Our Delightful Man-Killer

I

THE first automobile I ever saw was one built in 1882 by the engineer of the Minnesota flour mill in which I was working. It was intended for the hauling of wheat and flour between the mill and the railroad station — ‘several tons to the load, and at faster than a trot,’ the inventor assured us. His steam engine was of four horsepower, and for some reason known only to himself — perhaps to make the thing go faster than a trot — the rear wheels to which he geared it were seven feet high.

While the curious object was in process of building, this ingenious man met the impolite skepticism of everybody from the mill boss down — I was pretty well down, but not at all shy in my comments — with glowing word pictures of the day when not only his but every vehicle on the road would be mechanically driven and all horses relegated to the farm. His imaginative grasp of details, even to the coming sorrows of pedestrians, was remarkable. He envisaged the horseless age with a clearness and completeness that seem now, fifty years after, truly astonishing. And our humble engineer might have had the distinguished honor of starting the automobile on its hectic career had it not been that his little steam engine was unable to pull the contrivance out of its shed to the highway.

Twenty years later, in 1902, the little steam Stanleys were attracting the attention of the police; and one day I and my animated teakettle were haled into court on a charge of whizzing along a country road at a speed of sixteen and one-half miles an hour. The legal limit between those particular hayfields was fifteen miles. While the judge fined every other of the halfdozen motorists in court (they had been caught in the same police trap at speeds of eighteen to as high as twenty-two miles), he found me not guilty. He seemed to feel, although he expressed it in different words, that the small excess speed of one and one-half miles an hour showed my criminal impulse to be in its incipient stages and hardly warranted jeopardizing my restoration to a useful life with a court record.

On another bright summer’s day I was off in the country with a capacity load of pretty girls. One sat on the high seat with me over the boiler, — which she did not know was sizzling under a pressure of five hundred pounds to the square inch, — while the other two rode out forward on a sort of front stoop. Suddenly a young constable rose out of the tall grass, took my name and number, and looked us over carefully. Since I never heard from this holdup, it seemed a fair guess that that susceptible countryman used his authority to get a close-up of my stylishly pompadoured and balloon-sleeved young ladies.

Once again a pair of these ‘trappists’ got me into the toils of the law, this time on a charge of exceeding a speed of twelve miles an hour on a wide boulevard leading out of Boston. The speed limit on the same thoroughfare in the city was seven miles, but on the open spaces of the boulevard, where little else besides bunch grass rose to obstruct the view, one could ‘let ’er out’ to twelve. In spite of my timid suggestion to His Honor that he could keep his court filled with violators of the twelvemile limit by arresting every motorist on the boulevard who was not actually engaged in mending his tires or fanning the engine, he fined me twenty dollars. Perhaps I did not help my case by mentioning the already notorious fact that the police car (the department had ’recently bought one for snooping purposes) was constantly running at fifteen miles or better on streets within the seven-mile limit. It took every soiled one-dollar bill on my person to pay that fine; and as I heaped the crumpled money on the clerk’s desk, in a stack that seemed immense, the conviction overcame me that the wages of sin are even more harrowing than as pictured in the Scriptures.

II

I recount these experiences in the early days of motoring to bring out this point: from the first there was a conviction that an instrument of danger was coming on to the highways. After having been kept apart for generations, machine transportation with its machine speeds was leaving its protective rails and invading the safe paths of horses and men. The new anxiety had its first crude expression in attempts to hold the automobile down to somewhere near the speed of the horse. In a vague way it was expected to behave like a horse.

But the lawmakers of that day were ignoring a fundamental twist in human nature: a contrivance built to run forty miles an hour was going to be run forty miles an hour, laws and ordinances notwithstanding. They did not see the motor car as an inevitable step in the development of our civilization. Even to-day our incoherent protests against motor killings reveal us as still horseminded, still quite unable to grasp the wholly changed character of the highways, and not yet ready to accept the fatalities as a necessary feature of motoring.

The motor car was never a substitute for the horse. Every horse that vanished took his seven-mile gait and his kindly intelligence with him, and every motor car put into commission brought its own speed and its brainless tons of steel to the road. The old safety of the highways is gone forever as surely as the automobile has come to stay.

A doleful picture? Not at all — a mere statement of fact. In the face of constantly improving safety regulations, motor fatalities in the eleven years of 1920—1930 rose without one year of decrease from 12,542 to 33,000. Of still greater significance, the rate of kill is increasing faster than the increase in the number of cars on the road; the rate per 100,000 registrations rose without a break in the last five years of the period from 106.0 to 124.4.¹ This shows the extra penalty added each year by the increasing congestion; yet motor enthusiasts tell us that the ‘saturation point’ for automobiles is a long, long way in the future!

