; i.e., roads are used only by motorists and sidewalks only by pedestrians. But above and beyond this mutually exclusive assignment of territory, the captain in 50 days discovered an ethical explanation that had a genuine looking-glass tinge: “All this is done spontaneously, with an inner urge in every man and woman to obey traffic regulations and not because a policeman is there to book them!”
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