The Nut That Holds the Wheel: A Primer for Motorists

I

THE least analytical of minds can see at a glance that there are three principal causes which play their part, in varying degree, to produce most of our automobile accidents — the machine itself, the highway over which it travels, and the driver. These factors in a problem of such stupendous proportions that deaths each year are measured in tens of thousands, injuries in hundreds of thousands, and property damage in millions, are not listed in the order of their importance. It has often been said that the most dangerous thing about the automobile is ‘ the nut that holds the wheel,’and it is undeniable that the human factor is by far the most disturbing and elusive, as well as the one which offers the greatest challenge to traffic engineers.

There are circumstances, however, which extenuate the guilt of ‘the nut,’for he has never received adequate education designed to make him a courteous, sane, and safe operator of a powerful machine. He has never been taught the effect of speed on accidents

— a most vital lesson. The frightfulness of the annual toll of death — a harvest growing directly out of such driving blunders as he is daily guilty of

— has never been interpreted to him in a way to arrest his attention. His respect for that most impelling educator, the law enforcer, is all too slight.

He has not been made to realize, moreover, the necessity of keeping the essential parts of his machine in prime condition. And most important of all, he has never been taught the correct way to drive an automobile.

The average motorist buys a car advertised and extolled for its speed. It makes no difference how much he intends to pay; any car these days is capable of a mile a minute or better. While it is being demonstrated, the salesman says: ‘This bus can do seventy. Put your foot on the accelerator — feel the power, the get-away there!’ The prospective purchaser may be wholly unfit, physically or nervously, to drive safely except at a crawl, but what of that? The salesman, after all, is paid for selling, not for teaching. He feels constrained to give only as much instruction as is necessary to move the car off the company’s premises.

Whether the motorist is in the city or the country, he sees speed glorified upon innumerable billboards, advertising not only automobiles, but ‘zip’ gasoline, ‘flash’ motor oil, and tires ‘ built for fast travel.’ Manufacturers, realizing the demand for power and still more power, have answered with a vengeance. And they have not been content merely to provide speed; they seem to insist — if subtly — that the driver use it.

II

What effect does speed have upon accidents? Many people will be quick to say that it has little or no effect; that aged drivers, or women drivers, or drunken drivers are the principal cause of serious wrecks. Who, they ask, has not ridden or driven at sixty miles an hour without suffering an accident, without, in fact, experiencing any feeling of insecurity? And, in sooth, who has n’t? This has been possible ever since that happy day when both cars and roads were constructed well enough to permit fast travel without terrifying the motorist with noise, vibration, and occasional lurches into mud holes. But immediately upon the discovery that the thing could be done, the notion became fixed in the minds of automobilists that speed, in itself, is not dangerous.

The notion is as fallacious as it is alluring, as anyone may see who will take the trouble to study recent trends in accident rates. In 1926, for every 100,000 motor vehicles there were 105 deaths. In 1927, coincident with the general increase in the power and speed of cars, the death rate suddenly began to rise, and has continued to do so ever since, until, in 1931, it had advanced to 128. To put it another way, the increase in actual fatalities was from 23,400 in 1926 to 33,500 in 1931.

While it may not be wholly accurate to say that speed causes accidents, no one can deny that high speed makes an accident a great deal more deadly. For the explanation of this fact, J. S. Baker, assistant traffic engineer of the National Safety Council, recommends thumbing through the pages of the old high-school physics book to the discussion of kinetic energy.

‘The faster a vehicle is going,’ he says, ‘the more damage it can do itself and the more injury to the people riding in it, because its energy increases as the square of its speed. Thus a car going forty miles an hour is not twice but four times as potent an instrument of destruction as one going twenty miles an hour. Few people realize this, even when they look at a table of stopping distances from different speeds, which clearly shows that tripling the speed makes the stopping distance nine times as great.

‘Of course, the seriousness of the accident hinges largely on how quickly the energy of the moving vehicle is dissipated. If brakes are applied in time to take up part of it, and if the car can slide or roll for some way after the crash, the damage, even at extremely high speeds, may be surprisingly little. But if the car stops suddenly by running head-on into another car, a tree, masonry abutment, or other practically immovable object, the results are just about the same as they would be if the vehicle were dropped from up in the air to the ground; for it is the suddenness of the stop that, in dissipating the necessary energy, creates the forces to wreck the car and mangle the passengers. Thus a car hitting the concrete retaining wall of an underpass at forty miles an hour will smash up just about as badly as it would if it fell off the roof of a five-story building. For other speeds the figures are as follows:

‘The same fellow who has convinced himself that there is no particular danger in driving sixty miles an hour would hesitate considerably before walking along a cornice twelve stories above the street; yet a little slip in either case might mean a sudden stop from a speed of eighty-eight feet per second,’

III

In urban districts, where speed is usually limited, fatal accidents have been held to a rate of 18 per 100,000 people. In rural areas, where motorists can and do ‘step on it,’ automobile deaths have shot up to 23 per 100,000. These figures have convinced some few public officials that even a small diminution of speed would help in reducing our shameful accident rates.

