I
FEW will question the statement that, though we laugh with Will Rogers at the United States Senate and jeer at the ineptitudes of state legislatures, the really weak governmental unit in the United States is lodged in the city hall. As evidence of this I wish to call attention to the widespread bungling of traffic problems by municipalities throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is true that the man-killing automobile is a lethal weapon comparatively new in our civilization, but several decades have passed since the first life was lost in a smash-up, and the witticism that city populations are divided between the quick and the dead has been with us these many years.
What has the average city done to cope with the increasing death toll? Almost nothing; or, just as bad, the wrong thing.
A statistician has estimated that about as many persons lose their lives on the streets of the United States each year as die of snake bites in India. If a scientific Saint Patrick were charged with the task of annihilating the venomous reptiles in India, his first questions would doubtless be: ‘Where are these snakes, and what are their habits? What is their nature?’ Hence it might be reasonable to suppose that American city officials who are charged with looking after the safety of the folk who pay their salaries have gathered data on automobile accidents to help them rid their cities of this type of tragedy. False supposition! Of the 982 cities in the country with a population of 10,000 or greater, not more than a hundred have an accurate idea of how many accidents occur on their streets, not to mention records of important circ*mstances regarding each accident which would serve as clues to be used in the prevention of recurrences. Lest the reader suppose that this statement refers only to smaller cities in backward regions, I hasten to add that it is beyond the power of public officials in many of our leading metropolises, Chicago among them, to find out from their records how many accidents occurred at a given intersection during the past month or six months or year — except after prodigious research.
This statement is not true of fatalities. Local bureaus of vital statistics in the forty-eight states and the District of Columbia do keep accurate records of automobile accidents which result in death. These accidents, however, are so few in comparison to the total (there are about thirty-five accidents resulting in non-falal personal injuries to each fatality, and far more which result in property damage only) that these records are inadequate for use in prevention. Luck is the big factor which determines whether a crash is to result in death, in non-fatal injuries, or merely in damage to property. All accidents are potential fatalities; therefore records of all accidents must be used in any study which is expected to bring about effective enforcement of traffic laws, engineering remedies, or educational propaganda.
Yet, as I have already said, not more than one hundred municipalities keep adequate accident records. How many of these actually use the information so compiled? Perhaps a dozen. An example of the woeful lack of appreciation of the uses to which these statistics should be put was revealed when a traffic engineer visited the police department of Buffalo to study the accident records which it was known the department kept. When the engineer arrived, he was told that the office containing the records had been moved, and ‘while the necessary housecleaning was being done we decided to do a complete job and throw away all the old records and get a nice clean start.’ Priceless data destroyed!
II
Traffic engineering differs from civil or mining engineering in at least one important respect: while the civil or mining engineer pits steel and concrete against other tested substances, the traffic engineer pits steel and concrete against that great variable, human nature.
A traffic signal is installed. Will drivers obey it?
A parking regulation is laid down to facilitate the movement of vehicles on the street. Will parkers observe it?
If motorists don’t obey, does the city have police officers in sufficient numbers to enforce the regulation?
These are problems in traffic engineering, questions that are asked and answered in those few cities which take their street tragedies seriously; but it is possible to count on one’s fingers and toes the cities which recognize traffic hazards as a challenge to engineering science. The police are usually saddled with the responsibility of determining the location of signs and signals, of imposing parking regulations, and of establishing through streets. Perhaps they are supplemented by a committee of city councilmen consisting of a baker from the first ward, a dentist from the third, a building contractor from the fourth, and, as chairman, the genial chiropractor from the sixth. These men are the final arbiters of traffic problems, with the chief of police sitting in in an advisory capacity.
Thus in most cities there is one glaring omission in the machinery set up to regulate traffic. Where, one may ask, is the city engineer? To raise the question is to have the city authorities put us down as cranks and faddists. Anybody, they tell us, knows what is wrong with traffic. If we don’t believe it, we can ask the four committeemen and the police advisor — and, lo, we shall have five different answers, any one of which will be just as authoritative as the others!
