The Right to Drive

I

IT has been one hundred and sixty years since the first vehicle actuated by power other than that of an animal first crept along a public way. The Parisian authorities of the day were properly shocked at Cugnot’s assurance and promptly sequestered both the driver and his teakettle car. Just a generation later, a rude Cornish giant brought to London a ponderous traveling engine which had terrified his simple neighbors in Camborne. He tried to zigzag at twelve miles an hour ‘from Leather Lane to Paddington by way of Lord’s Cricket Ground,’ but the busmen and cab drivers were so rude that he could not properly guide his monster and it swerved and ripped up sixteen feet of garden railings, with the result that Trevithick gave his next exhibition inside an enclosure where now is Euston Square. And at the end of still another generation we find one Hancock turning out ‘steam carriages,’ which conveyed a dozen persons along the king’s highway in ' luxury ’ and usually even in safety at eight miles an hour. He christened one of the first of these ‘Autopsy.’ Verily there were prophets and seers in those days.

And we of 1931, can we project ourselves ever so little into the future in this matter of the use of our public roads?

Perhaps it will help if we view the immediate past in brief detail. Twentyfive or thirty years ago Americans who could afford it, and in course of time at least a few who could not, began to discard the trusty steeds that had served them and their forefathers in favor of crude ‘gas-buggies,’ which in a surprisingly few years have given birth to an innumerable progeny of high-, higher-, and highest-powered motor cars — the latest count indicates that their number is approaching thirty millions.

The results of so sudden and radical a change in our mode of living are everywhere apparent, and not all are salutary. To date, in the United States alone, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed by or in automobiles. This does not sink as deeply into our consciousness as would, perhaps, a newspaper statement such as this on each New Year’s Day: —

ANOTHER CITY GONE
Injury Situation Beyond Control

Late press dispatches confirm a rumor that during the past twelve months, as the result of a mysterious illness with which the authorities have thus far been powerless to cope, the entire population of Tucson, Arizona, have lost their lives. It will perhaps be remembered that in the course of the previous year the population of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was destroyed in a similar epidemic and that every man, woman, and child in Northampton, Massachusetts, perished from what was thought to be this same dread disease the year before that.

It is further stated on good authority that during the last decade, from this same horrible malady, every man, woman, and child in New England has suffered injuries serious enough to report, all the way from ‘harmless’ cuts to manglings that have kept them hovering between this world and the next for many weeks. A conference of governors has been called and immediate action is confidently looked for.

To speak in this connection of such a matter as property losses would seem to be altogether an anticlimax—and we Americans view waste rather nonchalantly at best. The fact is, however, that American automobiles are responsible each year for direct property damage of the value of two hundred millions of dollars — more than half the initial cost of our boasted Panama Canal; and if all economic losses are included the total approximates a billion dollars. Can this be even one of the least of the numberless causes of our present economic depression?

II

There is no simple cure-all remedy for so complex a situation as confronts us, although a number have been proposed, all the way from doing away with the gas pedal to surrounding all cars with India-rubber buffers or incarcerating guilty cars by the wholesale. Personally, I believe we all drive, at times, considerably faster than necessary. But I look at the London figures for the 1003 street fatalities caused by vehicles of all sorts during a recent year and note that nearly 800 of the vehicles were estimated, by the police, to have been traveling no faster than 15 miles an hour, and I wonder. The authorities in our smallest New England state have proved conclusively, by long and carefully conducted tests, that driving speeds in their state (at least up to 1930) have been increasing steadily over a period of years — higher in the autumn than in the spring, higher in the spring than in the preceding autumn, and so on. They are convinced that there is a direct ratio between speed and accidents; that one rises and falls with the other.

I keep pondering over an arithmetical sum — a half second’s wrong thinking carries one 36 feet at 50 miles an hour, but only 18 feet at 25; and in the 18 feet between there might conceivably be a number of human beings. And what passes off lightly as an unlucky bump at 20 miles an hour becomes a tragedy at 40, for the kinetic energy of such a blow increases as the square of the speed. The day is surely coming when a gentleman will no longer boast of having bowled along our beautiful New England highways at the speed of a limited express — he will apologize instead.

