Harmony on the Highways

ABRAHAM RIBICOFF

AS GOVERNOR of Connecticut I did what I could to improve highway safety in my own state. People still speak to me about the comparatively civilized climate of Connecticut motoring. Most important, by taking aggressive action we succeeded in reducing the traffic-fatality rate to one of the lowest in the nation.

Now, looking at highway safely from a national viewpoint, I find a senseless and tragic situation developing: the separate efforts of individual states to promote highway safety have created a conflicting and confusing pattern of traffic regulations across the country. Some states have good rules, some have few rules, and too many have different rules. Usually this inconsistency irritates the motorist. Sometimes it kills him. The adoption by all the states of just one uniform regulation, periodic motor vehicle inspection, could save many thousands of lives a year.

About 94 million Americans are expected to take extended driving trips in the course of this year. As you drive from one state to another, the highway markings are different — traffic signs and signals have different meanings — and the basic rules of the road, or who has the right-of-way, are different. The cars coming at you meet different standards, and sometimes no standards, of safety. And the people driving these cars have measured up to different licensing standards. It’s as though you were one of Pavlov’s dogs put to a series of confusing tests. The concrete may look the same, but the rules change drastically without your knowing it, destroying your ability to predict how the other fellow, and his car, will behave. Let me cite some examples.

You learned to drive in a state where, for example, a car making a left turn must yield the right-of-way until all cars coming in the opposite direction have passed. Now you take a trip in North Carolina, where (as in quite a few other states) a driver turning left who is in the intersection first, even though he has not begun his turn, has the right-of-way; he need not stop to let oncoming cars go by. As you approach an intersection, you are amazed to see a car make a left turn directly across the path of your car. You are lucky to avoid an accident this time.

You are a salesman on a business trip, a careful driver who never passes another car when you are not supposed to. In Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana you are forbidden to pass when there is a solid yellow line to the right of the center strip. In Massachusetts and Virginia the solid line is white. In Pennsylvania no lines are used; a no-passing zone is marked by signs. So far you’ve kept your wits about you. But when you get down south into Georgia, the line — yellow this time — is placed along the right edge of the roadway. You fail to see it, and pass a slow car illegally. You narrowly escape a huge truck coming toward you around a curve. Or you crash into it, losing your life instead of your temper.

You are driving your family east to the World’s Fair. Your car is in tip-top shape; in fact, it has just passed a stiff motor vehicle inspection demanded each year by law in your own state (the inspector made you come back twice — first your brakes weren’t tight enough, and the next time one of your headlights was faulty). As you motor along the superhighway toward dusk, two states away from home, an inexperienced fifteen-year-old driver approaches you in the opposite lane — his car hasn’t been inspected for three years, and his tires are worn down. He tries to jam on his brakes instead of stopping slowly. His car careens over the narrow center concrete strip and smashes into yours.

If baseball rules changed each time a team entered a different stadium — if the bases were farther apart or home plate were closer to the pitcher’s mound — the players would be unable to function properly. Drivers are no different. But the rules they must follow as they move about the country change from one state to another.

Accepted driver signals in most states, for instance, are the hand and arm extended horizontally for a left turn; the hand and arm extended upward for a right turn; and the hand and arm extended downward to signal a stop or slowdown. Yet the legal signals in several states differ drastically from these recognized directions, and in Pennsylvania a signal can be given only by the electric turn signal, a device now built into all cars. Motorists in all states must stop behind a halted school bus as it discharges young passengers. But drivers in Hawaii, Texas, and Oklahoma are permitted to proceed before the children are across the highway. A driver from these states might pass a bus when it stopped and smash into a a group of children with disastrous consequences.

In some states, U-turns are permitted; in others they are not. In some states, drivers are encouraged to keep to the right after passing; in others they are encouraged to stay in line. The laws of forty-eight states authorize overtaking and passing on the right. Massachusetts and Vermont do not. In a large number of states — twenty-six, to be exact — a pedestrian can cross the street against a red light (or when the traffic he is intersecting has a green light) if it can be done “with safety and if he does not interfere with vehicular traffic.” Fourteen states prohibit this. In most states, a yellow sequence in a stop-and-go traffic signal means a period of caution before a shift in the flow of traffic through an intersection. But in New York, caution may also be signaled by a brief dark period between the stop and go signals, or by a period when both the red and green panes are lighted at the same time. An added complication: in most states, flashing yellow signals are used to caution motorists to proceed slowly and with utmost care. In half a dozen states, you can turn right on a full red light; in all others this is not permitted.