The state which has studied the problem more closely, perhaps, than any other is Rhode Island, where outof-state cars form a large part of the traffic. Actual speed observations have been made to determine the average driving practice under all sorts of conditions. George R. Wellington, chief clerk, Board of Public Roads, knew whereof he spoke, therefore, when, at the twentieth annual Safety Congress, he said: —

‘I hold no brief for the old-fashioned speed limits, and I fully realize that speed must be considered relatively; but research work in Rhode Island during the past few years, conducted in an effort to determine the relationship of speed to accidents, shows conclusively that where speed is reduced the number of accidents is correspondingly lowered. Over a period of years we had a rising peak of accidents until 1928, when we reached a total of 145 fatalities, and in 1929 a total of 4826 other accidents involving personal injuries. By the close of 1930 these figures had been reduced to 106 deaths and 4426 injuries, or a reduction of 39 deaths in two years and 400 non-fatal injury accidents in one year — a most significant reflection of the prevention work going on. This prevention work consisted mainly of lessening the average driving speed throughout the state almost six miles an hour, from thirtyseven down to thirty-one.’

The reader who is not impressed by a reduction of six miles an hour must recall that the killing power of a motor car increases far faster than its speed. Even a small reduction in speed, therefore, cannot fail to bring about significant savings of human lives.

The rapid increase in fatalities among those who ride in automobiles as contrasted with deaths to pedestrians sheds further light upon the effects of speed. In 1931, pedestrian deaths were only slightly more numerous than in 1927, whereas fatalities to the occupants of cars increased 59 per cent. Of course pedestrians come out badly in automobile accidents whether the machine that strikes them is going fifteen miles an hour or fifty. The fact that non-pedestrian deaths have more than doubled in five years indicates that collisions are becoming more vicious because cars are traveling at higher speeds.

Four-wheel brakes have been hailed as a boon to traffic safety, and doubtless they have proved efficacious in averting many bumps. The fact remains, however, that accidents, both fatal and non-fatal, have increased since four-wheel brakes came into general use, mainly because they cannot compensate for the increased speed of automobiles. Our sensory reactions are too slow. In the average person there is a lapse of no less than one second between the time of sighting danger and the time when he can apply the brakes or twist the wheel. In that interval, a car going 20 miles an hour will move 29 feet; at 40 miles an hour it will move 59 feet; at 60, 88 feet. It is clear, then, that if one is traveling at the high but not unusual rate of 60 miles an hour, and if one’s nervous reactions are normal, he will travel 88 feet before he can start to stop. Then, if his four-wheel brakes are in prime condition, he will travel 225 feet farther before the car comes to rest. Woe unto anyone who moves into his path at less than 313 feet ahead of the front bumper!

These figures, of course, are for the average driver and good brakes. Fatigue and other common conditions of the body slow up the nerves, and in few cars are the brakes as good as they should be. Every driver should bear these facts in mind whenever he is tempted to speed through a blind intersection or past a line of parked cars, from behind any one of which a pedestrian may step or a child dart.

Lesson number one, then, in the sound education of the motorist is this: The higher the speed, the worse the accident — even with four-wheel brakes.

IV

Lesson number two may be stated briefly. The average man must be made to realize the imminent peril, the personal tragedy, that threatens him every time he is guilty of inefficient and improper driving.

Accident statistics are notoriously cold — mercifully so. One may read that 33,500 people were killed by automobiles last year and that 1,200,000 were injured, but the message does not carry home. Accidents are diffused in space and time; the annual total registers upon the mind of Bill Jones with far less effectiveness than the news of a single bad collision in his own neighborhood involving people whom he may know. The terrors of sudden death, the agony of the more fortunate who lie for months in hospital beds, the grief of bereaved mothers and fathers, husbands and wives — none of this is revealed by statistics.

To be effective in preventing accidents, educational publicity must be specific. This has been demonstrated in Evanston, Illinois, a community which is one of the pioneers in the work of enlightened traffic control. Franklin M. Kreml, director of the Accident Prevention Bureau of the police department, reports a striking case of the right kind of publicity which, in itself, was sufficient to reduce the number of collisions.