To the average person, death rates do not signify as much as they perhaps should. Several years ago our United States death rate from automobile accidents passed 20 per year per 100,000 inhabitants; the National Safety Council’s estimate for 1929 was 22.7; the rate is still mounting, and nearly reached 25 in 1930. It is almost twice as high on the Pacific Coast as in New England, and the New England rate is about twice that of England and Wales, where in an area a third larger than New England there are about the same number of cars and five times as many people.

Judged by results, the fight against typhoid fever in Connecticut has been, over a period of ten years, some seven times as successful as that against auto fatalities, for in that period the typhoid death rate has been divided by four and the auto death rate has been multiplied by nearly two. Perhaps we might assert that an automobile is, at the moment, thirty times as dangerous as a typhoid bacillus, at least potentially. Nearly one third of all our accidental deaths in the United States are due to automobile crashes; next in order come falls, and after that usually drownings.

There are one or two bright, or at least not altogether black, spots in the picture. Our young pedestrians seem to show improvement in adjusting themselves to a situation which did not confront their elders so early in life; teachers and parents should be heartened at this. Conversely, however ill we can spare them, the aged are being told off at an increasing rate. And it does not give one much of a thrill to hear that, in proportion to the mileage we drive, we are probably killing slightly fewer people with our cars each year; the figure last year was a little over two deaths for each million gallons of gasoline burned. It is as if a group of two hundred cars should be driven around the world before they killed anyone, but during the journey should injure thirty or forty persons, some of them within an inch of their lives. We should n’t pat each other on the back very complacently for a record like that. It is a fact that, in proportion to the number of cars on our streets, fewer than half the number of people are killed each year in the United States that were killed on the same streets during the latter years of the World War. But this is faint comfort to the hearts of the growing number of mourners; and, in fact, for several years past the rate has been increasing again.

III

There are many queries which might be put to a statistician versed in these matters; but to a fair proportion of the queries conclusive answers are at present impossible. Questions like these: Do flexible speed regulations increase or diminish accidents? What effect on accidents have so-called prima facie speed laws? Does universal compulsory insurance covering third-party risks make for more careful driving? Does the construction of speedways reduce the number of accidents or only change their type? Are women more careful drivers than men? Should we increase or decrease the number of warning signs? To questions such as these one might hazard replies according to his predilections or even his hopes, but he would have to confess that the replies were founded on rather slim documentary evidence of a statistical nature; perhaps ten years hence we may feel more sure.

There are other questions which can be answered with confidence, for the data are available. Accidents are most apt to happen, for instance, at about five o’clock of a pleasant Saturday (or in some localities Sunday) afternoon in the late summer or early autumn on a straight, smooth, dry pavement in a moderate-sized city or large town, perhaps at a street intersection. In such a picture one usually finds one or two drivers under thirty, and perhaps a pedestrian over fifty. In other words, in the localities where such records are kept we know with considerable exactness when the most accidents are occurring and where; also the comparative prevalence of each type, the nature of the damage done, and much besides. But even if we know all these facts, relevant and interesting though they may be, the one inclusive and all-important question is still left unanswered — namely, What are the main causes of such accidents?

All who have studied the subject would agree that, however hesitant one might feel about ascribing a definite cause to each accident, it is nevertheless true that causes do vary tremendously in importance. Defects in highways most certainly are responsible for only a small percentage of the total number, and defects in cars for fewer still — the latter only 3 or 4 per cent, even including the much-discussed faulty headlights. Defects in roads and imperfections in cars are of minor importance, but they are relatively tangible and simple of correction; a reduction of even 1 per cent in each might prevent many hundreds of deaths in a single year. And closely related is the matter of injuries and deaths which might have been avoided if there had been no shattered glass; in how large a proportion of cases this has figured seriously no one knows, but the situation is one that could be corrected, if we would, almost overnight. Pedestrians are perhaps to blame for 20 per cent of the accidents, though of course they are involved in only about half of the total number. But I suspect that all authorities would agree that the bulk of our automobile accidents should properly be laid at the door of the person who drives the car.

