"ACCIDENT PRONE"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 97, 24 April 1940, Page 8

"ACCIDENT PRONE"

NEW REGULATIONS

DRIVERS OFTEN IN TROUBLE

The record of drivers involved in personal injury accidents provides a means of locating some of the members of the "accident prone" group, stated a report from the Transport Department to the Road Safety Council at its meeting today, but the statistics do not go far enough.

To date fifteen thousand five hundred drivers who have been involved in accidents have been recorded and of these 456 have been involved in two accidents in the last two years and 26 in three accidents, but the report points out that in many cases the record is incomplete, for frequently drivers who have had one personal injury accident have had accidents where there was property damage only. Sudh drivers may possess faulty driving characteristics which render them accident prone and ay menace on the road, but under the, present system they are not recorded as accident repeaters. In that respect, the report adds, the insurance companies could assist materially. About 300 cases of accident repeaters have been referred to the various tx*affic authorities, but judging from the reports received the steps taken have been effective only to a limited extent. There has been no authority to carry the investigation sufficiently far and to examine the driver. Without a thorough test it is generally very 'difficult to locate specific faults or 1 weaknesses and it has not been possible to deal effectively with the few extremely bad cases where the driver is found to be unfit to hold a licence.

However, the Department stated, the new • regulations provide that any licence-holder may be required to be specially examined to judge his fitness to continue to hold a licence. There is also power for the Commissioner to revoke the licence of any person found to be unfit to continue to drive a motor vehicle. Consequently it will be possible to deal much more effectively with drivers with an accident history. A number of others reported for traffic breaches will also be tested. Reaction, eyesight, and other tests will be applied in addition to a practical driving test.

One particularly bad case of an accident repeater was placed before the council, of a taxi-car driver charged on five occasions with dangerous driving or other breaches of the traffic regulations in twelve months and in the same period involved in two smashes, but as personal injury was not caused his adventures were not, under the present system, taken into account in compiling accident statistics.