This being the all-too-typical state of things, it may be instructive to inspect the work accomplished under such haphazard control.
III
An accident is proof of inefficiency somewhere. Stop-and-go signals are installed to prevent accidents and to facilitate the movement of vehicles, to render a street safer at a certain point or along its whole length. Thousands of traffic lights costing millions of dollars have been installed all over the country for the purpose of reducing accidents and relieving congestion. Have these installations, these millions of dollars, made our streets safer? A study of several hundred typical intersections for which records of accidents ‘before and after installation’ were available revealed that only 60 per cent of the installations were followed by a decrease in accidents; in 10 per cent of the cases the records indicated no appreciable change in conditions, while in 30 per cent of the cases the number of accidents actually increased after lights were erected. Apparently our council committee can guess right only a fraction of the time. Even so, the committee is safe from criticism. Very few cities keep the vital records which would reveal such inefficiency as this, and, even if the records are kept, almost nobody bothers to pry into them.
Aldermen sometimes fight for an appropriation for signals because their constituents want to give their local business district a ‘metropolitan’ air. Public clamor alone accounts for others. In one city of eight wards, the council voted to buy sixteen signals, and permitted each alderman to have two to install wherever he wished. An engineer of the National Safety Council at one time visited Grand Rapids to make a study of the signal system there. He found several signals at points where the load of traffic was exceedingly light. ‘Why were these signals installed?’ he asked. ‘To safeguard the intersection,’ was the reply. But when the engineer went to the records he searched in vain for the report of a single accident that had ever occurred at those places. Here expensive equipment was used to safeguard intersections which were already safe.
It is difficult in the space of an article to touch even briefly on the many costly mistakes connected with the problem of parking in downtown areas. Merchants and other business men often work at cross-purposes, newspapers and chambers of commerce add to the confusion, and the city council, instead of finding the facts about the need of parking space and basing its regulations upon them, usually follows the dictation of the most influential group that happens to interest itself in the matter.
Thus in nine cases out of ten the council attempts to solve the problem by passing a new ordinance, without making any provision for its enforcement. In all likelihood the ordinance cannot be enforced unless the number of policemen available for traffic duty is greatly increased. Since this is rarely provided for, the new ordinance has no effect except to give the city authorities the false but comforting notion that the problem has been attended to.
A typical example was found a year ago in Richmond, Virginia. The city had restricted parking on the main business street to a thirty-minute period during the day, but had failed to provide adequate police supervision. Violations became so general that no space was available for shoppers and others who wished to park for short periods, the space having been preempted early in the morning by business and professional men whose cars stood on the street all day. A demand went up for a change, and the city council, instead of providing for enforcement of the existing restrictions, voted for more rigid restrictions! When outside engineers made a traffic survey of the city, they found that parking restrictions throughout the business district could be eased rather than tightened — if the regulations were enforced.
A development of the past ten years which has been pounced upon by traffic authorities in many cities as an easy cure-all for accidents is the arterial or through street. The stop provision is intended to protect traffic on the thoroughfare and permit it to move through town with a minimum of delay. But the device is misused by politicians who want to favor constituents by providing each of them with a fast boulevard from his home to his office.
Not long ago the city of Flint, Michigan, had three through streets running parallel to each other a block apart, requiring cross-town traffic to stop at each consecutive intersection. The result was that a great deal of cross-town traffic refused to heed the signs and entered the intersections without stopping, only to collide with through traffic which had depended on the signs for protection. Peoria, Illinois, at one time established a veritable maze of through streets, and Indianapolis as well as other cities passed an ordinance giving vehicles on every north and south street the right of way — and provided no signs to warn the unsuspecting visitor of the unusual rule.
IV
Traffic-law enforcement gives the inefficient city administration an opportunity to reveal itself at its worst. There is no type of bungling so pregnant with possibilities for an evermounting toll of death. To begin with, it is easy for any city to let matters slide and go along with traffic regulations which were enacted at a time when the fastest-moving vehicle on the streets was a runaway team. As a result, police in hundreds of cities are expected to enforce utterly unenforceable ordinances.