THE National Safety Council reports that 47,800 persons were killed on our highways in 1964, an increase of 10 percent over 1963. More than 3 million persons were injured. There are now 95 million drivers in this country. By 1975, there will be some 30 million more. At the current rate of increase, traffic deaths will rise to 100,000 a year by that time, and the cost of accidents will climb from $8.2 billion to $15 billion.

How much of this terrible waste, both human and material, is due to the lack of uniformity in traffic laws and traffic control devices? It’s hard to say exactly. But this much is clear: We are all creatures of habit, and we react instinctively in the same way to identical situations. We grow accustomed to following the rules in which we have been schooled both on and off the highway. If you travel abroad you expect to do many things, including motoring, differently. In England, for instance, you’ll be driving on the left-hand side of the road; on the Continent, an intriguing but uniform set of signs will keep you minding your motoring p’s and q’s. But on trips within your own country, you want and expect signs and signals just like the ones back home.

Often you fail to get them. Instead a vast array of perplexing changing traffic laws and control systems confronts you as you drive from state to state. Such variances can cause confusion and delays. In high-speed modern traffic there’s no room for confusion and delay. It’s no wonder, then, that 12 percent of all fatal accidents involve out-of-state drivers. It’s no wonder, either, that experts have estimated that if all traffic laws were uniform, 2000 fewer persons would die each year on U.S. highways. When the rules of the road vary by as much as a word, we risk costly confusion. The experts have come to regard right-of-way priorities as the single most important cause of traffic accidents.

There are other less obvious risks we take when we fail to insist on uniformity on the highways. There is, for one thing, a frightening lack of uniformity in driver licensing. Who is physically able to drive that complicated machine, the modern automobile? It all depends. In Kansas, an official was shocked to find that 10 percent of the people who receive state aid-to-the-blind payments still were licensed to drive. In Louisiana, Wyoming, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York there are no laws prohibiting the issuing of licenses to drug addicts or people suffering from mental illness.

Many states do not ask a driver to pass a physical examination before his license is renewed. In fact, in very few states is there any provision for periodic re-examination. Only a few states — Maine, for example — determine the physical condition of older drivers through examination. Certain hazards from aged drivers are just as bad as those from the too young.

In Montana, a youngster can obtain a driver’s license when he is fifteen years old. Under certain special circumstances, he can get restricted driving privileges at thirteen! Many states grant licenses, albeit restricted, to boys and girls who are only fourteen. In such states parents have a responsibility to them, and to themselves, to make certain they can deal properly with highway conditions. We can discharge this responsibility through licensing.

The Uniform Vehicle Code is widely accepted as the most current composite of desired trailic laws. Drawn up by experts between 1923 and 1926, it has been updated ten times to keep pace with changing traffic patterns. In it are only the provisions which have been tried out in more than one state and have been put into law in at least one state. This code contains a provision setting down the elements of driver identification that should be on an individual’s license. Nine items are specified, ranging from full name to date of birth to physical characteristics. Yet none of the fifty states lists all nine items on the licenses it issues.

Perhaps some minimum licensing standards should vary from state to state. Perhaps some criteria are best determined by each state. Yet the disparity between present state laws contains an element of danger. A person licensed to drive in one state is, in fact, licensed to drive in all states. State lines do not inhibit wanderlust. Each state has a distinct obligation to make certain, insofar as is possible, that its drivers will not cause accidents elsewhere. All drivers should meet a basic standard of physical and mental ability.

This lack of uniformity hampers a federal reporting program intended to make highways safer for all Americans, no matter where they live. Revocations or suspensions of drivers’ licenses for conviction of serious traffic offenses (drunken driving and fatality involvement) are recorded on an electronic computer operated by the National Driver Register Service at the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in Washington. All the states are providing daily information on persons who have had their licenses revoked or suspended. By checking with the National Driver Register Service, state licensing officials can quickly learn an applicant’s road record in other states. If revocations or suspensions are uncovered — revocations or suspensions that the applicant may have failed to list — the information can make a difference in the decision of licensing authorities.

To date, this service has helped the states prevent more than 43,000 people from getting licenses when they have had bad driving records in other states. These people might have gone undetected had it not been for this federal service. The system would be even more effective if all states identified licenses in uniform fashion, so that uncertainty in matching application material with bad driving records would be reduced. In some states the names of drivers whose licenses have been suspended or revoked are released to the press.

IF THE people who drive cars should meet certain uniform standards, how about the cars they drive? Traffic experts generally agree that periodic inspection of all motor vehicles contributes to highway safety. The Uniform Vehicle Code recommends that there should be inspections at least once a year, to rid the highways of unsafe cars and trucks. But only twenty states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring periodic inspection.

Another subject for greater attention is the installation and use of seat belts, which are installed now in all new cars but not always used.