Those who classify accidents according to their apparent primary causes are not altogether of one mind as to the proportion for which the driver is responsible, but the variation in their judgments is not wide. It is interesting to note that the authorities of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Berlin, Germany, concur in blaming the operator for between 64 and 67 of every 100 accidents. An unofficial canvass of coroners’ returns in Great Britain, three years ago, placed the figure at just under 40 per cent, in fatal accidents, for which it would naturally be low. A somewhat similar situation exists in the State of Massachusetts.

What is it, then, that these drivers — who are killing perhaps 20,000 of our people, including themselves, each year — do or fail to do? Statistics will tell you that, in the great majority of cases, either they are not focusing their whole minds on their driving, or they are proceeding too rapidly for safety under the conditions, or they are not giving way to other drivers as they pass them at intersections or elsewhere. In other words, most casualties for which the driver is to blame are due to a lack on his part of at least one of the three qualities of concentration, caution, and consideration. His mind may be nearly a blank as to the three R’s, but if he lacks the three C’s he is a dangerous person to meet on the road. We all realize that a driver who, while he is driving, does just that and cannot be diverted from it, who does not allow himself to take long chances, and who practises not only the rules of the road but the rules of everyday decent politeness, is almost certain to keep out of trouble.

If I had to choose between the three qualities, I should put the last first, for all too many drivers have forgotten that there ever was such an expression as ‘After you, my dear Alphonse.’

If drivers are responsible for so large a share of the accidents, it would seem altogether logical that our best line of action should be directed toward them. To say that our various states, even the most conservative of them, have been liberal in their official permissions to drive motor vehicles (where any permission at all has been necessary) is to keep well within the truth. Up to now the assumption has been, even in some of our best-regulated states, that an able-bodied person in his middle teens or over, with mind enough to shift a few gears, swing a car from one side of the street to the other, forward and back, and answer, parrot fashion, a dozen stereotyped questions, has a right to cruise around our whole United States at will — provided, indeed, that he can find six dollars or so for a license fee and either pay the first installment on a car that will hold together or borrow one for the occasion. In other sections of the country a person just exercises his God-given right to the highway, and who is the State that it should pretend to curtail him in his use of it?

Further, to assert that our courts (big and little, but mostly little) have not come up to the full measure of their capacities for uniform enforcement of the motor-vehicle law against offenders (big and little) is merely to rehearse what is common knowledge.

For ideal driving the car must become part of the driver, an extension of his personality, doing his bidding implicitly, just as his legs and arms do. If the car is not perfect in its mechanism, a well-balanced driver will use extra caution in other directions to make up for the particular defect. I would sooner trust an ancient bus, indifferently supplied with brakes, hard to steer, and rheumatic in all of its joints, but manned by any one of a half-dozen men (or one woman) whom I could name, than a luxurious 1931 model, with safety devices galore and a countless array of control dials on the dash, in the hands of a smart Aleck.

In other words, the whole problem resolves itself into a judicious selection of drivers. But how to pick out, from a horde of applicants each year, those persons who, in emergencies, will presumably exercise the three basic qualities mentioned is perhaps a more difficult problem than deciding, after they have failed, perhaps after an accident which it is then too late to prevent, just what punishment, if any, should be meted out to them. But the problem must be solved.

IV

Great Britain, under her new Road Traffic Act, has just begun to face this problem; it will no longer suffice for a prospective private-car operator simply to mail five shillings to the authorities.

(I was told by someone in London who knows whereof he speaks that a blind person had once done this successfully.) Most other European countries progressed beyond this point some years ago, and now examine all applicants for drivers’ licenses; the German examinations are thoroughgoing and conscientiously conducted.

Connecticut has, of course, examined drivers rather carefully from the first. The state has now in operation, in somewhat tentative form, a comprehensive examination to be set for drivers who wish reinstatement after having been, for sundry reasons, deprived of their licenses. The chief purpose of this examination is to determine, so far as such matters can be brought out by an examination, just how wholesome an applicant’s reactions are likely to be in the thousand and one emergencies which driving necessarily creates; in other words, to give the State something that an ordinary examination does not indicate — an insight into his personality and attitude toward the public generally. Perhaps much of the hope of the future lies in this direction.