‘We had a bad intersection,’ he said, ‘where twelve accidents had occurred in 1931, several of them serious. We could find little wrong with the physical layout of the corner; it looked innocent enough. Since we could not afford to patrol the spot all day every day, we gave a reporter a series of stories telling that this was one of the most hazardous corners in the city, and describing the accidents that had occurred there. After the publication of the articles, accidents were reduced.’

Such publicity as this is likely to have a more salubrious effect than the printing of columns of national statistics.

V

Out of the tangled mass of popular prejudices regarding all law enforcement in the United States one fact at least emerges: a sane traffic ordinance, courteously but firmly enforced, will reduce automobile accidents, both fatal and non-fatal, in any city. The overwhelming majority of people are law-abiding. They do not want to endanger anybody’s life, and they do not want to suffer mishaps themselves. Publicity by newspapers and the radio will help to educate them, but the most immediately effectual way to carry the message home is to enforce the law, and thus to teach motorists that they must pay for violations.

This is lesson number three in the education of the driver. It has an added advantage over all the others in that it will force into line the really dangerous minority comprising, on the one hand, the boob who is too stupid to see that illegal driving is a two-edged sword, and, on the other, that most cowardly of criminals, the motorist who, in the security of his car, takes wanton chances with the lives of defenseless pedestrians and other motorists. Enforcement of traffic laws must be impartial if it is to serve as the educational deterrent that it can and ought to be. Luckless is the city inhabited by privileged characters. Many of them will be found among the casualties, sooner or later, and the children of such a city have no protection.

The educational power of law enforcement has been demonstrated many times. In one year Evanston reduced its fatalities 40 per cent through the efficiency of its famous investigating squad, which rushes to the scene of a collision and collects all the evidence to determine responsibility. The record of St. Louis from 1925 to 1929¹ shows conclusively that accidents decrease as arrests for traffic violations increase. Ray Ashworth, traffic lieutenant of Wichita, Kansas, stated at the last Safety Congress that an increase in arrests for speeding from 1500 in 1929 to 2300 in 1930 resulted in a falling off in accidents of 33 per cent.

The fourth major lesson in the education of the driver is to teach him the proper care of his machine. Most cars are fairly safe vehicles when they are driven off the sales floor. After the first few thousand miles, however, only a modicum of their pristine efficiency remains in many of them. In Pennsylvania, during the month of November, 1931, vehicle defects accounted for 368 accidents in which 12 persons were killed, 327 were injured, and property was destroyed to the extent of $52,000.

During 1931, nine states carried out campaigns for the inspection of motor vehicles, and of the 3,800,000 registered automobiles in these states 90 per cent were examined. Almost half of them were found to have brakes in an unsafe condition, almost two thirds had faulty headlights, and one twentieth had defective steering mechanisms. Thus the inspection proved that millions of potential causes existed which needed only a particular set of circumstances to result in accidents.

VI

Although mechanical faults are important and contribute to many crashes, and although each of the other points enumerated here plays its part in bringing about the annual toll of death, injury, and destruction of property, the great majority of accidents are caused by none of these things, but by the personal faults of drivers themselves. Most of the trouble is directly attributable to ‘the nut that holds the wheel.’ The fifth lesson, then, is that motorists must be taught how to drive.

We have already seen that there are circumstances to extenuate his guilt. How did he learn to handle a car? He was taught by a relative or a friend, or by the salesman who sold him his first automobile, or perhaps he just picked it up himself. Does he drive correctly? Who can tell? The fact is that nobody knows ‘the one best way’ to drive, to borrow the phrase of the efficiency engineer. It is impossible to say how the wheel should be held and the pedals manipulated. If the driver’s eye level in relation to the top of the wheel and the windshield has a bearing on safety, should the same car be sold to a tall man and a short one without making important adjustments?

These questions, and many more like them, must be left unanswered. They will remain unanswered until the technique of driving is submitted to laboratory tests. Such a study has never been made, and until it is it will not be possible to say to a driver: ‘This you do wrong; this right. Correct that unhappy habit and your control of the car will be satisfactory.’

So casual is the interest in this important matter of seeing to it that the man behind the wheel knows what he is doing that only twelve of the twentyfour states which require licenses to drive insist on an examination of the applicant, and even in these states the examinations are in no sense an adequate test of the applicant’s ability. Still, statistics prove that even these minimum requirements are helping to make the highways safer. Since 1929, motor-vehicle deaths in the entire country increased 7.3 per cent, while in the dozen states which require examinations the increase was only 6.5 per cent. This showing is especially creditable because this group of states have large urban populations, and the urban states have shown a much greater increase in gasoline consumption than the rural states.