And how about the speeds to which the driver can push his car? All authorities agree that speeding is a major problem. But open-highway speed limits differ from state to state. The excuse given for this is usually varying geography and terrain. It is the extent of variance that troubles me. In South Dakota, the daytime speed limit is 75 miles per hour. In Massachusetts, even on some open highways, it may be 40 miles per hour. Do conditions vary that much between the states?

Slow drivers can be as much of a menace as fast drivers. The U.S. Bureau of Public Roads has found that speeds below 40 miles per hour, especially on open highways, can bring high accident rates. Despite this, eight states have no law prohibiting driving which impedes the normal and reasonable movement of traffic. Even if some degree of uniformity in speed limits might be encouraged along the interstate highway system, this system, when completed in 1972, will constitute only 2 percent of the nation’s total highway mileage.

But the situation is not hopeless. Many people and many organizations have become concerned with the problem of achieving greater uniformity on the roads of our nation. The trouble is that three things must be spent if their goals are to be achieved: money, time, and effort. In this field as in all others, these are hard to come by.

The cost of even small things becomes enormous when multiplied by the numbers involved in our network of roads. Tennessee, for example, has 418,446 official traffic signs on its highways. A recent survey showed that if the state is to measure up to national standards, these changes in the signs will be required: 13,149 to be removed as unnecessary, 32,808 to be replaced by standard signs, 131,016 to be repositioned, 197,122 to be both replaced and repositioned, and 7973 added. And of 1419 traffic signals in the state, only 430 meet national criteria. Nonetheless, Tennessee, much to its credit, is moving toward greater uniformity. Other states are studying just how much money and time would be required to follow suit.

The cost of replacing nonconforming traffic-control devices is high. Iowa officials found that a $4.9 million investment would be needed to bring their signs, signals, and highway markings into line with national standards. In Tennessee, the potential cost was pegged at $2.5 million. In Minnesota, it was set at $1.3 million.

Still, money and time spent here are worth the effort in lives. Experience in Kansas shows why. The year before new standards governing traffic signs were established in that state, forty-nine persons died on curves in the highway. The year after new standards were implemented, the curve death toll dropped to twenty-eight.

There are many indications of deepening concern. The National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances is pushing for adoption of the Uniform Vehicle Code by all states. The committee has started to publish periodic surveys on disparities in certain state traffic laws and also now publishes an annual digest of traffic-law changes enacted by state legislatures.

The National Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices has compiled a manual of sign and signal standards, and the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads urges adoption and use of this manual by the states. What is more, the bureau has set December 31,1968, as the deadline for compliance with the manual’s provisions on all federally aided highways. Federal financial aid has been made available to encourage replacement of nonconforming devices.

Still, two thirds of our total highway mileage falls outside the scope of any federal aid. Construction and maintenance of these secondary roads are the direct responsibility of local communities. It is here that we find the biggest challenge. But if the taxpayers are insistent and demonstrate a willingness to pay the necessary costs, state officials will act. The real tragedy is that until now the public has been apathetic about this whole problem. Such apathy can be overcome through voluntary cooperative action among the states, genuine teamwork. In 1963, the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce began a spirited drive in support of uniformity. If other civic organizations follow this lead, we could move forward.

Thirteen states have joined in a driver’s license compact. Under this agreement, member states exchange data on convictions within their jurisdiction on major offenses — manslaughter or negligent homicide, driving under the influence of drugs or liquor, a felony in which an automobile is used, leaving the scene of an injurious accident. Each state treats a conviction in another member state as if it had occurred in the home state. The same penalty is exacted. And each state refuses to license a driver under suspension or revocation in another member state. I fully expect the trend toward interstate compacts to help the campaign for greater uniformity in the statutes.

In the long run, this traffic safety problem will be eased only if the states exercise more initiative. Last year, thirteen states adopted provisions of the Uniform Vehicle Code. Eight state legislatures authorized special studies of uniform laws. These were major steps, and must be extended. The tools are available. The Uniform Vehicle Code and the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices represent the best thinking of experts in these fields. The painstaking work of formulating feasible and effective standards is done. They just need to be used.

There is an important role for the federal government too. It can and should help the states attack this problem with technical advice and financial assistance. Action must be taken by the states, but Washington can help with research, new techniques, and guidance where it is requested. Some financial help may also be needed. The hearings before my subcommittee investigating the federal role in traffic safety will help us find the answers to how the federal government can contribute best to the overall national effort to reduce the highway toll. We will make sure that the federal government gives the states all necessary help in their individual efforts to promote traffic safety on all our nation’s highways.

We spend tens of millions of dollars to teach our children a common language. But our traffic laws and traffic control devices remain a confused babel. It is high time we demanded harmony on our highways.