In order to appreciate better the inevitableness of these casualties we might go back to the days before the advent of motor cars and have a look at the thirty-year struggle for the elimination of railroad grade crossings. From the beginning of railroads, that intermittent streak of irresponsibility in mankind known as carelessness had recognition in stringent rules against walking on the railroad tracks. Many men could not seem to realize the dangers completely, if at all. If a trespasser had the sense and agility to get from between the rails of a train coming head-on, he was quite as likely as not to step over to the adjacent track and be taken in the rear by an engine bound in the opposite direction. Whether he would do this was not wholly a matter of his intelligence; it depended on whether his intelligence was working at the time.

But for fifty years the railroads entertained a fading hope that at their grade crossings the display of ten-foot signs, ‘Look Out for the Cars,’ ‘Beware of the Engine,’ ‘Stop, Look, Listen,’ might save a goodly portion of the vacuous-minded from self-destruction. As a matter of fact, the signs warned few besides those who would have been warned anyway by the obvious railway tracks. The only thing that saved a goodly portion of all others was the absence of trains while they were placidly driving Dobbin across the rails.

By the time the daisies were growing above the gathered remains of a few hundred thousand, the work of abolishing grade crossings was on in dead earnest. Slowly the work proceeded through the years — a huge, expensive concession, without another mortal excuse, to the discovery that in the presence of high mechanical speeds some people are careless most, of the time and most people are careless some of the time.

After the grade crossings in congested districts had been pretty well abolished, there remained a vast number throughout the country whose removal was either impracticable or seemed unwarranted; and, since the fundamentals in human nature do not change with the generations, these continued to furnish their usual quota of accidents. Indeed, with the advent of motor cars the fatalities at crossings increased enormously. There seems to be something in the motorist’s sense of his own speed that leads him to imitate the roadside hen in his efforts to cross ahead of the cars instead of behind them. In 1930, 1247 motorists in the United States so far miscalculated relative speeds that they crashed into the sides of moving trains, with a resultant kill of 238 and injury of 1756. The hen may be short of intellect, but it is something to her credit that she usually manages to perish under the front wheels.

To meet this new emergency at grade crossings, the usual warning signs were supplemented with various mechanical contrivances put in motion by the oncoming train, such as great red flares and overgrown baby rattles suspended over the highway. Among the latest of these appeals to moronic motorists are grotesque wooden arms set to wigwagging in mid-air, after the manner of the fond mother who waves colorful objects before the eyes of her offspring in the hope of drawing therefrom a gleam of intelligence. In every one of these silly devices at grade crossings we acknowledge an uncounted number of hopelessly infantile grownups among those who are supposed to have brains enough to drive on the highway. But the new life-saving gewgaws are practically useless for stopping people so obtuse that glaring signs, shrieking whistles, and thundering trains do not impress them. They are dead ripe for the annual harvest of the innocents who blunder into eternity by way of the cow-catcher.

The significant point is that many years and several generations of steady killings at grade crossings have taught the people next to nothing in the way of caution. Human incompetency in dealing with swift motion seems to hold at virtually a fixed level for the general population.

III

Now, in the traffic conditions of 1931, when every thoroughfare is a complexity of shifting colored lights and every busy intersection makes the busiest railroad crossing look like a deserted country lane, what has become of all that we learned about human frailty from the grade crossing?

We have forgotten it, ignored it. Our intricate motor-traffic system is based on the assumption that every motorist has the safe qualities of an engineer, and it reckons every pedestrian above child size as a perennial bloom of caution. All exceptions, especially when they are revealed by a killing, fill us with pained surprise. The only persons exempt from this charge of infallibility are the children — a wise discrimination, although they differ only in being habitually careless while their elders are intermittently so. Signs posted, ‘Danger! School Ahead,’ serve a good purpose; but if this precaution were carried to its limits of usefulness there would be other signs, such as ‘Slow Up! Several Absentminded Professors Live on This Street,’ or, at certain intersections, ‘Look Out! Morons Unusually Plentiful Around Here.’

We get a steadily mounting annual kill mainly because our motor-traffic regulations make no allowance for the intermittent childishness of grown-ups. And the plague of it is that traffic movement cannot be slowed down to protect the few who happen to be in a mental lapse without bunching the cars almost to a standstill. With the present enormous masses of automobiles, speed is the one essential for escape from hopeless congestion. At the turn of the signal the traffic officer waves frantically for speed, and more speed; between signals it is speed alone that keeps the line from backing up solidly through all the intersections. Out on the thoroughfares speed makes up for the delays of getting through the tangle of guarded crossings, and one motorist on an honest lookout for ‘dumbheads’ draws the wrath of the halting line behind him.