While we are considering the effect of driving knowledge and experience upon the death rate, it is interesting to mention the record of commercial drivers. During the five-year period from 1927 through 1931, fatal accidents involving trucks decreased 7 per cent; fatalities involving buses declined 12 per cent; and those involving taxicabs dropped 35 per cent. In this same period fatal accidents involving private passenger cars increased 50 per cent. The record of the truck drivers — the muchmaligned truck drivers — appears all the better when it is considered that the number of trucks increased 19 per cent during these five years, while cars in the other three classifications increased in numbers only 11 per cent.

VII

It will be apparent, then, that the positive work of correcting the present shocking conditions, which are a result of the American public’s misuse of the automobile, will have to deal with five fundamentals. (1) It must be impressed upon motorists that speed is dangerous. (2) They must be made to realize what their blunders are costing in life and happiness. (3) It must be brought home to them by the proper enforcement of laws that they cannot ‘get away with’ criminal carelessness. (4) They must learn to maintain their cars in a safe condition. (5) They must be taught how to drive.

The big question is: Who is to undertake this Gargantuan task? The National Safety Council, after years of constant experimentation, has recently outlined what it calls ‘A Balanced Programme for the Reduction of Traffic Accidents,’ and has listed the agencies that must coöperate to make it effective — the government, the schools, the press, the automobile industry, insurance companies, transportation companies, motor clubs, chambers of commerce, civic associations, and ‘all of us.’

The responsibility of governmental agencies, especially the municipal and state units, is clear-cut. They must pass and enforce adequate laws. The national government can also lend a hand. For example, through the work of the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, organized under the auspices of the Department of Commerce, a uniform vehicle code for states was formulated and a model municipal traffic ordinance was drawn up and offered to all the local governments.

The responsibility of the schools is no less clear. In the past it has not been considered improper for the schools to give instruction in swimming. May it not be equally within their province to teach youngsters how to drive properly? Clubs for this purpose are already being started in many high schools; their object is to give instruction in the fundamentals of driving and to instill in children a sense of their social responsibility as future owners and operators of automobiles. Since few graduates will find more than an occasional use for their knowledge of swimming, while practically all will drive through life, the relative importance of the two subjects is apparent.

But what agency is to undertake the job of finding out the one best way to drive? Since the ease, efficiency, and safety of operating a car are closely connected with its construction, should not this part of the project fall upon the automobile industry? The general public is becoming more and more aroused about this whole matter of safety, and any manufacturer who would be enterprising enough to offer thorough driving instruction with each car purchased would probably find it a valuable selling point.

Education through publicity must be left largely to the newspapers. Editors do not know what they are missing in the way of legitimate news about traffic accidents. Not long ago Marlen Pew, editor of Editor and Publisher, pointed to the traffic toll as a virgin field for journalistic enterprise. For the most part, newspapers are content to record the occurrence of automobile accidents as if they were inevitable, as if they were not now being reduced and prevented in other communities.

Why should not editors find out as much about this problem as they do about many others of far less consequence? It would be easy enough for them to do so. Why should they not publish the damning facts that their police do not keep adequate records of accidents, that the traffic force is pitiably unorganized and undertrained, that the police do not know what an accident-spot map is for, that enforcement is shot through with favoritism, that the traffic ordinance is obsolete, that the city engineer does not recognize traffic problems as coming within the province of his science, that a hundred and one other reforms in traffic administration are crying for adoption — all at the dear cost of human lives? Officials, and the public as well, would have their eyes opened by such a campaign, and the educational force of it would be great beyond belief.

Other powerful agencies must join in the movement before the ‘irreducible minimum’ of traffic accidents will have been reached. Insurance companies are vitally interested, as are also street-car companies and the railroads. Motor clubs are supposed to exist for the good of the automobile owner, and civic clubs would enhance the reason for their being by grappling with such a problem. There is plenty for each of these agencies to do.

Last, but emphatically not least, come ‘all of us.’ We are at once the perpetrators and the victims of traffic accidents, and we should be the principal gainers by reducing their number. It is time for us to learn that the automobile is no longer a novel toy, that it is a tremendous social force, mainly for good, but certainly for terrific evil unless it is sanely used. We drivers must learn how to control the twenty, forty, or sixty mechanical wild horses that we have taught to rear and plunge at the wiggle of a toe.