It's Just Another Statistic
From the very first, automobiles have attracted each other like magnets,
even when there were only two in the same town. The first incident (or
accident) occurred when horse met car. The car-haters over-dramatized the
runaways and foretold all sorts of catastrophes for the future. On the
other hand, the motorists blamed it on the horses and predicted a great
new day of personal transportation. Each side had an element of truth.
There was no question that the automobile was a boon to mankind, but it
was also to prove to be a killer of people, a destroyer of property, and
the accomplice of criminals.
Even in the beginning of the automobile age, when numbers were few and
bad roads limited the amount of traffic, deaths due to accidents in automobiles
began to mount. Before the U.S. entered WWI, auto accidents had killed
more than 36,000 Americans. By comparison, only 22,424 had lost their lives
in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American
War combined. This trend to kill more people with cars than with weapons
worsened as the years rolled by.
Before the turn of the century, anti-horseless carriage sentiments began
to express themselves in restrictive regulations. In the late 1890s, Louis
Greenough and Harry Adams of Pierre, South Dakota, built a homemade car
out of an Elkhart wagon and a two-cylinder Wolverine gas motor, hoping
to haul passengers at the county fair. They were not only denied permission
to haul passengers, the authorities would not even let them bring their
contraption inside the city limits. Automobiles were banned in the streets
of many cities: Boston, Chicago and Bar Harbor, Maine, to name a few. In
Massachusetts, an act to require that all cars be equipped with a bell
which would ring with each wheel revolution was voted down, as was one
for shooting off roman candles to warn of the vehicle's approach. There
were laws that required motorists to stop completely while buggies, surreys
and freight wagons dragged by. Speed limits as low as two and three mile
per hour were imposed by a few cities and towns. In some, night-time driving
was prohibited. In 1907, Glencoe, Illinois, built humps in the streets
to discourage speeding. Three years earlier, they had stretched a steel
cable across the road to stop the "devil wagons." Most of this was antagonism
rather than an attempt to accomplish constructive regulations.
While the jumble of confusing ordinances continued to plague pioneer
motorists, a new wrinkle was added: the "speed trap." In smaller towns,
particularly, marshals and other law officials lay in wait for unsuspecting
drivers, timing them by stop-watch or "by guess and by gosh." Some lawmen
were authorized to shoot at tires or to stretch chains or wire across the
road. Until the motorcycle became a police vehicle, the local sheriff's
office was somewhat limited in their pursuit of fleeing cars, since they
were either on foot or on bicycles.
Motorists tried to find ways to defend themselves. One way was by organization,
and in 1902, the American Automobile Association was formed in Chicago
to take up the pennant for the motor car operator. That same year, the
city passed an ordinance prohibiting the driver of a car to wear "pince-nez"
glasses. The A.A.A. proved to be a good watchdog for its members as it
fostered realistic regulations and fought against abusive police action,
especially the common practice of arresting owners of expensive cars on
the premise that such people could afford to pay a stiffer fine.
In the middle of this confusion, there seemed to be no stemming the
growing tide of accidents. It was a case of simple arithmetic; more cars
meant more collisions. With each year, too, the autos were made faster
and more powerful. Narrow roads with no shoulders and sharp, unbanked curves
simply couldn't accommodate speed runs, and from the beginning, auto owners
have had the desire to "see how fast she'll go." Gradually, the automobile
was accepted as a permanent fixture, and traffic regulations shifted from
anti-car priority to that of anti-accident.
On October 13, 1913, The National Council for Industrial Safety opened
a three-room headquarters in Chicago. The original emphasis had been on
the "industrial," but in that year, the Public Safety Commission of Chicago
and Cook County reported that in July, twenty people had been killed by
automobiles, eighteen of them children. The commission launched an education
program - with leaflets and slides - in the schools and parks, and the
new NCIS realized that the motor car would have to be the subject of its
most intense study. In 1914, the organization's name was changed to The
National Safety Council, and it began to the compile statistics on automobile
accidents. From 1913, when the death toll was 4,000, or 4.4% of a 100,000
population, it rose, in 1930, to 32,900, or 26.7%.
The desire to "do something about it" was growing among Americans everywhere;
but the urge to find unfettered freedom in a fast car was even stronger.
In 1914, Detroit installed a manually-operated stop-and-go sign. In August
that year an electrical traffic signal was put in operation at 105th and
Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The Ford Motor Company gave each car
purchaser a card reminding him to "Stop, Look, and Listen," at all railroad
crossings. Magazines and newspaper articles carried "don't drink and drive"
cartoons; this cooled off during the prohibition when "nobody" was drinking.
But bootleggers, in their big touring cars, and the bathtub gin guzzlers,
in their sporty rumble seat models, continued to add to the highway toll.
In 1924, the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, whose
chairman was the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, authorized a committee
to draft a uniform motor vehicle code for all forty-eight states. Two years
later, the laws were presented and adopted by the second conference. The
individual states didn't move so quickly, and some adopted the package
in their own time, but a standardized code of laws was a major achievement
of effective nation-wide traffic regulations.
Die-hard horse-lovers saw the entire development with an "I told you
so" attitude. They knew that the nation was going to suffer for its folly
in permitting roads to be over-run with those mechanical contraptions.
They were snickering in the wilderness, however. The automobile had a solid
footing in America, and no amount of finger pointing could make it go away.
Men began to feel that buying a car was like taking a bride, you just have
to take what you get, for better or for worse.
