THE KING’S HIGHWAY

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 5, 2 November 1925, Page 49

THE KING’S HIGHWAY

Ladies’ LMirror eLfiotor Sectioru

A MOTORING CAU SER lE y SANCHO

A RE women drivers more danARE women drivers more dangerous to encounter on the road than men? The other Sunday on a busy thoroughfare we arrived just after a bumping match had taken place. A young lady driving a limousine and going into town, in crossing the stream of outgoing trafficto reach a cross street, had bumped into a large touring car. Apart from the upset to the feelings of all the ladies in the two cars, the damage appeared to extend only to a broken lamp, a bumper knocked off, and

crumpled wings. It was quite an upset, however. The two cars remained in situ across the fairway, old ladies sipping glasses of water ere seated on kitchen chairs in the middle of the road, cars were pulled up everywhere roundabout, and their occupants swarmed round to view the damage. The usual officious Public Adviser emerged, laying down the law to everybody. “Women

again!” he declared. “They’re the very devil on the road. Butted right into him.” Having said so much, the P. A. rushed off to the old gentleman who had been driving the other car and told him emphatically that he must not let the lady move her car until the police came, and that he would ring up for the police. He also laid it down that it was the lady's business to have given way to

the other car, as main road traffic had the legal right of way over traffic in and out of cross streets. TX7HEN we departed agitated fe- ' * males were going about looking for witnesses, arguments on law points were proceeding ad lib., and traffic was crawling as best it could past the battered cars and the circumambient humanity. The only person missing was the policeman, hailed per phone by the Public Adviser,

but maybe he had heard that voice on the wire before. So far as we know there is no legal obligation on anybody not to move a car after an accident until the police have viewed the damage, nor is there even obligation to report an accident to the police unless injury has occurred to some person. As to main road traffic having the legal right of way over side-road traffic, no such legal right exists so far, apparently, as the Motor Union has discovered, for it has been asking for some considerable time for the provision of a definite right-of-way rule in the law. We don’t know whether the lady was to blame in this particular case or not, not having seen the collision, nor in the absence of statistics would we care to venture an opinion as to whether the ladies have more accidents relatively than the men. In the United States where they have dug into the subject to a certain extent, the women drivers make an excellent showing. Thus in Chicago last year there were 265 motor fatalities, and of this number only three were caused by women drivers. THE ladies showed up most creditably in some reaction-time tests carried out recently by Dr. F. A. Moss, in the course of research work for the United States National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. Dr. Moss, who is professor of psychology at the George Washington University, Washington, desired to discover the average period that elapses before a driver reacts to a warning of danger. If a car is travelling at a speed of thirty miles an hour and it takes the driver one and a-half seconds to shift his foot

from the accelerator to the brake after perceiving the dangerous situation, the car will have travelled sixty-six feet before the brakes are applied, and on the brakes being applied another eighty feet or so will be required to stop, making 140 feet in all. If the driver reacts to the danger in half a second only 22 feet will have been travelled before the brake pedal is touched. For his tests Dr. Moss placed two pistols under the running board of a car. The first was fired by an observer in the car pulling a cord, and was the signal to stop; the second was fired automatically as soon as the brake pedal was touched. The pistols were loaded with red lead which left a red splodge on the road, and to ensure further accuracy a chronometric tachometer was used instead of an ordinary speedometer. Thirty-five university students were put through the test, ten women and twenty-five men. The average reaction time of the women was 0.56 seconds, and of the men 0.59 seconds. Precautions were taken to see that all the students tested had approximately the same amount of prior experience in driving. The result goes to show that a woman reacts to danger fully as quickly as a man. f I 'HE number of cases in Dr. A Moss’ tests was not sufficiently large for sweeping assertions to be made. Each of the individuals was tested several times to discover the amount of variability in their reac-

tion times, as it was felt that the same person might respond quickly to danger on one occasion, but be slower on another. The average variability of the ten women was 0.17 seconds, and of the twenty-five men 0.22 seconds. This lends no support to the idea that women are apt to be the more erratic. The test, to be sure, was the relatively simple one of putting on the brake at a given signal. More important is the question whether a woman is able to “keep her head” in an emergency. The ability to maintain one’s composure in a crisis and to be able to cope with all sorts of unexpected situations is, of course, one of the important factors in driving. A driver may be quite capable of handling a car under ordinary conditions, but let an unforeseen emergency arise and he “goes to pieces” to such an extent as to be totally unable to apply the brake or turn the steering wheel. Only a few weeks ago we heard of a man whose first action on sweeping round a corner on his wrong side on to another car was to lift his hands in horror from the wheel. He recovered in time to avert a crash, and is still on the road, a highly potential danger. Are women more likely to behave in this way than men? 'T'O answer questions like this one -*■ has to keep turning to American research, as they delve into such matters there far more painstakingly than elsewhere. All the avail-

