MOTORING
The Toll of the Roads The usual holiday-time appeals to the motoring public, broadcast or in print, to take every possible care of themselves and other people on the crowded roads, serve mainly to remind us how small is the attention paid to them. There would be little need of such reminders if the accident problem were properly impressed upon the public consciousness— and conscience.
The toll of the roads is nothing less than shocking : as shocking today as it was last year and every year-before that, down to the time when mechanical transport was not yet an essential feature. of daily existence. It is practically certain that everything is being done to reduce that toll, everything practical in the way of restrictions, limits, special police supervision and " advice," warnings, pleas and the rest of it. Nobody with any sense of responsibility or know- ledge of the difficulties of this urgent problem would dream of belittling these honest and so far, unfortunately, vain efforts. The trouble is, to my mind, that while the public is daily . made aware of the attempted cure, the peculiar horror of the disease is not fully realised.
Impersonal Figures The figures published at official intervals are so monotonously tragic that they have long lost their effect. If you read every week that so many hundreds of people have been killed and injured and the total remains about the same for months at a time, your appreciation of what it all means is inevitably blunted. If you do not exactly murmur " How dreadful ! " and turn to the racing news, your attitude towards a national disaster is just about that. What is urgently needed is not a vague general warning but an individual, personal shock, administered to every reader of every paper at least once a week, on Friday, for choice.
Casualty Lists What is needed is a casualty list, on the lines of those which kept the nations in agonised suspense for four years. To- morrow you may read that during a given period 500 people were killed on the roads and r,000 injured, but as you have already read an exactly similar announcement at least twenty times that you can remember, the words make little or no real impression on you. Even if you have yourself seen several accidents on the roads, dead and injured, ambulances, gaping crowds and all the gruesome accompaniment of these things—and very few people have seen them in. any number— the statement does not penetrate. You do not know who these unfortunate people are and unless any of them are in some way well known or the circumstances of their death or injury of news-value, you never will. They remain figures, unidentifiable parts of a sum. They are not real.
Making it Real If instead of these meaningless reports the Government would issue a full list of the dead and injured, with names and addresses—particularly addresses—the attention of the public would instantly be aroused, its underlying sense of responsibility stirred. To read that 20 persons died in a London area as a result of traffic • accidents affects nobody but their relations ; to read their names and addresses, to realise that every day carelessness, stupidity, lack of con- sideration have brought pain and death and loss to individuals with identities, that it may be your turn next or your neighbour's to appear in that sinister roll, to find yourself anxiously searching the column for certain names—that might bring home to us all for ever the need for something more than general regrets.
A New Vauxhall The chief point of interest in the design of the latest 25 Vauxhall which I tried• some time ago, is the three-speed gear; the most interesting feature of its perforniante the success of the innovation. It is many years since a British- built car of this size (3i litre Six) has been so equipped, and I confess I took the wheel with a certain amount of foreboding. A three-speed gear can or at any rate could be so grave a handicap to an otherwise efficient car. There was nothing wrong with it. In fact I can truthfully say, as a 4-speed stonewaller, that the lack of a " third " made no difference to my pleasure in driving this lively car. Car-speed and engine-speed were generally what they would have been with a normal box.
At k3I5, with independent suspension, very creditable acceleration, an all-silent geak, a really roomy body and such gadgets as a defroster and interior heater, engine-drive for the screen-wipers (I wish this were generally adopted) and a telescopic steering-column, this car looks like very good value.
The Three Peaks Seven thousand feet above the sea level you climb out of Italy into Switzerland before you come to that very special shelf on the higher Alps. The air in July can be of astonishing crispness, calling' for warm coats if you mean to stay long among the glaciers, and on those who are uncomfortable in high altitudes only a few minutes' halt will be enough to produce the familiar faint depression, that odd senation that the sun is not shining quite so brightly. It is • of no importance because what you see from your shelter under the rocks on the northern edge of the top of- the Simplon Pass may very well pass for a unique view, and these are rare enough—particularly in the Alps, where you think there are so many—to make you forget everything else.
The Tower Stair The approach is certainly unlike any other I know. From Domodossola you climb up through a precipitous valley which narrows steadily into a gorge, and the mere fact that, unlike almost every other Alpine pass, the rock-sides cut off all but the views above you gives the Simplon a singular beauty. You must look up if you want to see out. You see the jagged crests cutting into the sky some ro,000 feet above your head ; you see on your left, about 6,000 feet up, a blue glacier hanging like a miracle above the last of the trees ; you see the road winding back and forth before you between the ramparts of the hills : but you do not see anything else. There are one or two minor passes in the Pyrenees where you get something of the same effect, but nowhere else in the Alps. There is always a big view from almost every hairpin bend, always a view to look back upon. Climbing the Simplon from Italy to Switzerland is like climbing the stair in a tower with. no roof.
In Space When you reach the top you come, a mile or so beyond the Hospice, to that shelf. The road creeps round a last corner and as it straightens out for the first time on the downward run it clings close to the rock on which the December snow lies thick in June. Below is the valley of the RhOne, about ten miles away and something like 4,500 feet down. It is impossible to accept the tiny thread that shines here and there among the shadows Of that abyss as the Rhone itself. A brook, no doubt; but not the second river of France. On a level with your eyes (as it seems to you) above and beyond the incredible valley sleep the three peaks, the Aletschhom, the Finiteraarhorn- and the Jungfrau. From the shelf they look as -neither they nor any other famous peaks look anywhere else in the Alps, outside the world. They do not belong to your tour nor to that of anybody else. The dark valley, twenty miles across, might be space itself; [Note.—Readers' requests for advice from, our Motorig Correspondent on the choice of new cars should be accompanied -by a stamped and-ad-dressed envelope. The highest price payable 'must be given, as well as the type of body required. No adviCe can' begiven- on the pnrchase, sale or exchange- of used carsj
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