Letters to the Editor
ROAD ACCIDENTS
SIR,—Your Motoring Correspondent is far too enlightened to become a partisan of motorists against other road users. He would, I am sure, prefer to work for agreement and joint action; and so would most readers of the Spectator.
Agreement about the measures necessary to reduce accident rates is at present hampered by the lack of a true and accepted theory of accident causation, everyone feeling entitled to air his views in public without study of the statistics or of the investigations carried out by the Road Research Laboratory and other research workers in this country and abroad.
At present the Ministry of Transport's statistics appear misleading in at least three respects: (I) They play down alcohol as a factor, because they are -based on police reports, which only blame drink when the evidence is sufficient to justify prosecution.
(2) They play down speed as a factor, be- cause the policeman reporting after an acci- dent can seldom be certain about the speeds of vehicles which he himself did not observe.
(3) They play down road defects as factors, because the policeman, not being a highway engineer, can only take the roads as he finds them and report such obvious and small defects as potholes and loose chippings, ignor- ing the major defects, such as bad lay-out of crossings or lack of physical segregation of different types of traffic.
Nevertheless, much information of great value to a study of accident causation can be gained from the Ministry's statistics; and this can be supplemented from other equally im- partial sources.
Could not the organisations of the three major classes of road-users get together (by the medium of a joint committee) and agree upon a statement of the sorts of conditions in which accidents do in fact occur, giving proper emphasis to human failures, to bad roads and to vehicle defects ?
Enough material exists for agreement to be reached on this subject between the road- users so that the true theory becomes accepted and uncontroversial. A capable joint com- mittee could reach agreement in a month.
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