But the American city can and does commit other blunders in enforcement just as serious as those which flow from antiquated restrictions. More frequently than not, a police department arrests traffic offenders only to find the courts unable to handle the flood of cases. In a worse plight still is the city government shot through with favoritism. Nothing discredits the work of the police more quickly and more thoroughly than ticket fixing.
While anachronistic laws, inadequate courts, and outright graft characterize municipal government in all its departments, the results of inefficiency in traffic control are more tragic than of inefficiency elsewhere. Indeed, the enforcement of law has a more direct and immediate bearing on accidents than engineering, and certainly enforcement is the most impelling method of education. This has been proved in many cities and states. The record of St. Louis from 1925 to 1929 offers sufficient evidence that this is true. In 1925 the number of traffic arrests totaled 34,568, the convictions totaled 18,835, and the traffic fatalities 192. The next year, when arrests jumped to 53,762 and convictions to 26,370, fatalities fell to 174; and the good work was continued in
1927 when 59,196 arrests and 34,750 convictions hammered fatalities down to 147. But in 1928 laxity in the courts resulted in the conviction of only 29,956 of the 50,499 persons arrested, and the number of people killed by automobiles zoomed to 215. The close relation of fatalities to arrests and convictions was further evidenced in 1929 when enforcement was tightened up again: 59,938 traffic-law violators were haled into court, where 39,297 were convicted, and the fatalities were reduced to 162.
It may be said with surety, even with conservatism, that the laxity of 1928 cost the lives of at least fifty innocent men, women, and children in this one city.
V
The bare statistics of last year’s experience with man-killing automobiles indicate the size of the problem. Thirty-three thousand lives were lost in automobile accidents; more than a million persons were injured; and property damage was estimated at approximately one billion dollars. Consider wiping out the entire population of Moline, Illinois; Tucson, Arizona; or Rome, New York. Consider injuring every man, woman, and child in Los Angeles, leaving tens of thousands hopelessly disfigured and maimed. And doing all this every year!
Is a city justified in spending money and training officers to cope with the problem? Inspector Charles Greenwood of Toronto said last fall that no modern city exists whose traffic problem is not a more serious challenge than its crime problem. It is well known that more people are killed and injured by automobiles than die by homicide and suicide together. And yet the police officers assigned to traffic are usually a small, poorly trained fraction of the force.
Accident records form the basis of intelligent prevention work. For instance, the motor-cycle men of a MidWestern city had for years spent most of their time patrolling an important boulevard which carried a large volume of fast traffic through town. But when the department began to keep records of accidents it was discovered that 70 per cent of traffic accidents were occurring over on the other side of town in a foreign settlement. The victims, records revealed, were child pedestrians. Dispatched to this section, the patrolmen found hundreds of children playing in the streets, and they discovered that drivers of delivery trucks and private cars were exercising very little care. The police not only clamped down the lid on speeding and reckless driving, but they also ordered the children off the streets and conducted an educational campaign among parents to keep their children out of danger.
Adequate records show where the traffic ‘sore spots’ are, what kind of violations to look for, and where to concentrate the efforts of officers.
Records also reveal the need for signs, signals, and other traffic devices. When individual accident report cards are filed by location, the engineer can plot on a diagram of each intersection the movements of all cars that have been involved in accidents there. Surprising are the revelations of this simple procedure. In one city the public was clamoring for traffic lights at an intersection where a serious accident had occurred, but a ‘collision diagram’ disclosed the vital information that only a negligible portion of accidents there had been right-angle collisions; traffic lights, therefore, could have little or no effect in preventing future accidents.
At another intersection, aldermen wanted to install signs ordering all northand south-bound traffic to stop, but here again a collision diagram pointed the way to the correct remedy when it showed that nine out of ten accidents at the intersection were caused by collisions between northand west-bound traffic only. An inspection confirmed the suspicion that the difficulty lay on the southeast corner: a high hedge across the property line was found to obscure the vision of drivers approaching the intersection from the south and east. The hedge was trimmed and accidents ceased forthwith.
