MOTOR TRAGEDIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23055, 4 December 1936, Page 7

MOTOR TRAGEDIES

TOLL IN AMERICA CONCLUSIONS FROM RESEARCH Last year motor cars in America killed 37,000 persons, permanently crippled 105,000 and hurt about 1,000,000 more. Because so many people use the highways day after day with no worse hurt than a, bashed fender, the figures never seem to mean much. But certain traffic engineers are beginning to see automobile accidents as the result of bad highway designs. Roads can be built that overcome the opportunity for accidents, declares an article in the Readers' Digest. Dr Miller M'Clintock, head of Harvard's Bureau for Street Traffic Research, has given traffic engineers a new word—" friction." Whether cars go into blinding head-on crashes, or drool into side swipes,

or go looping down a steep embankment, or merely poke along, jamming up the cars behind, the engineers' word for it now is friction. Dr M'Clintock sees traffic as a river of steel and rubber and the highways as its bed. Thus the inter-sections, where the streams of traffic cross, give rise to inter-sectional friction. There the worst traffic jams, the cruellest accidents happen. On a typical highway, intersectional friction accounts for around 19 per cent, of all accidents. Medial friction is the conflict arising in the middle of the road when two opposing lines of traffic scrape. It, results in head-on collisions and sideswipes of brain-jarring violence. Charge 17 per cent, of all accidents to medial friction. Internal-stream friction is the rub in traffic flowing in the same direction. It causes rear-end collisions and sideswipes that come when cars cut in and out of their lanes. Lay to it 44 per cent, of the accidents. Marginal friction is generated by bad road shoulders, abrupt curves and " fixed objects," meaning parked cars, trees, guardrails, etc. Marginal friction accounts for 20 per cent, of all accidents and among the " fixed objects" it annually sets in permanent rigidity are 16,000 pedestrians. The friction theory not only defines accidents in terms of causes; it throws the inadequacies of our present road system into sharp relief. The cold fact is: Traffic to-day is a combination of an 80-mile-an-hour car in the hands of a 20-mile-an-hour driver on a 30-mile-an-hour road. And it doesn't work out very well. All the while the car's speed was increasing the technology of the road was lagging. For a long while people thought the cure-all for congestion and death was more and still more hard roads. But now it is dawning on them that slick stretches of pavement are invitations to more speed, more accidents, more deaths.