able evidence goes to show that, in the words of Dr. Thorndike, professor of psychology at Columbia University : "The individual differences within one sex so enormously outweigh the differences between the sexes in the intellectual and semi-in-tellectual traits that for practical purposes sex differences may be disregarded.” In another test made by Dr. Moss, who has already been quoted, women showed themselves equally as capable as men in recognising potentially dangerous situations. The persons tested were handed photographs in which were shown without especial prominence typically dangerous situations such as should be avoided by a careful driver. In one was a car parked on a curve, in another a car passing a tram which had stopped to unload passengers, one car passing another near the crest of a hill, a car cutting a curve, and passengers getting out on the wrong side of a car in the way of oncoming traffic. The tests were given to a hundred of each sex, with instructions to write down the danger noticed in each picture. The differences between the sexes was so slight as to be negligible, and altogether it may be said that the ladies emerged with flying colours. T AST month we commented on J the new draft motor regulations issued by the Department of Internal Affairs, and the inability of the Minister to state that there had been any practical test of the various novel requirements therein imposed. It now appears, for in-

stance, that the Department in its widsom copied some Illinois rules as to the distances in which cars must stop at given speeds on application of the brakes. The rules were for cars, but in copying them the Department in the innocence of its heart, applied them to motor-vehi-clesgenerally, and so far as can be gathered, the heavy solid-tyred vehicle is not in the least capable of coming within the requirements. Further, nobody seems at all clear, in the absence of a proper try-out, whether the distances are what a car should attain with its brakes newly adjusted, or the lowest requirements compatible with safety—two entirely different things. ' If motor traffic is to be efficiently regulated in this country it will scarcely be by playing around with the subject in this way, borrowing regulations from other countries without testing them, and muddling them up in the copying out.. It is high time we had a proper motor bureau to look after all these matters. A NOVELTY in motor conferences was one held in Wanganui a while ago. It was a meeting of representatives of the local automobile association with representatives of the drovers and farmers to discuss the etiquette to be pursued when stock are met on the road. It was agreed that the sounding of the horn was inadvisable in passing stock, and that on bridges motorists should give the right-of-way to stock. Another rule was that it should be regarded as an act of discourtesy for motorists to drive so as to force stock back on to a drover, and equally for a drover to take no action to get stock past a car. On narrow roads it was laid down that on a motorist overtaking stock the motorist and the drover should co-operate to turn the lead so as to get the stock to run back in an opposite direction to that in which the car is travelling so as to facilitate a passage for it. In meeting stock proceeding in an opposite direction to the car the great thing is to drive quietly and avoid turning the lead. If the lead is got past the car the another animals will tend to follow quietly by, but if the motorist dashes up as the lord of creation and scares the lead back the mob is bunched up, and unnecessary delay and annoyance follows on both sides until matters are straightened . out ■ again.

IT is good to learn that the Survey -*■ Department has an up-to-date road map of the Dominion on the stocks. It is, from what one hears, to be a re-issue of the old ten-mile mapthat is, on a scale of ten miles to the inch. This ten-mile map, now out of print, was one of the best and clearest maps of the Dominion ever published. It is quite a good scale

for a first-class road map, for it means ten inches of map to a hundred miles of country, and anything bigger than that is a nuisance in a car. In fact, the ten-mile, to be handy for use on the road, needs to be cut down into well-thought-out sections. When it is said that this map is in hand it does not mean that it is precipitately to appear forthwith.

They don’t do things like that in the Government. Oh dear, no! The position is that some of our children, or our children’s children, may see it. At the moment nobody knows in the least just which of the roads shown on the shoals of maps issued by the Government are real roads, which are merely bridle tracks, and which are merely mouldy surveyors’ pegs in the ground. There are a lot of the latter, for many surveyors in the old days ran road lines on the shady side of the hill when they might just as well have taken the sunny side, and did other eccentric things with the result that when a road was really wanted it was made somewhere else, but the old unmade road remains on the map, and nobody in the map office has the faintest idea now what is real and what isn’t. And this in spite of the fact that we are supposed to have the most efficient Civil Service in the world. Poor old world! There are a lot of brain waves about maps and sign-posts afloat at present. The Highways Board proposes to have signs put up bearing the numbers of the highways, so that a motorist getting on, say, No. 1 Highway at Kaitaia has only to follow the number to arrive at Wellington.’ Official designs for new standard direction posts and signs have been approved, and it is laid down that the numbers are to be painted on the posts, and names of places on the finger boards. Thus at a cross-roads or a fork in the road there will be boards with names pointing every way, and on the post the number of the highway but with nothing on earth to show to which of the roads at the junction the number belongs. The poor traveller who stars out with the idea that he has only to look at the numbers to reach Wellington from Kaitaia is much more likely to reach Jericho —or Avondalethan anywhere else. At least such is the view of an automobile association friend who has been studying the matter with a view to planting new standard pattern signs about the countryside. Anyway, why worry!. Doesn’t the poet tell us “there is no place under heaven so blue that’s fairly worth the traveling to,” and advise us to “allow the streams in civil mode to direct our choice of roads.” Half the interest in life, too, is in taking all the wrong turnings on the broad highway.