ROAD SAFETY WEEK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 7 December 1938, Page 10

ROAD SAFETY WEEK

GAMBLERS AT THE WHEEL TOO MANY TAKE CHANCES i By Floyd Taylor, i Through a pleasant valley runs a broad highway. The valley is one of green meadows and tall trees, sprinkled with farm houses, barns and haystacks. The valley is so attractive that it might bear a name emphasising its beauty, but it doesn’t. It is known to the people who live there as Death Valley. The name is well earned. The valley has been given the name because so many motorists have had the life crushed out of them in automobiles. To look at the valley on a day when there was little traffic it would be hard to believe that j death waited on the highway. The road j doesn’t look dangerous. It wouldn’t be • dangerous if there were not so many j gamblers at the wheels of motor cars. It j would be a safe road if there were not | so many drivers ready to risk their | necks and the necks of others on the chance that no trouble lies ahead. There ; is nothing wrong with the highway except that in the middle of the valley it narrows from three lanes to two. Drivers who gamble that it is safe to speed on the third lane road sometimes j have to slam on their brakes when they ] meet congestion at the point where one j lane is eliminated. Most of them win the gamble but some of them lose. Death takes his percentage. On this! road one day' not so long ago a driver j had to thrust his foot down on his! brake pedal to avoid hitting a car ahead ! where the three lanes narrowed to two. ! Behind the man who jammed on his j brakes was another car. Its driver 1 wasn’t quick enough. The cars came together in a rear end collision. The gas tank of the first car burst. A spark I from the tail light wires, which had! been torn loose in the accident touched off the* gasolene. There was a flicker, then a roar, of flame. In the time it takes to draw a few quick breaths the car with the burst gas tank was enfolded in fire. The driver escaped, because he was thrown through the door b.y the impact. But two others in the back seat, did not leave that car alive. Another gamble had failed. Another motorist had been mistaken in his bet that everything would be all right ahead. GamI biers never can be sure of winning, no ; matter what the odds. The gambler at the wheel of a motor car can’t even be ! sure of the odds. At Monte Carlo it’s different. The odds there are known to every man ! who plays. Those who play roulette at : Monte Carlo see before them a wheel I with thirty-seven compartments, numbered from zero to thirty-six, coloured I alternately red and black. The gam- : biers can bet on the red or the black, on the even or the odd, on a specific j number or a set of numbers. The odds ! j vary from even money’ to thirty-five to l; j one, according to the way in which the ; | bet is made. When the croupiers spin j | the wjheels they throw the balls against j the direction in which the wheels turn, i i The wheels, revolving more and more | slowly, finally’ come to rest. The tense gamblers crowd close to the tables, | smile as luck strikes but more often j mutter imprecations as they lose. The house has a constant percentage in its favour. When a gambler makes a bet on the number seven, the odds given him are thirty-five to one. If he bets one hundred francs and wins, he is paid off with thirty-five hundred francs. But' there are thirty-seven numbers on the wheel, not thirty-five, so the syndicate which operates the Casino always gels ; its profit over a period of play. Roulette is forbidden by law. Dctectives gather evidence against gam- j bling houses, police raid them, roulette [ wheels are confiscated and smashed so that they cannot be used again. But the gambler at the wheel of the motor car risks more than any man risks at roulette. He doesn't risk merely money. He risks his life and the life of everyone he comes near. Like the gambler I in roulette he has a wheel before him. 1 Like the gambler in roulette he has a i percentage working against him. The j "house” to which he may be forced to I pay tribute is not a syndicate operating j a casino. The "house” which is ready i to collect from him is death. If the gambling driver never killed anyone j but himself, it might not make so much difference. But he kills others, too. A | gambling driver speeding along a coun- ; try road sees a boy on a bicycle ahead ' of him. The driver maintains his speed, j gambling that the boy will continue i ahead. The boy doesn’t. He swerves j j his bicycle across the road. The driver ! i jerks his wheel, the wheel behind which j he has been gambling. What happens? I ' Sometimes the boy is killed. Sometimes ! he is maimed. | One day a girl driving with a boy of; i six beside her leaned down to flick j , away a grasshopper which had come I I through the window and settled on her | ankle. The car edged into a ditch. 1 I rolled over several times and came to 1 I rest with the boy dead. I One gamble that the speeder always ' ' makes is that his tyres will hold. Most., tyres are well made and last long if well 1 treated, but blowouts cause many a ! funeral. It lakes more strength and j ! skill In control a speedig car when a | ! tyre blows, especially a front tyre, than | most drivers realise. They gamble that ! they can do something most of them j 1 can't do. Tests given by Harvard re- | search men to thousands of drivers I have shown, in the words of Dr. Han j R. De Silvia, in charge of the tests, that i "people are not so good at driving as j they think." Many a man who thinks i of himself as a good driver is actually j a gambler at the wheel. The fact that j 1 he is fairly able at handling a car doesn’t mean Ihat he isn’t a gambler. l He’s a gambler unless he always al- ( ways, not most of the time, but always I : has the situation under complete con- j 1 trol. To qualify as a gambler at the wheel, | a driver doesn’t have to start out with the thought, "Well. I may kill someone! • to-day.” No normal persons leaves his ! | garage in a car with the notion that he i j is probably going to kill himself or his ! passengers or anybody. Accidents are | not premediated. But the gambler at the roulette wheel doesn't set out with ! the idea of losing, either. If all drivers could have the experience that falls oc- ! casionally to each of the 600 chauffeurs 1 for a big corporation in an American > city they might visualise what fate can | have in store. The officers of this cor- | poration, and particularly the superini tended of transportation, were appalled ; by the fatal accidents caused by the ; chauffeurs, and worried by the cost of i these accidents. Children playing in i the street were the victims in many of j them. The chauffeurs were able drivers carefully selected, but sometimes were i careless. It seemed impossible to teach

them not to gamble that children would 1 keep out of the paths of cars. In 1932 the superintendent of transportation had an idea. He built a figure of a boy out of balsa wood, clothed the figure in a tan coat and knickerbockers and 1 mounted it on a platform built on roller ' skates. He took the figure, which he , called Jerry to a congested street often used by the corporation’s chaffeurs. He hid between two parked cars until one of the corporation’s speed wagons approached then pushed Jerry in front of the speed wagon. The speed wagon j toppled Jerry to the pavement and ranl over him. A horrified driver stopped i the car and jumped out. The superin- j tendent tried this trick several times! and it had such a good effect on the! chauffeurs that it was adopted for per- ! manent use. In the next four years the corporation's accident record was reduced seventy-two per cent., and nine Jerrys were worn out and replaced. Whenever a driver hits one of the balsa wood boys he gets a note, which contains only two sentences. They are: "You hit our boy to-day. What if he had been alive?”