At this point several questions become pertinent. How large a proportion of our drivers are causing most or all of our accidents? The impression of some people has been that operators of Southern European birth or ancestry, or of relatively humble origin, are the chief offenders; but this is only an impression, which I do not personally hold, and I know of no data to confirm it.

That the total number of accidents is not evenly distributed among the total number of drivers needs little proof. A study of fatal accidents in Connecticut during 1929 revealed the fact that in the case of 90 of the 429 drivers involved the fatal accident was not the result of their first crash or even

of their second; in 33 cases it was the third, in 32 the fourth, and there were a few drivers whose records, at least on paper, appeared still worse. Doubtless some of these drivers had simply been the unfortunate victims of a series of untoward circumstances, but not all of them.

A close study of the physical and mental characteristics of such a group in any jurisdiction should yield large returns. Perhaps it might even silence part of the outside pressure for the restoration of some licenses.

What proportion of accidents would not have happened if there had not been alcoholic indulgence on the part of a driver? Statisticians thus far have been necessarily somewhat silent on this question, for the good reason that no reliable data are available. I have before me a number of tabulations showing the proportion of accidents caused by ‘drunken’ drivers. In the city of Berlin, in 1928 and 1929, between 4 and 5 per cent of the accidents laid to the drivers were ascribed by the police to drunkenness (Trunkenheit); the Connecticut percentage for the same year was barely more than half of this; while that for Great Britain was smaller still, according to coroners’ returns on fatal accidents only, made to the National Safety First Association.

But I am convinced that these insignificant percentages give an entirely misleading picture of what is actually happening. One of the foremost German authorities on motor-vehicle regulation has recently written, ‘Drivers who drink alcohol are more subject to accidents than abstainers.’ Within a month, in talking with two of my friends who have thought long and hard over such matters, I have raised a pertinent question. How large a percentage of automobile accidents are due to drivers who are not drunk, but have simply taken a couple of drinks, or so, a short time previous? One, an enthusiastic Volsteadian, cautiously put the figure at 30 or 40 per cent. The other, our State Motor Vehicle Commissioner, is convinced that at least half of the accidents following reckless driving, speeding, and the like, are due to liquor. He is also convinced that, in a great majority of these cases, the amount of liquor taken has been comparatively small.

Suiting his action to his convictions, Commissioner Stoeckel has, since last summer, intensified his administrative procedure against those intoxicated drivers who manage to escape punishment by the courts for that offense. I have no sympathy with those who opposed the Commissioner’s stand in this matter, for I have always assumed that life should logically be valued above both liberty and the pursuit of what some people call happiness; and one cannot afford to deal gingerly with so serious a menace. The motor-vehicle department of Rhode Island, in a recent bulletin, Alcohol and the Operator, said, ‘In the average case, but two or three drinks caused the trouble.’ I have made no effort to learn the views of other motor-vehicle departments on the subject, so that I have nothing much beyond my strong suspicions. However, I feel quite sure that most departments would agree with me that concentration, caution, and consideration are not usually on the programme of a person who has taken into his system a drug whose ' first effect is blunting of self-criticism, reason, judgment, and volitional control, with weakening of all of the finer social reactions.’

I do not undervalue powerful automobiles equipped with the last word in control and safety devices. Especially can I appreciate the success of the efforts of skilled men of my own profession to build highways ever more serviceable and safe. (Parenthetically, I could wish that they never built one without a sidewalk.) And both publicity and the education of pedestrians, especially the younger ones, will contribute to the solution of this vexatious problem.

Nevertheless, with all this acknowledged, I am certain that ten years from now we shall be enjoying our densely thronged highways with comparative immunity from accidents only if, by that time, through a process of thoughtful selection and education of drivers, uniformly enforced discipline, and careful and constant elimination of the relatively small number who prove unfit and of the still smaller number of potential criminals, we shall have acquired the grace and wisdom to determine which of our citizens have earned the right to operate motor vehicles over and upon the said highways.