MOTOR ACCIDENTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 31, 7 February 1928, Page 17

MOTOR ACCIDENTS.

PROTECTION IN DANGEROUS PLACES. (By MOTORIST.) A few weeks ago I drew attention to the large number of fatal motor accidents occasioned by local body engineers failing to meet modern conditions by constructing modern protective fences in dangerous places. Pointing out that an ordinary post and rail fence or even a flimsy hand rail sulliced to keep horsedrawn traffic on the right track, it was seen by too many fatal accidents that these old safeguards are now utterly useless to protect motor ears. Drawing an analogy from the great success which has attended the modern system of con-

structing wire fences on farms, it was seen that by keeping the posts wide apart, and fastening swaying battens in between, there is provided sufficient ''give" to turn the wildest cattle, whereas they would easily 6nap either the wires or tho posts if the fence was made perfectly rigid. From this it was suggested that local body engineers might experiment with advantage, in order to discover the best design of wire fence to give a maximum of resistence, thereby absolutely protecting the motor ear and its occupants from being precipitated over tho adjacent cliff or embankment.

There is already abundant evidence of the utter uselessness of the old post and rail fence which at present serves to give a false sense of security alongside hundreds of dangerous places, where the fracture of one post or one rail

would allow a motor car to somersault cner a bank, probably the most glaring danger of all being on Mount Eden, where (he fence is not even strong enough to bold up a bicycle that got beyond control, and even a concrete post might easily snap under the impact of a ton of motor car moving at a fair pace. On the other band, if the fence consisted of a few strands of wire, with the rigid posts well apart, the whole thing would have to break before a motor car could get through it. A sinking corroboration of this contention has just been afforded near Oamaru, when the members of the Main Highways Board were approaching the concrete bridge over the Waianakarua River, travelling in a cloud of dust at the fast pace which nas already provoked stormy protests from the local bodies whose roads they were treating so severely. 1 o avoid a collision one driver turned smartly aside and mounted a high bank, still travelling so fast that the car crashed through the growth of vegetation on the bank of the stream, and snapped a post in the fence that was supposed to protect the road. The snapping of the post was the salvation of the motor car and its driver, for it enabled the fence to swing out without breaking, and the five strands of wire were sufficient to hold up the heavy car, suspended over the cliff. Neither the

car nor th« driver received much damage, whereas if the post had held the impact would probably havo been severe, while if rails had been substituted for wire nothing Is surer than that the car and its driver would have been in the river.

It is rather an interesting coincidence that the driver was tlio engineer to the local county council, whereas only a fewweeks earlier the engineer to another county council was drowned under almost exactly similar circumstances, through crashing into a post and rail fence aud dropping into a river. Such a spectacular contrast in the fato of the two engineers will probably convince all the rest of their profession that it is quite time they protected all these dangerous places with wire fences, and tho first one that requires urgent attention is on the motor road to'tlie top of Mount Eden.