Yet for the alert, the competent, both in cars and afoot, these permitted speeds are not generally excessive, and traffic arrangements are usually adequate, often more than adequate, for their protection. The system already is perfected beyond the perfection of the human beings it aims to serve. No multiplying of precautions is going to put caution into either motorists or pedestrians scattered through the mass who are in the mood for blundering. These will continue to kill and be killed so long as twenty-seven million motor cars on our roads move fast enough to get out of each other’s way.

IV

What are the means for reducing motor accidents? Statistics show that a surprisingly small proportion of the casualties result from material imperfections, such as signals out of order, defective cars, or poor roads; they charge the vast majority to the erratic performances of human beings, both in cars and afoot. Then, if there is to be any significant relief, it must come through some correction of this faulty human element.

First, consider the intermittently vacuous-minded among pedestrians. Unlike children, they cannot be recognized by their size and given special consideration — nor by any other feature, since the momentary lapse is often from a state of high intelligence. Neither can policemen lead them by the hand across the street, because there is no way of telling just when this ought to be done. They fall victims quite impartially to drivers careful and careless. The best we can hope to do for an uncertain percentage of their kind is to send or omit flowers, as the relatives request.

A pedestrian inattentive, miscalculating, reckless, endangers only himself; but when the same sort of individual gets behind a steering wheel he becomes a menace to every cautious motorist and pedestrian within range of his machine. Here we have the chief killer. What do we do to discover him before he kills?

Almost nothing. Again we are hopelessly horse-minded. The same promiscuous lot that once had barely wits enough to hold the reins over an intelligent horse are permitted to run fifty-horse machines whose actions must be humanly controlled every moment. Twenty-six states do not require so much as a license to drive, while only seventeen out of the forty-eight states require any instruction or demonstration of fitness; and in most of these seventeen states anyone, from a doddering old man to a sixteen-year-old girl who can back a car around twice in the same half hour without maiming the teacher, is entitled to a license.

Driving uncovers a multitude of faults which the most foolhardy pedestrian has no chance to exhibit. A driver may be intermittently vacuous or always rattle-headed, flighty of judgment in crises, a daring ‘show-off,’ or a ‘poor fish’ afraid of his shadow. Temperamental unfitness figures high on the casualty list. In cases of emergency it matters little to the undertaker whether the motorist is stubborn for his last inch or wobbles uncertainly under orders from the back seat. The most dangerous of all are the ‘drunks’; but for crazy performance at the wheel a close second to the part-time drinker is the one-arm petter. Thirty per cent of all fatalities in 1930 involved drivers under twenty-five years of age. Papa’s only son comes home from college with a pack of youths who help him tear open the night with the big family car, and little daughter takes out the boys and girls in a three-ton locomotive as soon as she has learned how to use her feet on the funny things sticking up through the floor.

If we could ever get through thinking of the automobile as an exaggerated horse and treat it as a powerful, insensate machine requiring a vastly more careful selection of driver than any span of horses, one more gleam of sanity would be added to the few now pervading the motor mania. The National Safety Council made a careful study of accidents in the eight states which have the soundest driving-license and examination laws. From the study it derived an estimate that these states had reduced their normal expectation of motor fatalities 29 per cent. Yet none of the eight states has a system of licensing drivers that can be dignified by the term ‘selection’; they merely throw out a few of the obviously unfit and let everybody else drive.

Probably the country’s total of motor fatalities could be reduced by several thousand if the other forty states were to have even as mildly restrictive driver-licensing laws as the eight; but a much greater saving of life would be possible if every state in the Union were to compel a selection of drivers commensurate with the obvious demands of a road locomotive. Why this extraordinary backwardness in the effort to get safe drivers?

V

Again there is the self-assertive twist in human nature: a universal desire for anything under heaven has never yet been known to put an effective curb upon itself. In a country where nearly everybody wants to drive, nearly everybody is going to drive, and that settles for good the prospect of any adequate selection of drivers. All prohibitions are got up by those who do not happen to want the thing they are prohibiting. In this country, outside of drivers and the obviously decrepit, there are not enough people left to fight for real competency in men and women at the wheel to make a dent in the popular will to drive.

To illustrate the idea further: the trolley car is as easily and as quickly controlled as any good automobile; it is run usually at lower speeds, and its clearly defined rails make it a safer driving proposition. Yet because nobody wants to drive a trolley car except for pay, careful selection of its operators is assumed as a public necessity. None but mature men of proved judgment and caution are permitted at the controls. How scared we should be at seeing chatty high-school girls, or Antonio the fruit peddler, running a trolley car up the street as a holiday diversion! And nobody thinks of taking in the motorman as one of a gay party aboard; we are not allowed to speak to the motorman, much less pet him while he is running the car.

