Man or Machine

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19750, 17 March 1934, Page 10

Man or Machine

CAUSE OF ACCIDENTS

In a recent address before the Traffic Club of New York, Mr. Harold G. Hoffman, Commissioner of Motor Vehicles in New Jersey, stated the cause of thousands upon thousands of motor accidents. He said:— "Only a few months ago one of our motor vehicle inspectors apprehended a fourteen-year-old bo'y travelling at an admitted speed of seventy-two miles an hour on a well-used highway of our State. The youngster, possessing a driver’s licence legally issued in the State of Michigan, was a student at a New Jersey preparatory school, and indulgent parents had presented him, last Christmas, with a new and highpowered sedan. "There you are. That’s why there are so many accidents and that’s why so many of them are fatal. The driver may not always be as young as 14, though high-powered cars are being driven by immature youngsters all over the country, and the speed may be 65 instead of 72 miles afl hour, though it is often 80 or 90. The point is that, except under unusually favourable conditions, any one driving a car at more than a mile a minute on a travelled American highway is saved from serious accident only by luck. “The answer to this situation, in the opinion of some is an indictment of the power and speed built into the modern car. It has been proposed that motor manufacturers be required by law to so limit the horsepower of their machines that cars will be mechanically incapable of going more than a limited number of miles an hour. This may seem like an easy solution of the problem, but surely anyone who considers it comprehensively is forced to admit its impracticability. It just wouldn’t work.” Mr. Hoffman did not recommend any such anachronistic about-face. Instead of fatuously damning the motorcar manufacturers for making such high-powered cars he said the increased power and performance of to-day’s car as constituting “a positive challenge to the motoring public.” The only thing for the public to do was accept the challenge and prove that it was capable of handling the truly

wonderful machines which progressive engineering science had developed for it. It was up to each individual motorist “to prove that he possesses horse sense in proportion to the horsepower of his car.” In other words, it was up to each motorist to be a good driver and to remember that good driving did not mean flashy operation, but competent command of a car under all driving conditions. “The really good driver intelligently fits his speed to surrounding circumstances, for instance, and in passing, turning, starting, and stopping, clearly indicates his intention to others, at the same time keeping his intention in check until it is safe to release it in action.”

Drivers might be helped towards improvement by education, by regulation under police supervision, by the building of more adequate highways, and, in time, all men might become competent to handle motor vehicles. Admittedly, this was a slow process, but it seemed to be the only way. It was impossible to take out of the hands of human beings all the useful, but dangerous, instruments that modern science had produced for them. If they could not learn to use these instruments intelligently they would be destroyed by them.

The trouble was that others must suffer, too. It was the innocent victims of motor accidents who made the toll most deplorable. Some impatient people had said that everything would be all right if reckless drivers killed only themselves. They deserved their fate and, by exterminating themselves, would make highways safe for less foolhardy motorists. But even that would not solve the problem in any way beneficial to humanity. The fact that a man was a, reckless driver did not mean that he was a useless citizen. The boy of 14 foolishly driving his car at 72 miles an hour might grow up to become a leader in science, government, business or one of the arts. He might become an Einstein, a Charlie Chaplin, a Shakespeare, a Will Rogers, a Michelangelo, a Ring Lardner, a Lindbergh, or a Babe Ruth. Society might be the loser if he destroyed himself.

There was no natural selection of the fit for survival. It was not so much the mere number of motor-vehicle fatalities that appalled the thoughtful observer as the realisation that, among the thousands killed, were many shining citizens needed in this fitfully illuminated world.