Accurate methods of timing stopand-go lights, interconnecting these lights into flexible progressive systems, and determining critical approach speeds for intersections are a few of the newer developments in traffic engineering. Scientific methods have been developed for making parking counts so that parking demand and supply can be accurately measured. The determination of preferred routes which will lure traffic away from bottlenecks and other congested districts and route tourist travel around rather than through the heart of the city, and at the same time minimize the likelihood of accidents, is also a relatively easy task for the trained traffic worker. And regulations governing both parking and routing can be based upon the number of policemen available to carry on an efficient enforcement programme.
The now famous accident investigation work of the Evanston, Illinois, police department remains the outstanding contribution to the technique of traffic-law enforcement. Here emphasis is placed on those violations which have actually caused accidents, and no stone is left unturned in the endeavor of the police to bring the violator of the law to justice. All accidents in the city are reported immediately to headquarters, and a specially trained and equipped squad of men hurry to the scene. They measure skid marks with a steel tape, and the length of these marks is an excellent indication of the speed at which each car was traveling. They photograph the damage, the position of the cars, and any obstructions or lack of obstructions to the view. They take down on a portable typewriter statements of principals and witnesses, and have them signed on the spot. If evidence is found that a law has been violated, the police themselves file a complaint and prosecute the case with the very effective evidence of their measurements, photographs, and statements.
Although the Evanston police would be outstanding for their traffic safety work without their investigation squads, the work of the squads is given chief credit for the 40 per cent reduction in accidents which the city enjoyed in 1930 — the same year which brought big increases to surrounding suburbs as well as to Chicago.
Perhaps as remarkable as this reduction in mishaps has been the success of accident investigation work in solving that most baffling problem in modern traffic control — the hit-and-run driver. Before the special squads were organized, Evanston, like other cities, did not charge any particular officer, bureau, or division of the police department with this job. There was no real follow-up; nothing was done; and the traffic arch-criminal went free. But, by investigating each one of these accidents, Evanston has achieved first place among cities for the apprehension and conviction of hit-and-run drivers. During the fifty weeks ending on September 15, 1930, 52 of these elusive cases were reported in the city, and of these offenders the police caught 49 and convicted 43. Only three remained uncaught, and at least one of these cases involved an out-of-state driver who never returned.
VI
Four potent evils in enforcement — anachronistic ordinances, lack of uniformity in regulations and signs and signals, inadequate courts, and ticket fixing — can be entirely eliminated simply by the will of an honest city administration to eliminate them. The National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, called for the first time in 1924 by Mr. Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, drafted a model municipal traffic ordinance which provides up-to-date regulations plus nation-wide uniformity. Splendid traffic courts and violations bureaus have been functioning for years in several cities which need only to be copied by others. And a strict auditing of arrest tickets, such as Minneapolis provides for, would make fixing of tickets easily detectable and traceable.
Information on these ‘life-saving’ developments in traffic engineering and enforcement has not been withheld from any city. On the contrary, they have been given every kind of publicity possible. Mayors, chiefs of police, city engineers, — the key men in traffic, — have been approached through every feasible channel. Newspaper and magazine articles and tens of thousands of letters and circulars have reached them urging the acceptance of information on effective methods of handling modern traffic. Some of these officials have taken the information; a few have put it to use; but here is a remarkable fact: those guardians of the public’s welfare who have shown interest have usually been forced to do so by local business, professional, and industrial men who, joined together in a local safety council, have demanded action.
If the organized safety movement in the United States has discovered anything in its two decades of unceasing work, it is this: Accidents don’t just happen; they are caused; and these causes can be eliminated by engineering, enforcement, and education. Unless city officials assume their responsibility for doing away with the causes of traffic accidents, which they as public servants are paid to do, and stop bungling, accidents on our streets, with their trail of tragedy, will continue. The steadily increasing annual toll of death from 12,542 in 1920 to 33,000 in 1931 is ample evidence that the problem of the man-killing automobile will not ‘work itself out’ alone.