Mass psychology born of the universal will to drive has made impossible a proper conception of the motor car as a locomotive running intimately among frail human beings. We accept its killings reluctantly, but nothing like as reluctantly as we should submit to restrictive laws in keeping with its power to kill. Since initial selection for fitness to drive is unattainable, the next best means for achieving greater safety on the road lies in the rigid exclusion of all drivers found guilty more than once of gross carelessness or of driving while drunk. One such offense on the part of a trolley operator would bar him forever. Yet, against the popular will, not one state in the Union has been able to make more than a fair beginning in the elimination of unfit drivers. Complete statistics are not available, but all records show that a remarkably high percentage of casualties is chargeable to motorists who have been involved in one to a dozen previous accidents, or have been excluded from the road, or, in licensing states, never have had licenses. Prohibition of incompetent drivers is decidedly more difficult to enforce than prohibition of liquor, for the will to drink is nowhere near as universal as the will to drive.

If we must tolerate unfit drivers, why not try to worry them into a semblance of fitness by a rigorous system of supervision on the road, with sure penalties for every infraction of the rules for safe driving, regardless of whether the breach of road etiquette causes an accident or not? The scheme has possibilities. The same public opinion that does not favor the withholding or canceling of licenses might view without alarm the depleting of the other fellow’s pocketbook in the interest of safety. Traffic officers at intersections, instead of ‘bawling out’ each petty offender, would take his number and hand him the ominous card. ‘Speed cops’ in the more open spaces would have their functions extended to cover the many other infringements of rules and common sense that go to make up unsafe driving.

VI

Take as an instance the passing of the car ahead at curves or hills on narrow highways — a prolific source of accidents, mainly because it has to be done at increased speed and on the wrong side of the road. Probably nineteen out of twenty habitually reckless passers escape a terrific crash only because there happens to be no obscured car coming head-on. That is one reason why they have the habit. Now if they could be made to contribute handsomely for a few of their successful passes, there might be less of this important menace to safety on the roads. And so with driving off-side, making forbidden turns, suddenly speeding up as a car attempts a legitimate pass, overrunning signals and failing to give the proper hand signals, and habitually taking chances with motorists and pedestrians alike — a cash penalty for each offense might induce a perfunctory caution among the naturally careless and reduce those thousands of daily violations which seem always to ‘get by’ through sheer luck, while as a matter of fact they are furnishing a good part of the daily casualties.

The best feature of this scheme would be its getting at the careless driver before instead of after he has demonstrated with an accident. It would give a drill in safety to a lot of unpromising human material in whom any increase in caution would be a godsend to the community. But the scheme’s fatal weakness lies in the obvious fact that it would take a few million more traffic officers to make it work. Those offenses occur at all hours of the day and night, on every block of every city street and anywhere along the country roads; nothing but the immediate presence of ‘ the cop’ checks the carelessness of habitual offenders. So far as this supervision could be achieved, it would undoubtedly result in the saving of lives. But the limit of public toleration for both the added expense and such intimate police regulation of all motorists would be reached long before the attainment of adequate supervision. The efforts of present traffic, tagging, and speed officers might profitably be extended to include a general drive on carelessness; but, as a constructive measure, chasing incompetent drivers over the endless highways to impose fines is a mighty poor substitute for the proper choosing of those who are fit to be on the road.

After all, there is a left-handed consolation in the thought that the ideal selection of drivers would not reduce the fatalities more than a few thousand. We can never make a selection of competent pedestrians; and carelessness, the main source of all accidents, has demonstrated itself as a fixture in the human constitution. The best we can expect of our most valiant efforts is to hold the killings down to an irreducible minimum. The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving. It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.

All things considered, we are doing very well against impossible odds, and the price of such safety as we have is eternal vigilance. The record for 1930 of 33,000 killed and approximately 1,150,000 injured — 1 per cent of our total population — must be pretty close to the irreducible minimum. So long as we do not relax our efforts to keep the accidents down we may as well accept complacently an annual slaughter that will increase not only with the increase in the number of cars, but also with the rise in the kill per car — the inevitable penalty of greater congestion. Possibly this rise in the kill per car will become sufficiently alarming to change our views on the ‘saturation point’ of automobiles; but this effect on us is not likely. Eventually we may arrive at the comfortable stage in which the normal rise in casualties will not particularly annoy us, while a temporary drop would be hailed with genuine satisfaction.